Nvidia, you have gone to far Created 18 years ago2006-06-10 10:48:23 UTC by M_gargantua

A GeForce 7950 with A GIG of GDDR3 memory?

you have got to be kidding me. not only does it have a gig of memory, it has to 7950's on a single card. downside is that its optimized for Vista.

Your thoughts?

Well, the link's broken, and I'm sure it's very expensive.

Expensive as in how much? Might be interesting to know what the limit is before it is 'expensive'.

http://www.bfgtech.com/7950Gx2_1G_PCIX.html

and if that still doesn't work
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814143063
and newegg says $600 which is really low seeing as it has 2 GPU's on it

I read about the Evga version, sounded interesting but my budget is too low, might just get the 7900GT or 7600GT instead

I'd agree, I'm pretty impressed with this latest card and its price. Although, I do think nVidia are perhaps rushing too many cards into the market. If only they'd take more time on cost-reduction R&D then we'd all be happy.

Take one of those, a Conroe 2 and you have something worthy enough to give even the straightest of men a 'hard-on'.

Conroe...hmm, Im undecided on whether to get Conroe of Yohna (arnt conroe boards more expensive or something?)

resolutions up to 2560x1600.

hah!

My friend just bought a 512 card. He gets 200 FPS on HL2 on high without HDR.

Leave it to BFG to do such a thing ;P - Those are some good cards.

Aren't these the first of the consumer market cards that make 4 SLi machines available to the end-user/enthusiast w/out having to go through Alienware or other high-end companies?

Yes, rabid, BFG owns.

Thats really not a bad price for the power that card has.

Is it DX10 compatible? I didnt see that...

Why the heck would we need this? we're not Pixar...

Of course you would need this. To play games like Crysis. It surpasses the power of 360 I would say. 360 has duel cores and 512 GDDR3 RAM right?

Leave it to BFG to do such a thing ;P - Those are some good cards.

I'd disagree given that I had to clock its 'overclocked' card back to normal settings so it wouldnt crash quake 4 or a few other sensitive games. The 7900GT also had a small quality problem where quite a lot of cards turned up with resisitors missing!

you probably just used bad drivers and bought from the wrong people Job.

Oh that explains why the 5 different sets of drivers, including the manufacturers own all suffered the same problem! I know BFG are normally quite good, but please dont be so bloody dismissive, a large batch of 7900GTs were fucked straight out the factory its well known. Thankfully I didn't get one of them.

im still waiting for dx10.

You may not have to wait too much longer. Crysis, the new game from Crytek, was built to take advantage of DirectX 10. Since it's due out in the fourth quarter of '06 (Oct - Dec), it stands to reason that it'll be out by then.

And if ppl already know the date, I personally don't keep up w/ Microsoft's camp much.

I wanna see someone go dual on these... fucking 2 gigs of graphics dedicated memory. The insanity.

dx10 is coming out with vista in janurary(?) next month, but it will probably be delayed again :/

I'm fine with my 128 MB videocard. It can play any game and do anything. Why the hell would you need something like this? And I don't pay attention to the 4000 or 7900 or 7950 crap, I just pay attention to the MB or GB.

That's a mistake, halo4life. If I just looked at the MB, I'd think my old 256 MB Radeon 9600 was faster than my 128 MB GeForce 6800. You should pay attention to things like the core clock and memory clock speeds just as much as the memory size.

I'd still have to agree with you though, I can't see myself needing that kind of power, at least not with very current/near future games.

Higher price = Better card.
The formula of win.

Oblivion is the only game that requires anywhere near that kind of power for consistent performance

now this is a great card for rendering apps.

....rendering in real time...

The ironic thing is that even this beast isn't truly a DX10 card.
It can't be until MS finalize DX10 and then nVidia can re-assess their line. It will run it though, don't worry about that. Well, actually, only Vista will suppourt DX10, so we're all screwed.

And to whoever automatically assumed this was more powerful than the 360's GPU, smitten be thee. Don't ever even remotely compare PC's vs. consoles. Consoles have to deal with so much less, they can get away with being half as powerful and yet still deliver top-quality graphics.

do any rendering applications make use of SLI for previewing purposes?

Not sure, but I guess the potential is there. SLI and CrossFire will become more important when the PPU battle picks up.

I think more and more CPU cores will eradicate the need for a PPU. MS just need to alter parts of Windows to suppourt core dedication to a fuller extent. In the future you may even see 'cards' which are basically just memory units dedicated to one job, since buying yet another transistor would be pointless if you have a few spare un-used ones on your CPU.

Pure speculation of course, but it's highly likely.

i thought the physics processor was gunna be built into the gfx card?
i.e. the PPU and GPU on the same card?

Well, Aegia are pioneering seperate PPU (i.e. custom built cards that deal solely with physics). nVidia and ATi (I think) are using their existing dual card setups and modifying them.

Essentially, what'll happen is that your lesser quality card (the second one) will be used for physics processing while the master card will deal with graphics. So what'll happen is that when you decide to get a new master card, you can downgrade your current master card to be a physics card.

Aegia says that it's not the right approach as you need special hardware to deal with complex physics calculations. nVidia says otherwise. Point is, it's too early to gauge the merits of either system as few games support it.

Cooler graphics, better in-game behaviour and all sounds cool and granted, I like to play a good FPS, but I don't really like the way those big games are heading. This hunt for better visuals is one of the reasons games take longer to create, and are shorter to play. Plus, they cost more in terms of hardware...

In other words, I'm happy I like casual games these days. Upgrading just to play a new game never sounded really interesting to me and while I like the tech that's going on behind it, I feel it detracts from actual gameplay.

As for specific cards, I tend to believe physics will benefit from a specific card more than from a generic dedicated core.
Oh well, I'm happy I got an internship with a small game-dev studio that dedicates itself to handheld console games... no worries about changing hardware there, and a pretty good technical documentation too...

i wouldn't mind having a physics card tho...although i cant imagine there would be any sockets coming out from it...
physics monitor, anyone?

Erm...