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New NVidia Graphics Cards Reviewed
UnixRevolution writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Nvidia's new FX5950 and FX5700. According to Tom's Hardware, ATI's Radeon 9800XT is still at the top of the heap." They're still some pretty slick cards, if only for their heat sink designs.
is over three weeks old.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
You know what I find pretty damn interesting? That my Radeon 9600 operates with NO active cooling at all, only a simple heat conductor. Quite is good.
TODO: Something witty here...
When did Slashdot take over from the Wayback Machine?
The article's old. Really, quite old. As in, "Hello? The 90s are calling -- they want their articles back" kind of old.
Is Nvidia doomed to not have learned from 3dfx? Seems to me all they're doing now is adding slightly faster/better boards, while charging the same prices. Where are the new cutting edge features and options? It seems ironic, 3dfx was put out of business by Nvidia, and now Nvidia may be put out of business by ATI, and 5 years from now we'll be talking about how ATI will be put out of business by XYZ. The problem I think is once the company starts making serious cash, the founders just don't care anymore.
The above was posted from a computer hand-carved from oak.
Signed,
Anonymous Coward
Did you even read the article? Admittedly, I'm not a huge fan of Tom's Hardware, but their numbers are generally good. Using your Battlefield 1942 (not 1945, which show's you're probably not the target demographic for these cards), the GeForce 5950 does 98.7fps at 1024x768 with 4xFSAA and 8x fnisotropic filtering at 32bpp. By comparison, your Voodoo3 can't even display 32bpp, nor would it be able to pull even 10 fps at 1024x768 with 4x FSAA and so on. That doesn't sound like +0.7fps to me. Adding more RAM isn't going to magically make your Voodoo3 be able to display 32bpp color, or do 4x anti-aliasing at 1024x768 at almost 100fps.
As I mentioned before, you're apparently not the demographic at which these cards are targetted. There are always early adopters and people that like to play on the bleeding edge. This is true for almost everything from home theater hardware to kitchen appliances. These high-end cards are targetted at that portion of the market at their release. In a year or two, when another few revisions have been released and this card is down to $100 or so, you'll be in the targetted demographic. Of course, at that point in time, the 5950 Ultra will no longer be top of the line, either. Fanboys gush because this is an area in which they are passionate, and reviewers gush because they know their audience (fanboys).
I know this will never happen, because it would be a huge loss for the card manufacturers. Or maybe it will. Once upon a time, you bought computers with the CPU and RAM soldered to the motherboard (think pre-386 and some 386's). True, the was a socket for a math Co-processor, but often upgrading the CPU was out of the question. This is where we are with video cards now. The upgrade path is rather steep.
I'm waiting for the day when you buy a video card and then have the option of buying the fast processor, the really fast one, or the processor-thats-so-fast-it-melts-the-card, and then have the option of buying lots of RAM, a lot more RAM, or way too much RAM. Of course, I'll take option 3 :-)
Anyway, I know I'll update my video card a lot more often if that ever happens.
Pong and Frogger?
PERIOD.
While the nvidia article is a little old, there is an interesting article about a new company called 'XGI', which was formed when SiS spun off its graphics division Xabre. According to THG cards based on XGI chips could arrive within one or two months and their top model could retail for a good $100-200 less than the flagship models of NVIDIA or ATi. The article includes a review of the prototype card called 'Volari Duo V8 Ultra' based on the XGI chip.