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ATI PCI-Express Devices Revealed
JohnQ writes "According to Xbitlabs and AnandTech, the specifications for ATI's newest graphics cards have been revealed. Interesting to note is that all of these next generation video cards will run exclusively on the PEG (PCI-Express x16) interface. This does not bode well for those of us who just paid top dollar for the last generation of AGP cards. Read more about the roadmaps on Anandtech and Xbitlabs"
This does not bode well for those of us who just paid top dollar for the last generation of AGP cards.
But it does bode well for those of us who want cheaper AGP Radeons.
People who have the last-gen AGP cards will continue to use them...
"This does not bode well for those of us who just paid top dollar for the last generation of AGP cards."
Come again? Why do people consider than advances in technology retroactively negate past purchases? If you bought a nice AGP card yesterday, it will continue to be a nice AGP card today.
You're missing the point. Yes, you don't need to run Q3A at 300fps, but if this new card will run it that fast, then when the next generation of games come out that will make your current card bog down to 15fps, the new one will be able to play it.
Manufacturers will continue to put AGP slots on mother-boards for the next while - as far as I can tell you will be able to plug a PEG gfx card into ANY PEG slot on your board
This just takes us back to the old PCI/AGP days.
No need to spread FUD on the GFX card market - anyone who just paid top dollar will be able to use their top dollar car din their new top dollar PEG capable board for the forseeable future.
What this does herald is the next generation of GFX cards that are coming, but I dont think there
will be much difference between PEG and AGP GFX cards for a while - at least not before the shine on the new FX5950 and 9800's has long worn off.
Standard Slashdot sensationalism (but you gotta love it)
I'd like to see Linux drivers in the "roadmap". I still can't get 3d acceleration and tv-in on my 8500 card. The newer gen. cards look great, but how long till the drivers are available for them? By the way, this is a good open source project for drivers (ATI) here.
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Having a single AGP bus has miffed me for a while. I've always wanted to stick my GF 4 and my GF FX in the same computer, but nooo.. It'll be nice when one can run more than two monitors and a very nice quality for a game. =D
Of course, I'll be able to achieve this in four years, when I have enough money.. =T
Three screen Quake3, anyone?
This statement is false.
Anand's site often recommends (for users with a budget, anyway) that people buy stuff that will run the software(games) they want to run now. I agree and make this recommendation often.
/.
Don't spend $400+ on a video card for the performance you'll get on a game in a year or two. Spend $200 on a 9700 Pro (or whatever your pref.) for the games you play now. Then spend another $200 in a couple of years for whatever card you need to run your games. Buying top of the line means paying top dollar.
Then again, this is
Let me get this straight, you're whining about obsolescence in the graphics card market? What planet or cave are you from? Leapfrogging happens...what, at least twice a year? New GPUs, different VRAM technology, faster PCI bus interfaces...it's old news, and by now anyone who buys a top of the line card should full well know it's going to be next week's "1" on the benchmark scales and worth half as much as it was when they bought it.
In fact, anyone who has bought -any- computer components in the last 30 years should know this, including the people who bought Apple Lisas(Helloooo, $6k down the toilet!)
By all means though, don't stop- if you did, the graphics card market would probably implode, as you're no doubt single-handedly funding the R&D efforts, and those of us buying 1-2 'generations' back want to keep seeing the not-so-latest, not-so-greatest drop in price ;-)
Please help metamoderate.
...and couldn't care less that it will be 'obsolete' in a year. If you base all your purchasing decisions on when the latest, greatest thing is coming out, you'll never buy anything.
Yeah, I'll wince when I see the same card I bought last week selling in three months for $100 less, but in the end I don't think I'll have a problem sleeping because of it.
Anybody who rushed out and bought a new top-of-the-line AGP mainboard recently and is now pissed because their video card upgrade options are going to be somewhat limited has nobody but themselves to blame. Hardware review websites have been talking about the pending shift to PCI-Express for the past year. The same can be said of people who blindly buy stocks without doing due diligence. It's not entirely surprising that upcoming video card chipsets only support PCI-Express.
I'm not sure that this bodes quite as badly for those who just bought an AGP video card. AGP mainboards aren't going to disappear overnight so you'll still have new mainboard upgrade options for at least a year or two.
As there's no measurable difference between AGP 2x, 4x, and 8x, why is everyone getting excited? I know PCI-X is going to be great for high end SCSI cards and the like, but as far as I know graphics cards aren't bandwidth limited.
READY.
#
There haven't been any major 2D ehancements in years. You'll get a bit more bandwidth for pushing data around but my 6 year old 4MB video card does 2D just as fast as my 1 year old 64MB card.
The focus is 3D performance. 2D is limited by motherboard bus speeds and things like that.
A high-performance hardware vector based 2D card might be cool. You know, running display PDF in hardware or something.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
that PCI-Express is really coming into the consumer channel in a big way in the near term.
That's great news and its about time. It makes me wonder why I never see GigE ethernet cards and switches in retails outlets though. I've seen GigE NICs as on-board features and I've seen them on-line and the prices look quite reasonable, but I've never seen them in a store yet.
But if boards are going for the big speed upgrade, then it's time for the home networks to step up a notch too.
> Video cards don't need to be faster than they
> already are in the midrange and top end.
That's what they said when 3Dfx built the Voodoo2 back when Quake2's graphics blew everyone away. There will ALWAYS be room at the top. I want a graphics solution that can render full-scene real-time anti-aliased anisotropically-filtered photo-quality scenes across three high-res displays. Even the best cards out there would flat-out choke.
That said, what I think better software needs to be written to take advantage of the current hardware. When I see how beautiful graphics look in many console games, I can't help but wonder why PC games don't look as good on average, even with much studlier hardware. PC games need to render at higher framerates and resolution to look good on a computer monitor, and developers need to code to non-standardized systems. I think the latter of these issues causes developers to not polish and tweak the look and feel of their games as well as on a console. Better, more generic, and more widely-available game engines for the PC will have more impact on graphics in the near-term than will graphics hardware.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
As far as the feeling of having made a good deal goes, nothing that happens in the marketplace ever bodes well for the one who pays top dollar for anything. In the computer industry this lesson is learned, (or at least tought) faster than in most other industries.
The need for faster graphics cards will continue until a 3D game is indistinguishable from a video recording of reality.
Right now, no graphics card can do that even at 1 FPS.
Once graphics cards can produce full motion video quality graphics, I imagine development of graphics cards will somewhat slow until The Next Big Thing becomes known, like virtual reality or something.
There is a definite goal for graphics card makers. They also know that the future of their respective companies is in fact quite limited. In 10-20 years, I imagine the upgrade cycle for video cards will be effectively over.
I mean, 10 years ago X-Wing was still one of the best 3D games out there. Have you sat down and tried to play it since then? We've come pretty, thats for sure.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
While this is true today, it's not going to be true for much longer. Frame-buffer issues aside, things like Apple's Quartz Extreme are quickly re-defining what 2D is and isn't, thanks to new features that are a combination of 2D/3D. Expose is a prime example, requiring upwards of 64MB of VRAM in extreme cases(high resolution, a dozen+ windows to compose), and a full 128MB(the quantity of memory high-end cards come with) if you do that with 2 displays. Longhorn is expected to bring a similar situation to the table, so what's been true for nearly the last decade, isn't going to be true for much longer.
I lucked out into getting a Radeon 9500 PRO for a mere $100 a few months ago. It plays all of the latest games with the settings maxed, and even runs very niceley on Linux.
By the time AGP has depreciated, it will be a great time to upgrade. For now, my new KT600 based board will do the job fine for the current line of AGP cards. All together, the upgrade, with new CPU and RAM, only ran me about $400-$500 dollars. I can't imagine paying that amount for a videocard alone, since the performance increase over the 9500 PRO (which I can hack to operate as a 9700) is very minimal. Besides... Who needs anything better when all of the current games play perfectly with the settings maxed out? If I upgrade every 2-3 years with the best $100-$150 card I can find, the $500 card users that need to have the "best toys on the block" have no real edge over anyone else... And I end up saving $700+ over what they spent.
Another thing that ammuses me is that the Human eye can only see arround 24fps yet gammers boast about getting much more. Do they realize most screens perk at about 60 refreshes, while TV/Digital/HD/cinema is only 24-30fps (broadcast, not necesarly what your TV is capable of, which brings to mind another marketing gimick). That's why when you watch a car on TV the wheels speed up untill they eventually appear to be moving backwards slowly. The fact is that the human eye perceives the typical cinema film motion as being fluid at about 18fps (with motion blur).
VENI, VIDI, VICI, DIXI
Are you the AC who posted almost exactly the same thing here? I ignored the AC post, despite the fact that it has (rather undeservedly) been modded up, but this is getting silly. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about ("rendering glitches could possibly be fixed on the fly" wtf?), so please stop spreading this nonsense.
PCI-E is about performance -- particularly higher bandwidth (scalable) and lower latency. I (and I suspsect you as well) have no idea what you're trying to say with regard to "allows data to be communicated back to the system after it has been processed on the card" (since both PCI and AGP are biderectional as well), but if there's a PCI-E "feature" to herald in addition to performance, it's the cost reduction allowed by the the use of high-speed differential serial links.
If you meant something else, please do explain.
everything in moderation
Right. You go and perfect a motion-blur trick for 3D hardware that doesn't devour memory like water, and actually looks good.
Have you seen accumulation buffer effects actually put to good use on the PC lately?
The other reason faster framerates rule the competitive gaming scene: the difference between 60 frames per second and 24 frames per second is an extra 25 miliseconds of delay between frame updates. For gamers who strive to optimize all paths of I/O, who complain about pings above 50 miliseconds, who go out and buy a fancy new USB mouse to get 125 Hz updates (8 miliseconds), 25 miliseconds added delay is unacceptable.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Offline 3D rendering. Or anything else involving heavy vector math. 3D animators are salivating over being able to someday throw a whole bunch of these in the system to spit out frames faster.
You need access to lots and lots of memory to handle large amounts of geometry, render-time displacement triangles, huge textures, and enormous raytracing acceleration trees, so pixel/geometry shaders on the card won't cut it (not to mention you need better/faster antialiasing than the card provides built-in for offline rendering).
The bottleneck has always been the CPU in 3D rendering, while this amazing specialized chip was sitting a few inches away on the vid card twiddling its thumbs. Soon, we'll be able to use that chip, and maybe a couple dozen of its siblings, to dramatically decrease wait times for renders.
If you want to buy an AGP based motherboard this year, go right ahead. If you're worried about AGP cards going up in price, Fry's is selling 128 MB cards based on the 5200 Nvidia line. with TV out, for $90 or less after rebate. Sure, it's not the latest or greatest, but it's pretty cheap for what you get.
Whining about AGP not being on future boards is like whining about ISA not being available. AGP just no longer will cut it, in the future, for the newest and fastest technologies.
Get off my launchpad!
Ever notice how fast side to side pan shots are rare in movies, and have excessive motion blur when they happen? Shots like that happen constantly (every time you look around) in games, and there's no motion blur at all. Movies are watched in darkened theaters, and the contrast makes it look smoother. Games are played on monitors. In games, you're in a feedback loop, not just watching. Try playing a game for once, and you'll see that 60 fps just feels smoother than 25 fps.
And you think most screens peak at 60 Hz? Using a 60 Hz monitor gives me a headache. My eye, whether you think it's human or not, can clearly see the difference between 60Hz and 85Hz. A game isn't maximally responsive until the minimum framerate in the most crowded scene is equal to the refresh rate. That's why when you watch wheels spin backwards, you can still see changes when they continue accelerating. You can't make out the details, but you can sense changes, and that's what matters in games. It's still perfectly playable if the minimum is 30 fps, but getting a minimum like that involves a huge 3 digit maximum.
The human eye percieves cinema as fluid at 18fps because cinema cheats in a lot of ways. The human eye percieves a game as painfully slow and jerky at 18fps.