Can anyone tell me when the Next-Gen cards come out?

[DarkSign]

and by next-gen I mean 10.1 DX cards that reach the next wave each maker is bringing out.

ATI has the 3800 that's 10.1DX Shader 4.1 which meets the criteria I suppose, but Im hearing that this card doesnt beat the 8800 Ultra from Nvidia at all.  So how can that be the new shiny?

Previously, erroneous reports called the G92 the 9800 which did teraflop floating point operations...but that turned out to be false.

Anyone got any info? Please? Pretty please? I'm like a crack addict, here.

[Daeven]

So. Wait. Does this mean I should replace my AGP card?

Well, crap.

[Shavnir]

Crap I think I'm behind the curve on this one :
http://www.bripro.com/low/hardware/nesvidcard/index.php 

[Venkman]

Dark, from what I've been hearing, people expect ATI and nVidia to either ignore DX10.1 or not specifically support just that for some time. If I had to guess, I'd say "some time" is probably until Christmas 2008. They spent a lot of money developing and selling DX10 cards, including cards that were already in shipment for fall sets at retail when the DX10.1 stuff was announced. They can't just flip off that switch and can't afford to piss off the recent owners in Q1 CY08 either, not for what amounts to what some think is little more than a relatively minor upgrade. I don't get why a minor upgrade wouldn't be backwards compatible, but I'm really just parroting stuff here to begin with anyway

[Trippy]

Latest I've heard is NVIDIA's next-gen 10.1 compatible cards will be released sometime around the release of Vista SP1 (which includes 10.1) which is supposed to be released first quarter 2008.

[Hoax]

Trippy, is waiting for the new shit to drop and buying two under the price jump 8 series cards to run in SLI a bad plan for any reason?  Keep in mind I'm still running a X700 or so card which can handle TF2 like a champ but has fucking issues with HG:L when I play with multiple people.  So I do need to upgrade (I feel) but I would like the upgrade to be viable for 2-3.5 years if at all possible.

[Trippy]

It's hard to say without knowing what sort of performance jump you'll get with the 9xxx (or whatever they call it) series. The 8800 GTX was a huge jump in performance over something like the 7900 Ultra and in fact is about double the performance of the 8800 GTS so going with dual 7900 Ultras would not have gotten you even close to GTX performance levels, and SLI is still somewhat of hassle so you may be better off just getting a single 9xxx card.

[Venkman]

Do you think SLI will take off, or will the card companies keep with the one-card strategy? I've got the 8800GTS and it works like a charm for now. But I'm thinking by next summer I may want to upgrade.

[Hoax]

I can't imagine a situation in the world where buying the 9XX series would make sense.  I'm running a X700 ATI card, that shit is old, it just became a problem and not even a bad one yet.  I've always found video cards to be horribly overrated by enthusiasts.  My personal exp has always led me to think.

Ram > Cpu > HD speed > video card.

[DarkSign]

Not sure if this is true, but someone on another forum said "early spring brings the dual GPU 8800GT and HD3870 cards and summer/fall comes the next generation GPUs."

If that's true, I'll buy dual 8800GT's then replace next fall with the 9XXX next-gen card.

[Trippy]

I can't imagine a situation in the world where buying the 9XX series would make sense.  I'm running a X700 ATI card, that shit is old, it just became a problem and not even a bad one yet.  I've always found video cards to be horribly overrated by enthusiasts.  My personal exp has always led me to think.

Ram > Cpu > HD speed > video card.

No. These days more like:

Video card >>>>>> CPU >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> HD speed

CPU > Video Card if you run at very low resolutions, as in 640 x 480 type resolutions, otherwise the GPU is the bottleneck (with a few exceptions) if you like to have all the eye candy turned on. For RAM it's only important to have enough so you don't swap. If you are swapping during gameplay then RAM > than all but if you have more than you need to prevent swapping that doesn't help anything (unless the program has a memory leak in which case it'll postpone when the program crashes). HD speed is inconsequential unless you are playing EQ circa 2000 when zoning times could mean the difference between life and death or you really really like being the first one to load up a map.

[Hoax]

I really just don't understand how you can say things that have no connection to ANY gaming experience I've ever had.  I'm willing to imagine you are right but it just doesn't bear out for any of the machines I've built over the years.

Then again, I turn off hella shit in any fps because dynamic lighting or whatever can kiss my ass unless it makes it easier to shoot people in the head and I don't play these eye candy + story games that apparently are all the rage.

TF2 plays fine.
HG:L chugs dick but I can't tell why because its so broken on its own thanks to mem leak issue.  I do think I need more gpu though as I've had some fps issues when playing the game with other humans.  Though I get no real slowdown in towns, which just confuses me.

Quake3 played fine.
Tribes3 played fine, though I didn't buy it, fucking grapple hook 4tL
CS played fine.
DoW played fine, sometimes I had some slowdown in 6-8 player games that went long but I mostly played automatch.
Various f2p mmo's worked as well as they were going to.  Though many had slowdowns when loading shittons of player textures at once.
WoW was smooth as silk (of course).
Titan Quest played fine.

I'm sure Supreme Commander would have broken my machine's spirit.

Rumble fighter actually seemed to need a little more juice at times, and did seem like it was gpu as sometimes when lots of people were activating exo-cores (flashy shit) I got some slowdown.

This is on roughly:
P4 3ghz
1gig matched, xms2 pc-6400 (I want to say -it was hot shit 3years ago lol)
ATI x700
10k rpm HD for game installs.

So yeah, I guess I didn't touch Oblivion, FEAR, etc. so I'm straight up unaware of how evil some games have been on hardware or something?  Its just so strange, I look at Video Cards for $400+ and I find myself laughing.  $400 is roughly a third of what I payed for my entire fucking computer 3 or 4 years ago, I think I clocked in at ~$1250 with the case, razer mouse, no monitor.

[Sky]

Yes, gpu is meaningless because Hoax plays old games with all the settings turned down to low. And here I thought Trippy had a clue.

 

[Hoax]

For real, in what universe do you imagine your post was warrented, necessarry, helpful or anything other then fucking stupid?

Just curious of course.

[Sky]

The same universe your completely useless input about gpus applies to this thread.

[Hoax]

I've never seen first hand the gpu be the primary bottleneck.  Certainly I've never felt the need to budget such a ludicrous amount of $$$ for it.  If somebody wants to tell me thats because I haven't bothered to buy certain games then that explains it to some extent.  I've never Not made a purchase to date because I didn't think my comp could handle it.  Supreme Commander was close, but the initial buzz was so negative I decided not to bother either way.  I would like to bargain bin it in the future.

So because I've never had a desire to buy single player sandbox games, or eye-candy + storyline single player fps games, I have a genuine desire to figure out if Trippy's bottleneck chart is an ivory tower construct or if it actually applies to me.

What I mean by that is does that chart apply if I'm still spending under $1500 on an almost full upgrade cycle or only if every component is stupid-bleeding-edge-omg-new-shiney level of cash expenditure?

Or has the landscape changed while I was away not playing these games?  Again I just bought the orange box, I played a tiny bit of HL2ep2, like under 5 hours, because single player fps isn't my thing.  Game ran fine.  TF2 runs fine.  That and HG:L are the only "new" games I have experience with.  So I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing because what the most tech savvy person on the board is saying doesn't jive with my actual play experience.

I would end this post by talking shit to Sky and pointing out I don't really need to justify shit to an assgoblin like him and this post was more to hopefully illicit a usefull response but fuck it, got to work and all that.

[Engels]

HL2ep2 runs pretty much the exact same graphics engine HL2 ran about, what, 2 years ago? Your rig performing adequately isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of your theory that GPUs aren't that vital. Let's face it; you like games that don't tax your graphics resources, which is fine, but I do hope you realise that you're in a pretty small minority of PC gamers; most of us like RPGs, and the accompanying high end graphic output, in MMOs or otherwise. Hence, its pretty much right there that you have your bottleneck.

Frankly, the whole point of PC gaming is that you have a progressively richer graphical environment, whereas console games have to make do with a predetermined hardware configuration until the next generation of consoles comes out. At this time, things look pretty good for consoles in comparison to PCs, but that's bound to change, until a console company comes out with a new console that'll take advantage of already developed PC-based graphical advances.

[Trippy]

So because I've never had a desire to buy single player sandbox games, or eye-candy + storyline single player fps games, I have a genuine desire to figure out if Trippy's bottleneck chart is an ivory tower construct or if it actually applies to me.

Giving ancedotal evidence without numbers and other specs isn't useful. I can just as easily say that HL2 runs fine on a Radeon 9200 (true) which is just about the crappiest post-GeForce dedicated GPU made and therefore the GPU is not the bottleneck (false).

Now the relationship between the CPU and GPU in terms of 3D graphics performance is more complicated than I wrote above but I was simplifying it to match your comparison example. The CPU does a lot of "setup" work before passing the data to the GPU to be rendered and it does other tasks like the AI, physics, and the lower the resolution and the fewer graphics quality settings turned on the less work the GPU has to do and the more work the CPU has to do. So replacing your CPU with a better one will improve your FPSes in many situations but these days the GPU is far more important as I implied in my earlier post.

Here's a example of how resolution and graphics settings change things from the CPU being the "bottleneck" to the GPU being the bottleneck:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_core_2_extreme_qx9650_penryn_performance/page11.asp

At 800 x 600 you can see noticable differences in performance among various high-end CPUs but as you move up in resolution and turn on AA and AF what used to be the slowest CPU is now the "fastest" one (by a fraction) because the GPU is the bottleneck.

Here's another example of what I mean by the GPU being the bottleneck:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=706&model2=744&chart=279

Near the bottom you can see the X800 in blue (closest to your X700) and right below the top you see the 8800 GTX. If you jump over to the dual/quad GPU benchmarks you can see that the FPS just keeps going up as you add GPU power when run on a high-end CPU (the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 in these benchmarks):

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_sli2007.html?modelx=33&model1=804&model2=804&chart=339

Another example of the GPU being a bottleneck (S.T.A.L.K.E.R benchmarked on a 7900 GS, F.E.A.R behaves in much the same way):

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/stalker_cpu_performance/page4.asp
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/stalker_cpu_performance/page5.asp

For fairness here are some benchmarks from Supreme Commander a game in which the CPU is the bottleneck:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=911&model2=877&chart=421

On a low-end CPU even with a top-end GPU the game is basically unplayable.

To muddy the waters even more here's an example of where both the CPU and GPU matter but the GPU matters more. Note that this isn't an identical comparison because the CPU benchmark is run with lower quality settings than the GPU one so I'm doing a bit of hand waving here:

Here's Prey running at 1280 x 1024, a fairly low resolution these days with the same video cards marked and the same high-end CPU as above:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=706&model2=744&chart=280&chart=301

Here's Prey running at similiar (but not exactly the same) settings on a 8800 GTX with the CPU being varied (I've marked your CPU in red near the bottom):

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=911&model2=877&chart=425

As you can see at that resolution the CPU is important but a low-end CPU matched with a top-end GPU gives better performance than a high-end CPU with a low-end GPU and if your raised the resolution you would see an even bigger difference in favor of the low-end CPU/top-end GPU combo. Note that the CPU benchmarks would be slightly lower if run at the same quality settings as the GPU benchmarks (the hand waving part) but my point still holds.

Of course there are other games with other settings that can show the reverse as well (where the CPU is more important) like the Supreme Commander benchmark above but screen resolutions keep going up and up (1600 is the norm now with new monitors and 1920 is becoming popular) and the graphical effects even more elaborate that the GPU is usually the gating factor.