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The Fastest Video Card You Can Buy
Mack writes "OCAddiction takes a look at the fastest video currently on the market. Here's what they say."With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day, this we can count on. But as it stands now, the OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE is simply the best card your money can buy today.""
"With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day"
Did the day of release of Quake 3 cause a surge in video card sales? O_o
I can understand Doom III being the standard benchmark, but why's opening day such a big deal?
What is really amazing to me right now is that games are driving this huge industry of video card development. Both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to deliver faster frame rates pushing more and more triangles that appears to be developed for games. Now, I like a good game as much as the next guy, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games? Simulation of course was the original driving force for computer graphics with companies like Evans and Sutherland and more GPU power is great for moving around molecules and proteins as computers can model progressively larger structures, but I am wondering what novel uses out there are being implemented?
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Videocard fanboy masturbation... why bother reading it? It'll be just like the 500 other video card reviews we've seen this year. You know the ones: "The BadBoy XXTerminator SpanKKAss 50K VX Turbo beat out our standard test rig with a whole 0.7 FPS!"
Big deal. Wake me up when there's some *real* news.
ZZZZZ...
Modern GPU like R300 is very fast SIMD machine with great memory bandwidth. At last SIGGRAPH it was demonstrated doing realtime raytracing. You can harness its power to do video decoding, encoding and postprocessing or image filters. Audio processing seems doable too. I can also imagine you could use it for physical simulations. Its uses are unlimited.
I only wish that we had something to drive processors the way good games drive cards. You know, besides SETI@Home and corporate greed.
Gryftir
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
I mean, really. With my GEForce 3 + P3/800 = I can play anything I want. Eg: Command & Conquer Generals, Unreal Tourney 2003, Warcraft 3, Battlefield 1942. Maybe not with all the options turned on and at a "mere" 800x600 - but still, so long as the game is fun... right?
Game makers know that the lower their system requirements the fewer copies they will sell - which I bet is why Counterstrike has been doing so well.
If you don't need one, don't buy one. Everybody has an addiction, and computers happen to be addictions for a lot of people.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It has been a while now since video cards became the driving element in box specs. HD's don't push....MB's don't push, and heaven knows USB2 isn't doing anything worth mentioning. High performance video cards push development of many other components. Much like a bigger engine in a car needs better handling and more fuel, etc.
The video card has been the alpha male in the component arena for some time, and I'm surprised to hear people proclaiming shock over a $500.00 price tag.
As usual some people would complain if their computer was free.
If you don't like it, don't buy it....if you can't afford it, don't whine...if something works better for you, smile and be happy.
"First you bitch about the baby, then you bitch 'cause we're not married!!"
I would wait until DOOM 3 is actually out. Test demo or full version. =)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yep, its about "penis envy". A $100 or less card will run all the games you really want to play right now with essentially full quality (ok, so you might not be able to turn on every performance killing feature from the driver control panel but the increase in visual detail is negligible). Also, even when games do come out that finally use the power of a card more powerful than you have, they may not be games you really want to play. Take Unreal 2, for instance. While not a "bad" game per say...it was good enough for me to finish it...it certainly wasn't worth spending money on a video card to play it, if I didn't already have one. It offerred nothing new, basically the sterile non-interactive environments of Quake 2 (all you can do is shoot monsters and flip levers, and every lever must be flipped. Dialogue makes no difference, characters die in the plot but you cannot save any of them) dressed up with better graphics. I want more to DO in the game, like Deus Ex had. For instance, in the game there's an entire level of the inside of your spaceship that gets revisited periodically. You can wander around, even going into maintenance sections. But you cannot touch or interact with the environment in any way! Nothing you say to characters makes even the slightest bit of difference, and you cannot do anything but open doors.
Its rare that a game comes out that both has system destroying graphics prompting an upgrade AND is actually a game you want to play. While Doom 3 may look good, it is yet to be seen whether its even as good as half life single player. Also, its unlikely it comes even close to a classic like Battlefield 1942 or Half-Life mods for multiplayer.
Seriously, its ridiculous.
30 some posts, a dozen complaints.
People who are car aficionados will glady throw down 12,000$ to turbo their cars or 130,000$ for a ferrari. I know people with multi-million dollar homes and the house is all to themselves. Is it crazy to pay 800$ for a PDA when you can get one that does the same for 99$?
If people have the money then let them spend it on what THEY want and quit complaining because YOU have a problem with it. If you think it's too much money, then it's not for you.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
...they have terrible resellerratings. Also, the card ships with a nice and quiet Zalman heatpipe, which, though quiet as the fanless nature of it implies, probably cuts the life of the card to a year or so. I'm sure anything close to the heatsink is in serious danger of melting (be careful of PCI cards around it). Besides, this isn't anything you couldn't do with a retail ATI 9700 Pro which isn't very loud in the first place.
people do still overclock.
for fun. and for use. lower p4 northwoods overclock nicely, and it does make a difference in encoding & etc. (certainly a jump from 1.6ghz to 2.4ghz or so makes quite a difference when encoding divx)
modern mobos allow for that 10% overclock so easily that it's not even 'trouble'.
people just don't want to read about budget card reviews, even though thats what most of the time they should be reading.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Wasn't there a test a while back that shows the AGP bus has little bandwidth back to the CPU?
The fact that the AGP bus was always intended as a one-way street will limit the options avalible to hackers.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
sure hope you are not trolling; but for your information I run at 1024x768 with all options on "normal." (yes that includes texture-size) I disable a few things that I don't care for like decals (burn-marks) that just happen to improve performance.
It's a mobile radeon 7500, by the way. the newer mobile radeon 9000 and nvidia's mobile 420/440 can do even better.
for the convenience of not having to fuck with galvinic corrosion or insanely loud fans, I'd say it's a pretty good tradeoff. Not to mention that I can play this on trans-pacific flights.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
ATi determines the model numbers. OCSystem wanted to hype it up, but they obviously couldn't change the model number because ATi would get really pissed at them (and they could be sued), so instead they had to tack on a bunch of adjectives. Get over it.
I don't mean to take my frustrations out on the poster, as this is a more general complaint. Is it "cool" to use words like "winsucks" and "winblows"? I have problems with MSFT too, but ff you're trying to get a point across, say something useful instead of resorting to childish cheap shots.
A $10 FM radio will give you all the sound you need. Sure, fancy stereos have lots of buttons and knobs to twiddle, but the difference in sound quality is negligible--especially since all we really do with our sound systems is listen to talk radio, right?