AMD Radeon HD 5870 Adds DX11, Multi-Monitor Gaming 195
Vigile writes "Few people will doubt that PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in the arm with the consistent encroachment of consoles and their dominating hold on developers. Today AMD is releasing the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card based on the Evergreen-series of GPUs first demonstrated in June. Besides offering best-in-class performance for a single-GPU graphics board, the new card is easily the most power efficient in terms of idle power consumption and performance per watt. Not only that, but AMD has introduced new features that could help keep PC gaming in the spotlight, including the first DirectX 11 implementation and a very impressive multi-monitor gaming technology, Eyefinity, which we discussed earlier this month. The review at PC Perspective includes the full gamut of gaming benchmarks in both single- and dual-GPU configurations as well as videos of Eyefinity running on three 30" displays."
Eyefinity videos (Score:5, Informative)
There are some videos of Eyefinity at work in this article, here is a direct link as well:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=783&type=expert&pid=6 [pcper.com]
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There are some videos of Eyefinity at work in this article, here is a direct link as well:
Hrm, this reminds me of playing AH-10 Attack on my Mac IIvx with a couple nuBus video cards added and some old monitors. Front screen got the front view; left screen, left window; right screen, right window. It was really quite fun for the time (c. 1992?). I had no idea a generation later the technology had gone missing (after college, game time dried up).
Own up now... who else thought of NetHack? (Score:2)
Own up now... who else thought of NetHack when they read...
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We are doing a bigger article on it; it will not do different sizes and/or resolutions at this time.
What makes eyefinity better than nvidia's stuff? (Score:2)
For years Nvidia already has tech that allows you to have 2 (or more - quadros support 16) monitors look like one seamless display to the O/S - that's called "span". Span behaviour is undesirable for most people though.
In most usage scenarios, it is counterproductive to have X monitors look like one seamless display to the O/S when the real life image produced isn't seamless - nondisplay edges of the panels etc. So it's very silly to have yo
Time to move up (Score:2)
Apps that ignore the system DPI setting (Score:4, Informative)
Time to move up from 1280x1024 displays finally? My hardrive size and processor speeds have gone up 10x in the last 10 years. My screen resolution is unchanged.
As are your eyes. Beyond a certain point, FSAA will increase perceived quality as much as higher DPI.
I think for games, doubling pixel density would be more than noticeable.
Supporting ClearType style subpixel rendering in your FSAA might help too. But the big problem with doubling pixel density is that so many Windows applications other than games are hardcoded for 96 dpi, ignoring Display Properties > Settings > Advanced > General > DPI setting.
15~21inch standard over 15 years is a pretty sad change for the computer industry.
For one thing, desks haven't gotten much bigger. For another, after a certain point, the amount of glass and other materials in a display outweighs the number of pixels in determining price. I went to Walmart* and saw a 32" 720p class Vizio TV for $399 and an otherwise identical 1080p TV for $499. Compare that to the price difference between 32" vs. 42" TVs.
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Absolutely.
As an example, I use a 24" 1920x1200 monitor for my primary display. I can run GTA Vice City (I know it's an old game, bear with me) perfectly at 1920x1200, 32bit color, maximum draw distance and effects. But I think it actually looks better if I run it at 1280x800 with maximum settings and 8xAA and 16x anisotropic filtering added.
Of course, the game was originally designed for the PS2 and meant to run at SDTV reso
How big is your dis? (Score:2)
Sure, you could run Wolfenstein on your 2560x1600 30" monitor and possible even hack it to be able to use that resolution, but it'll still look like shit due to low-resolution graphical assets
Of course, that'd be true for Castle Wolfenstein (Apple II) [wikipedia.org] and Wolfenstein 3D (id Tech 0) [wikipedia.org]. But are you talking about Return to Castle Wolfenstein (id Tech 3) [wikipedia.org] or Wolfenstein 09 (id Tech 4) [wikipedia.org]?
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I've been using 1600x1200 for a long time now....on a DELL CRT that's probably approaching 6 years old now.
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My thinkpad has 1920x1200 on a 15" screen, so they exist. You might want to get the 75% more pixels before you complain. Honestly though, the biggest difference in gaming is what's *in* the pixels. Pretty important too, and todays games render in SPF (seconds per frame) instead of FPS on ten year old graphics cards. Or rather on your CPU, because it's doing all emulation in software. 1920x1200 is same resolution as a BluRay which is pretty damn good, if my games looked like that I'd be extremely impressed.
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BluRay is 1920x1080. Though your 1900x1200 screen should support that, too.
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WHY THE FUCK DON'T LAPTOPS COME WITH BETTER RESOLUTION?
Probably just penny pinching to get the sticker price down. But perhaps you've been looking at the wrong laptops. Those in most stores have crappy resolutions, even with large displays. I just hate when they say 18" widescreen LCD, without saying how many pixels. As like as not, it's just 1440x800 or something equally pathetic, but you might have to corner a sales droid to find out.
At home, I've got a 6-year-old laptop, with a 17" WUXGA (1920x1200) display. Since I got it, I'm unwilling to accept any less.
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Check out Dell Precisions, Thinkpads, HP EliteBooks... just a few that offer WUXGA @ 15.4".
Personally, I'm not sure if WUXGA might not be cutting it a little too closely. I'm on WSXGA+ (1680x1050) @ 15.4" right now, and I couldn't be happier.
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They used to. 1280x1024 is pretty damn decent, especially for a laptop, and was perfectly normal a few years ago. Then some genius decided to chop the top two hundred pixels off, so they could manufacture five screens using the same amount of material that previously only yielded four screens.
His boss pointed out that no one's going to want screens that have about two hundred pixels less resolution than they could get before. So the guy thou
How do I tiled windows? (Score:2)
I would much much prefer 2 960 x 1200 monitors to a 1920 x 1200 wide screen, It just helps me group stuff better.
Then get a window manager that will do that for you. All versions of Windows since Windows 95 can do it: control-click on several windows in the title bar, right-click one of them, and choose "Tile Horizontally".
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Or use a tilling window manager like Awesome.
Not quite the numbers I would have expected (Score:2)
Reading the PC perspective reviews and a couple of others the 5870 seems to be a bit faster than the GTX285 but not by much, and certainly not by a margin one would expect from a new generation of parts vs old.
Admittedly this is all DX9/10 stuff, and there's probably a lot of the transistor budget allocated to new DX11 features but I would have expected ATI's latest offering to have utterly destroyed NVIDIA's last gen part. The GTX 295 is really 2 gpus so it's not really a fair comparison.
It will be intere
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I have to amend this. I hadn't looked at http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5870-review-test/ reviews, which seem to have a different selection of games and paint the 5870 in a better light than the pc perspective article. The PCper article I got the impression teh GTX285 was in some cases faster and only 10-15% slower than the 5870 in most cases, the GURU3D test has a more noticeable 25% or thereabout performance boost for the 5870. Better, but not stunning. I would have still expected a 50% or so
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I noticed the exact same thing. I was a bit disappointed by the 5870. Only at the highest resolutions, 2560x1600 4xAA 8xAF, did it start beating the GTX285 by a 10% margin. [pcper.com] The GTX285 came out in January and is already under $300 [newegg.com], how does ATI expect to compete with a $400 card that only offer
Really good GPUs but... (Score:2)
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...I really with they'd come out with decent Linux support. I mean, come on guys, 1280x1024@75Hz is the max screen size you can do with fglrx in your driver?
Would you even begin to contemplate a 20% to 30% increase in R&D expenditure to address what is effectively a non-existent market?
We have a severe chicken and egg problem here. Until games support linux directly the market will stay small. That won't happen if the drivers suck, nobody will put money into better drivers if there is not market.
There is a defacto standard that works relatively well (and keeps getting better) until that changes gaming on linux is king of screwed. But don't go blaming the
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There is a defacto standard that works relatively well (and keeps getting better) until that changes gaming on linux is king of screwed
Microsoft can sit down at a table with the hardware and software developers, hammer out a roadmap for gaming on the Windows platform - audio, video, anything than seems relevant - and make it happen.
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If you're still running into problems, it could be that your distro is misconfiguring X, and you need to change something in the config [linuxinsight.com].
It takes time for driver development. Good things are in the pipeline. If you don't mind compili
About time (Score:2)
Took the industry long enough to deliver a great 3D perforance and 3 monitor outputs on one card*. If the Linux support is on par with nVidia's support, I look forward to replacing my current nVidia dualhead card and Matrox Dualhead2go box with one of these beauties. Especially since the Dualhead2go "Digital" edition uses an analog VGA input and I can see some faint ghosting on text/sharp lines.
* I know that Matrox had the Parhelia line of 3 monitor cards, but the 3D performance was sadly lacking in those
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Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary misses the point of why consoles are gaining so much ground in the gaming world. The main reason consoles are so popular is because the hardware never changes. Most people (like myself) don't want to have to go out and buy the latest and greatest graphics card to run a new game. With an XBOX 360 or PS3 I know that if I buy a title for that platform, it will work. Yes, there are certain exceptions like hard drive requirements, etc., but for the most part it is true. The stability also allows developers to get the most out of the hardware, and generally by the end of a consoles life expectancy, the games are getting very, very good.
There will probably always be a market for the hardcore gamers, but the average, casual gamer would rather play an XBOX 360 at 720P on their big screen than play at double the resolution on a screen a quarter the size.
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It's cyclical. When the consoles first come out they look good. But for how long? At some point PC tools and PC hardware make consoles look antiquated. This new hardware is 4 generations later than console hardware, but some of those generations were more die shrinks than anything consumers care about. For the moment we're fluttering around equal quality between PC and consoles, the race to the bottom in PC prices and hardware has meant that trying to make a decent PC only game which both takes advanta
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I keep my PC connected to my TV: it costed me $2 to buy a S-Video cable. Graphic cards have TV-Out (first S-Video, now HDMI) since what, 2000?
PCs without a graphic card (Score:2)
Graphic cards have TV-Out (first S-Video, now HDMI) since what, 2000?
I see two kinds of PC cases at Best Buy: slimline and mid-tower. Mid-towers look out of place next to a TV. Slimline PCs look better, more like an Xbox 360 or an old PS3, but they typically don't come with a graphic card. Instead, they tend to have Intel's Voodoo3-class GMA chipset on the motherboard because they're designed for web and office apps.
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Don't sully the name of the Voodoo cards by comparing Intel to them. :P
Intel's graphic performance is beyond terrible, considering the resources the company has to work with.
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The GMA X3100 actually has a hardware T&L unit. Not that this makes it a good card.
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A number of companies make HTPC or Media Center cases [newegg.com]. Some of those have room for normal PCIe cards, and some of them require a riser. The real acid test, though, is whether the heat generated by a decent graphics card is compatible with a quiet living room.
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Most people (like myself) don't want to have to go out and buy the latest and greatest graphics card to run a new game.
Well that's good, because you don't. You only need the latest and greatest card if you want to play a game at 1920x1200 and still get 120 fps. As long as you don't have to have all the knobs turned up to the max, you can stay one or two card generations behind, and your games will still look better than anything you can get on a console.
Do You Know How Wrong You Are? (Score:2)
The summary misses the point of why consoles are gaining so much ground in the gaming world. The main reason consoles are so popular is because the hardware never changes. Most people (like myself) don't want to have to go out and buy the latest and greatest graphics card to run a new game.
Stop spreading the FUD. If you don't understand PC gaming, which it shows you clearly don't, don't throw around your baseless opinions. Why do you insist that people need the latest and greatest hardware to run the newest games? Where did you ever get that idea in the first place?
When Crysis came out, I ran it on medium settings and the game worked fine and looked fine. So where was my need for the latest and greatest hardware there? The fact is, people routinely play newer PC games on dated hardware too. T
Re:Bologna (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason consoles are gaining so much ground is no one wants to waste money on the PC. Why spend millions of dollars on developing a title when 25% of the user base is going to pirate it anyways?
Not every developer is interested in "spend[ing] millions of dollars on developing a title". If you don't have millions of dollars, the PC can prove more profitable because there's a lot less overhead in obtaining a PC devkit than a console devkit.
Re:Bologna (Score:5, Informative)
do you really think the dev kit cost is significant, alogside code/ressources/marketing ?
Console makers want to see a "secure facility" and "industry experience" before they'll even talk to a developer. A "secure facility" is at least a leased office, not your basement, attic, or garage. "Industry experience" is either a previous commercial PC title or an internship at a major video game developer in another state. A team of part-time developers with day jobs outside the video game industry is unlikely to have those.
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For devs like PopCap or Ace Team? hell yeah.
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You've never actually applied to get an official devkit, have you...
It's one more barrier of entry that simply doesn't exist on PC / Mac / iPhone development.
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So do I:
A) buy a new computer plus invest all my time to get it up and running with my applications, settings, etc, or
B) buy a console (PS3 and 360 have
Option C: Get an HTPC. (Score:2)
So do I:
A) buy a new computer plus invest all my time to get it up and running with my applications, settings, etc, or
B) buy a console (PS3 and 360 have had good price drops) plug it into my TV and I am playing a game in 10 mins. and saving at least a couple hundred bucks in hardware and a lot more in time savings.
C. Go to Dell.com, order a Inspiron slimline desktop PC with NVIDIA graphics and no monitor, and plug it in to an HDTV. Use this PC only for gaming, video playback, and web surfing; use your existing PC for the your work. There are numerous worthwhile games for PC that will never be ported to any console due to console makers' policies against part-time development.
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Simplicity is a nice thing.
There are also numerous worthwhile games for the console that will never be ported to the PC either (or ported much much later).
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There are also numerous worthwhile games for the console that will never be ported to the PC either (or ported much much later).
So what platform do you recommend for a low-budget game developed by a team of developers working part-time from their homes over the Internet? Console makers tend to frown on such an arrangement.
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Doom 3 was not a DX9 game. It was an OpenGL game. I don't think the GeForce4 Ti supported the arb2 rendering path; most likely the game fell back to the "nv20" scheme.
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It's a bit old, but the "Call of Duty 2" game had a "high quality" rendering mode that was leaps and bounds above normal quality. Graphically, that is. I'm not sure that it provided any benefit except to look pretty.
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Lets say I want to purchase a game for my brother that's on both XBOX 360 and PC? Which one do I buy him.
So what do you do when you want to purchase a game that's on both PC and PC because the console makers turned it down?
Re:Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, $380 for a video card that provides graphical performance that well supersedes the capabilities of the PS3, and possibly even the PS3's successor. Or you can actually compare a video card with very similar capabilities to the card in the PS3, the NVIDIA RSX "Reality Synthesizer" with a 550MHz CPU and 256 MB of DDR2, which would be an NVIDIA GeForce 9400 that you can pick up for about $50.
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You seem to be contradicting yourself here. First you say that you were not talking about image quality then you go and try and refute his argument that a PC card can cost just $50 by saying that then he will not be getting a good piture quality.
So with a PC you have a choice between spending a little like a console (the $50 card) and getting a low quality option and you have the choice of a $380 card and all the other costs for a really good machine which is much better than the console. So in summary wi
More reviews (Score:5, Informative)
Anandtech
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643 [anandtech.com]
"At the end of the day, with its impressive performance and next-generation feature set, the Radeon HD 5870 kicks off the DirectX 11 generation with a bang and manages to take home the single-GPU performance crown in the process. It's without a doubt the high-end card to get"
Techreport
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17618 [techreport.com]
"Well, Sherlock, what do you expect me to say? AMD has succeeded in delivering the first DirectX 11 GPU by some number of months, perhaps more than just a few, depending on how quickly Nvidia can get its DX11 part to market. AMD has also managed to double its graphics and compute performance outright from one generation to the next, while ratcheting up image quality at the same time. The Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest GPU on the planet, with the best visual output, and the most compelling set of features. Yet it's still a mid-sized chip by GPU standards. As a result, the 5870's power draw, noise levels, and GPU temperatures are all admirably low. My one gripe: I wish the board wasn't quite so long, because it may face clearance issues in some enclosures. "
A shot in the arm? How about cooler chips? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Few people will doubt that PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in the arm with the consistent encroachment of consoles..."
I know I don't count, but I resent the assumption that everyone cares. I don't care. I'd never buy a console to play games other than Wii sports.
I assume GPUs will get better and better, as will CPUs, and I'll benefit But I'm still playing StarCraft 1, and I just want a higher resolution interface for the same screen -- I know people think it affects the balance, but I'd like to see the zerglings when they're a little further away.
I don't think PC gaming needs a shot in the arm. I think it needs well designed games that stand the test of time.
But it would be nice if we could get the kind of power we can get for a reasonable price (sub $1000 PC including graphics) today to run cool without fans.
Re:A shot in the arm? How about cooler chips? (Score:5, Funny)
Reasonable.
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My quad Opteron and 1GB Nvidia card are passively cooled from slow running case fans.
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What Nvidia card is this? I have a (stock) passively cooled 7950 GT, but I haven't been able to find any newer cards that come stock passively cooled and aren't junk (ie, low-mid end cards at best). Unless you mean watercooled, but I'd rather stay away from that.
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Personally I would love a reduced core version of the 5870 with even lower idle power and low enough max power (~75W) to allow passive cooling.
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Gigabyte has a GeForce 9800 GT [gigabyte.us] that is passively cooled. That's the highest I've seen.
Sadly the 260 GTX cards seem like a much better deal (price/performance) if you don't mind it using a fan (coming from someone who's always insisted on fanless video cards).
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Sparkle 9500GT
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I think it needs well designed games that stand the test of time.
But it would be nice if we could get the kind of power we can get for a reasonable price (sub $1000 PC including graphics) today to run cool without fans.
This. 1000 times this.
I have no interest on playing on a platform where I am forced to invest thousand of dollars every couple of years.
I would be interested on buying a fun game that runs on the computer I already have!
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And you can't? Seriously, look at the graphs on the review sites, they're cranking it all up to 2560x1600 with max AA/AF with Ultra High quality. It's not like you can't play with anything less...
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Thirded (? is that a word?). I have a fanless 4670. It plays the games I want fine. Not everything is maxed, but I play at 1680X1050 on the monitor fine. I have hooked the computer via hdmi to a 1080p tv and it looked great there as well.
If one does their homework before buying they are usually better off. This machine I was going for tv hdmi connectivity with it being a DVR. So I got a low power (no extra power plug) 4670 and a fanless one for less noise. It plays my games as well as my the 8800gt I have.
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Thank you for proving my point.
What I was trying to say is that PC Gaming would be a lot more popular if there were games available that you could play with the on-board graphics chips most computer owners in the world have
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If your physical hardware doesn't support 3D, THERE IS NO MAGIC THAT WILL CHANGE THAT! That said, new machines are coming out with better graphics all the time. Even entry level machines have more capable GPUs in them. My main point was that it is cheap as shit to ge
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Surely no one is suggesting playing Crysis on Aunt Tilly's Pentium III! ;)
I was thinking more on the lines of "newer" motherboards that still have inexpensive integrated graphics, like Intel's G45 Express or Nvidia GeForce 8300
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Speaking of cooler chips, [H]ard|OCP's review [hardocp.com] found this card to have reduced power draw and temperatures compared to the 4870 and GeForce GTX 285.
It does vary depending on the load the card is under (duh), but for a card that is about twice as powerful as its predecessor, it's quite impressive.
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Yes, and Xbit Labs, as is their tradition, got a true power consumption reading direct from the 12v and 5v PCIe supply lines [xbitlabs.com].
It turns out the card has the same power consumption as the 4870 at load (3dmark), not to mention exceptional idle power. Way to go ATI, I could have sworn TSMC's 40nm bulk CMOS (no metal gates) would have raised leakage, but this proves me wrong!
Seems like a good bang for the buck (Score:2)
My take away from the reviews is that it is significantly cheaper than Nvidia's current top of the line single-card solution while offering slightly better performance with a more modest power draw. In another year or two, we'll all be able to play Crysis with all the eye candy turned on. :)
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Since you mention it... about a year ago, a friend built a new gaming PC and put a Radeon 4850 (basically 1 generation older than this) in it with 1GB of VRAM. His "test app" for the new system was Crysis... enabled DX10, maxxed every setting, and played through the whole thing. At 1280x1024 his display isn't exactly super-high-res, but the framerate was high enough to be completley unnoticeable in almost every part of the game. A 4870 (same GPU at a faster clock speed) could probably have handled the whole
Tough times ahead for Nvidia? (Score:2)
Nvidia seems to be between a rock and hard place. AMD is nudging it out of the limelight in the graphics marketplace and Intel and AMD are nudging it out of the market for motherboard chipsets...with Intel doing so more aggressively.
Where do you see Nvidia 3-5 years down the line?
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A middle-tier ARM SoC provider competing against TI, Freescale, Qualcomm and Samsung for the media player market, with a sideline in high-end compute and graphics boards that exist as a technology testbed for said SoC products?
Yeah, I have to agree: I don't see Nvidia dying anytime soon, but I have to say that (barring some impressive new market), their days of growth are over.
Intel has locked Nvidia completely out of the Intel chipset business, destroying one of Nvidia's major market segments (who buys Nvi
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"Yeah, I have to agree: I don't see Nvidia dying anytime soon, but I have to say that (barring some impressive new market), their days of growth are over."
Doubtful, no one other then AMD is able to succesfully compete in the graphics market, also AMD does not have any GPU's or ultra mobile devices, and that market is simply enormous and nvidia is hoping with their next gen mobile chip to get into everything from phones to portable video players, that is a growth market. High perf, low power graphics chips
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You're obviosuly not a linux user. ATI's Linux drivers suck hard compared to nVidia's.
For that reason, none of ATi's product range is on my purchasing radar.
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I've had exactly the opposite - if I ran anything with the GPU my ATI card machine BSoD'd. I sent the card back twice (to the manufacturer, Sapphire - I didn't have problems until about 30s-5 minutes in and didn't realize it until way past when I could return it to the store (and normal VGA tasks like my life at the time, VPN and then remote desktop to virtual machines, worked great - I really do hate crunch time in the computer world). I've planned to check driver stability for months now, but haven't re
Graphics not the issue (Score:2)
PC Gaming may or may not need a shot in the arm, but it isn't because of graphics. It's most likely the plug-and-play nature of games and the dumbing down of controls. Not that ASWD is particularly complex, but if you throw in mouse-look...it's basically like rubbing your tummy and patting your head. Not everyone's up to the challenge.
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Yes, in consoles we only use one hand... no? Then we use the two hands to do the same thing... no? Oh, that's right, we use one hand to control a joystick and another to press buttons.
I hardly see this as being much easier to use than WASD+Mouse looking. On the contrary, even though I've started playing in my N64, I have ever find Mouse looking much more intuitive than Joystick looking.
No Core2 Tests (Score:4, Insightful)
All those reveiws and not 1 of them tested a Lynnfield chip that I could find to see if the dual 8x pci-e slots get pinned when running a DX11 card in SLI. Not one review used a typical median computer that someone would currently own.
So after all those 'reviews' *cough advertisements* we still don't know if someone with a Core2 Duo at 3 Ghz can even feed that card effectively. No DDR2 systems, no Quad Core Core2 running DDR3... just the usual i7 Etremes that tell typical consumers anything. We don't know, after all those review if it's even worth buying based on a typical machine. ZZZzzzz....
If anyone can find a Core2 system tested with this new card let te rest of us know if any of us who don't own $1000 processors get a benefit...
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This card costs more than the low-end i7s. Just buy one.
You can't buy the latest bleeding-edge
graphics card and be a cheap bastard at the same time. It doesn't work that way.
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It's called augmentation. You buy the top of the line in cpu/motherboard one generation, then gpu the next generation. There was a time when those core2 quads were top notch... and they'll still beat the 920 in a few tests, nothing to worry about there. On the other hand the Duos haven't been top notch since about 2006, so it's hard to say how much that cpu will hold back your new graphics card.
I consider the p55 limitation there intentionally to avoid solid sli or crossfire performance. It would still b
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Personally, DDR2 vs DDR3 has WAY too many variables like RAS, CAS, and RAS-to-CAS delay, burst memory sends, etc. When I had my brother do this analysis for me (he designs RAM...) he found that in many cases DDR2 was smoking early DDR3 in random access and was only slightly slower in burst. That was until I found a CAS20 DDR3 chip running at 1600MHz in my price range (which sealed the deal for me going with DDR3). Just letting you know, though - if you have fast DDR2, it may be faster than early DDR3.
Mem
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sorry - had an error there - CAS is 7, not 20. 7-7-7-20 was the spec, and the ones I was looking at before that was 10-10-10-24 and 12-12-12-? (24? 30? - don't remember).
Temperatures, power requirements, noise (Score:3, Interesting)
The review/source contains no information that's even remotely useful to those of us who look for video cards that are quiet, do not reach absurd temperatures (anything above 60C under load is considered absurd; do people realise just how hot 60C is?), and do not have excessive power requirements.
All I've seen after reading the review is a bunch of snapshots stolen from a PowerPoint presentation with said "technological improvements", and some graphs indicating the card draws less watts than competing cards.
Given the size of the HSF (it's full-length -- look at that sucker!), I'm inclined to believe it runs hot. Given the size of the HSF, I'm also inclined to believe the card sounds like a mack truck barrelling down the highway when under load. Finally, given that the card has two -- count 'em, two -- PCIe 6-pin power connectors, this indicates the card requires at least 24V (e.g. two dedicated 12V rails), and God only knows what its amperage requirements are. Then take a look at it's price.
I feel like the only one on this planet who cares about the amount of heat hardware emits, the amount of power it draws, and the amount of noise it makes. Instead, it appears that the "i gota haf 50829fps in WoW!!!!1!! fag!!!11" gamers have taken over technological evolution and turned it into what Intel during the days of the original Pentium 4. Are there others here who have the same reservations about this kind of hardware as I do?
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You may just be the only one who still bothers to read the article hoping for useful info.
New video card tech reviews are, almost always, all about vicarious genital measurements. Benchmarks for FPS, raw computational capacity, shader support, etc. all abound - as if it were 1996 and the high-end was still competing for mere adequacy.
It's not that 'the 1337' have taken over the tech evolution, it's that they're the only readers left for those publications as their focus became less relevant for the normal m
Perspective artifacts? (Score:2)
While I think that the "curved" arrangement of monitor is probably the best way to make use of multiple monitors, at times, the graphics looked skewed and distorted.
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its working on DX11 "mindshare" building more than anything else were I to guess.
Re:PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in a (Score:5, Insightful)
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The kind of shot in the arm that PC gaming needs isn't at the high end but at the low end. If something better than Intel graphics became common on slimline PCs (as opposed to bulky towers), that would open up the market for gaming on home theater PCs.
The really great news about this card is that it's relatively inexpensive compared to what most top end cards cost at launch. The 5870 is going for $380 just about everywhere, while typical high-end cards launch closer to $500. I hope this is an indication that prices will drop across the board and therefore affect the low end, as well. As far as better graphics getting in to SFF PCs, we've long since left the realm of the "sane" when it comes to thermal requirements on decent graphics chips, but if you
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Uh-huh. And a burgeoning community of console hackers, software mods, firmware hacks, millions of modchips sold, Nintendo DS flashcarts selling faster than actual Nintendo DS consoles, and a modchip installation store in just about every organized flea market and farmers market in the country proves that this is a problem endemic only to PC gaming.
Sure.
Pull the other one, it plays Metallica.
Re:PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in a (Score:4, Insightful)
I must be few people, as i doubt PC gaming needs a shot in the arm. The way i see it PC gaming has its market and consoles have theirs. For single seat games it is still (and always will be) the shit, except for a short period around the release of new consoles it is not lacking in the hardware department. The same way that the Wii didn't eat into "real" console sales, i doubt the console are eating into pc game sale, what they are doing is being played by a huge market of people who regularly enjoy playing with friends in the same room. It could be argued that PCs lack the software to play multiplayer in the same place (because the HW is there to do it with emulators), but tbh if your going to do that you need to plug it into a TV so either its expensive (laptop) or pointless (if you have a dedicated gaming box connected to you TV why not just call it a console).
If you don't play with local mates -> PC gaming
If you play with local mates --------> Console gaming
If you only play with local mates --> Casual Gaming
Despite these categories overlapping in terms of both games and players, they do not directly compete much.
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tbh if your going to do that you need to plug it into a TV
PCs have started to come with 19" monitors lately. These are big enough for two players, but I'll admit not four like on the consoles.
if you have a dedicated gaming box connected to you TV why not just call it a console
Because unlike a console, a gaming HTPC can run free software, freeware, shareware, mods for commercial games, and other software that hasn't been digitally signed by the PC maker.
If you don't play with local mates -> PC gaming
If you play with local mates --------> Console gaming
If I play with local mates, but I also want to play (and possibly even make) mods, then what?
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If I play with local mates, but I also want to play (and possibly even make) mods, then what?
Those aren't mutually exclusive, you're just in 2 groups.
But are there any games that serve the two groups? Or are you thinking of one set of games to play with local mates and a separate, disjoint set of games to mod and play by myself or with remote mates?
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There is a small (possibly non-existent) intersect.
My question was why is it small and possibly non-existent, other than historical reasons related to the rarity of large PC monitors prior to the middle of this decade?
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I don't know about you, but I think the "shot in the arm" PC gaming needs is a serious divergence from console gaming in terms of titles, but it needs to take a big cue from console games in terms of fitting game design to the platform at hand.
Here's a useless antecdote: Need for Speed Shift just came out. Yay me, I love Need for Speed. So I bought it for my PC, which has an SLI pair of not-to-terribly-old nVidia graphics cards and should be pefectly capable of playing Shift. Surprise! It doesn't work. Pres
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10 guy friends of mine... cream themselves... joy overload.
Gayest post evar.
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That's nothing. Browse at -1. =)