Results tagged “6800gt” from Birmingham Mail - Technobabble

I see the latest 'big thing' in the graphics card world has come out - the £450 GTX280.

Is it just me or do new hardware releases - fail to excite completely, be they cpus or gfx?

I remember when the 6800gt came out and everyone got extremely excited and went out and bought one even at £250+.

I think it's not so much the performance increases being less impressive, rather general 'update fatigue'.

The manufacturers have induced indifference through launching a new product line (esp gfx cards) every three months or so.

This has royally narked some who just bought the latest tech, which has recently come out, only to be repeatedly told they should have hung on another week for something 20 per cent faster at the same price.

Both the 2900 series and 8800 series are serial offenders at this.

Now I just think the days of automatically upgrading to the next generation have waned somewhat. People just think they'll skip a family of cards and wait for the next one.

The latest way to spend £450 - the 2800gtx.

The new computer-killer on PC, as many gamers have discovered to their cost is Crysis.
Many people used to mega-high frames per second rates on their huge widescreen flatscreens were horrified as the latest title was reduced to a slideshow at high detail levels.
People who lashed out massive wads of cash on their rig realised a crucial fact which has been covered up by the graphics card manufacturers - DirectX 10 does not work very well on their equipment.
So all those people who spend half their lives running synthetic benchmarks, while overclocking their components, have realised they have got obsolescent kit - and they can't buy their way out of it.
A friend of mine recently lashed out an eye-watering amount on a PC which included an Intel QX9650 cpu, and two 9800x2 graphics cards in SLI.
He installed Crysis and, not unreasonably, expected it to sing and dance on his 2560x1600 screen with at least 60fps rates. Er, sadly not and the most he could eke out was 40fps at medium settings, which is reasonable, but not that fast.
So with a cpu retailing for £630 and two just released graphics cards at £375 EACH, the newest DX10 games struggle a bit. Don't forget in the Hexus review I linked to above the 9800X2 absolutely batters every other card on the market into submission.
I wait to see what, if any, changes in terms of new hardware are on the horizon - but this certainly shows that flinging money at an 'enthusiast' system is not necessarily the right solution to the current problem.
It actually puts me in mind of the last real 'computer killer' - Far Cry. That wouldn't just work slowly on lower end systems - it wouldn't work at all. And it inspired me to build my first computer - a system based around the hot at the time Athlon 64 4000 and 6800GT graphics card.