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512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra Reviewed
Timmus writes "If you thought the $500 GeForce 6800 Ultra and $550 Radeon X850 XT PE were excessive, wait until you see nVidia's GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB: it officially retails for $999.99! Firingsquad has a review of the card manufactured by BFG. They ran tests with 6 different configurations (including a pair of 512MB cards running in SLI) with widescreen benchmarks at 1980x1200 as well."
Then buy a PS3.
A grand for a video card? A grand? All I can say is some folks have more dollars than sense, but that's just MHO.
A mirror of the print version is here and a mirror of the full article is here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Do you now buy the computer as something to run the graphics card on, rather than vice-versa?
hahahahahahaha
That's the question on our minds.
Damn. I'm thinking this is a very small nice-market.
Except for scientific aplications and video work, what can use this?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
can this one fly in fleets of unmanned aircraft that fly in flocking formation?
ill take a thousand....
IIRC an article posted earlier the added video ram was just for show. Only a true newb would spend so much money on a video card.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
a complete waste of money. For an extra $500 you get maybe 1 or 2 fps. What I find strange is that firingsquad is split over whether or not readers should buy it. The whole review seems to be a better benchmark of how much of an industry shill firingsquad is than the graphics card itself.
Well for Longhorn and Quake4 I think this is now the minimum? Or is it 2 of these in an SLI setup?
I'm still saving up for the 4way multi-core CPU minimum requirement =/
That means it's only $2000 for the _graphics cards_ in a top of the line SLI rig... this month.
This card costs $999 with 512MB DDR3, someone tell me how much the Xbox 360 comes with?
See where I'm going with this? Just how big of a loss are Sony and MS willing to take with their consoles this time around? I mean either way the consumer wins out big.
Even by the time winter rolls around you're not going to see this card or it's 256MB version for $50.
-- taking over the world, we are.
That video card has MORE ram memory then my first computers hard drive space.
No one needs that much graphics processing... *looks at Longhorn* Nevermind.
MadOgre.com
So for that price, I can buy 3 PS3s, or a PS3 with a large TV, or a PS3 with LOTS of titles.
I have a geforce4ti, and wonder why will I need more GPU power anyway. HL2 and doom3 run fine, and seem to need more memory and cpu bandwidths than triangle-pushers.
Theres a major lackage of a physics processor right now. Given the nice placement of GPU cards... on a high bandwidth bus of the northbridge, I'd say put the physics chip on the video card. Otherwise on a PCIX card.
Anyone care to comment where a card like this Geforce will be REQUIRED?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Could something show more strikingly how disgusting and how far below any journalistic standard O'Gara's article was, than the fact that /. trolls are now copy and pasting it in order to troll?
/. troll.
Mrs. O'Gara, meet your natural ally, the common
My wallet exploded just from reading that article..
The price tags just dont justify what you get in return. So in order to make the "bling ding" cards attractive, they quietly drop support for "obsolete" hardware, that is, you don't see any bug fixes or software features being added in ATI's catylyst set for the 9x00 series anymore.
On top of that, those "obsolete" cards haven't gotten any cheaper as new products usurp them. The 9800 I saw on the shelf last weekend still cost as much as when I bought mine a year ago.
So far all signs point to the next gen of consoles being pretty much on par, visually, with the greatest crap that ATI and nVidia churn out.
It's really hard to see the point of PC gaming anymore. What's it got that consoles dont? Online gaming with annoying mouthy 14 year olds? Check. Overpriced titles, and half-baked content delivery mechanisms? Check. Half finished products that require patches and updates to work correctly? Check.
For what this card costs, I could get a jillion-inch widescreen high-def DLP set to hook my PS3 and XBox 360's up to.
Just posting to keep the "pc gamer" vs "console gamer" wars going strong. It's fun to watch dweebs and simps fight.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It is twice the price, but offers equivalent (and in some cases worse) performance than cards with half the memory, because they have faster memory.
Show-offs only need apply, for now.
Game dev and music blog
The idea is that anyone with enough money to buy one or two of these 512MB cards is also planning to use a nice display. Thankfully, BFG had the foresight to employ two, dual-link DVI connectors, each of which supports resolutions up to 2048x1536 at 85Hz. You'll get away with up to 1920x 1080 at 60 Hz using the single-link port featured on 256MB Ultra cards. But if you really want to go big, Apple's 30-inch Cinema HD display, for instance, requires a dual-link DVI output for operation (BFG's product manager makes the clarification that the 30-inch Cinema HD is not supported in SLI mode, though). Previously, this was a feature only available on high-end Quadro cards, so including it with the GeForce 6800 Ultra is a big deal for graphics professionals.
I don't think the 30-inch Cinema HD display is supported in this over-priced cards dual-link mode either. According to Apple, the optimum resolution of the 30-inch HD display is 2560 x 1600 pixels. The let's-drop-a-grand card supports a maximum of 2048 x 1536 (according to the article). Do the people who spend the money on these things expect blurriness?
All I can say is that for a grand, this card better blow me and make me toast in the morning.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Someone like John Carmack or Pixar might want to tinker around with this kind bleeding edge technology, but there are tons of kids out there who will end up buying this card so they can play their Halo 2 and Ultimate Marbles.
In a few months the price will drop to less than half, and BFG, LeadTek, or Asus will release the same board but with 1GB of RAM.
For that price I'd rather get a used onyx.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
We all know the VGA, SVGA resolutions. My question is: who comes up with these screen resolution combinations? How far up can you go in pixels on one screen?
It seems to me the graphics chip guys are pushing the MBs on the cards instead of the resolution they put out. I wonder why?
... and obsolete in 6 months.
Game Developers.
If you are starting a new, state of the art game now: by the time you get it out the door, this level of video card will be standard built into motherboards. Almost Every PC game company in the world will need a few of these for testing, if nothing else.
I read the article, the card didn't do that great against ASUS's 256mb card, and in fact, in most of the tests the Asus 256mb card did better. ATI got blown away in pretty much all the tests.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
For what this card costs, I could get a jillion-inch widescreen high-def DLP set to hook my PS3 and XBox 360's up to.
No, you couldn't. I agree though, consoles are coming in as much better value for money.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I thought both ATI and nVidia were supplying chips for the next gen consoles. They probably don't make as much money per console, but they won't be out that much business unless both console and PC gaming does out.
Keep in mind that the new consoles won't come out until late this year at the earliest, more likely some time in 2006.
I guess by this time they must be beta testing new processors for their web-servers ...
Should read 1920x1280 not 1980x1200.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Pc gaming got mouse control for FPS, real time strategy, and the option NOT to buy the 999$ gfx card...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
My monitor is a 23'' LG2320, with a native resolution of 1900x1200. I play WoW and Guild Wars at that resolution with excellent results with my 128Mb 6600GT.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
The Dell LCD 2405 is 1900x1200...I have one and it is sweet. Will probably pair it with another one or a 1600x1200 LCD since some games don't scale well to widescreen. For programming, the extra screen space is very useful. Plus a little picture in picture from my mythtv box makes it even better.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Slashdotted already, anyone got a Mirrordot/Coral link?
It is very well possible that these GPUs have more processing power than any desktop CPU currently sold, although it is somewhat specialized. This power is one reason why Apple made a developer-accessible API that taps into GPU processing power for image and video manipulation.
So who wants to hack this into the Mac Mini mezzanine slot?
The parallels between Thresh's firingsquad and MS / SUN / Red Hat's bought and paid for style reviews are somewhat disturbing.
-- RLJ
Sure I could.
As a matter of fact, I was eyeing a nice DLP rear-projector the other day. 720P, light engine, retailed for 1500 or so, but they were willing to sell the floor model for 1100. Close enough. The launch of the 360 and next years PS3 and Revolution will really start to move HDTVs out the door, since up until now, there was really nothing to use them for (high def TV programming is overrated). Hopefully that means rapidly plummeting prices.
Still, you could get a decent 30" widescreen HDTV (CRT based) for about 700, and a 360 to go with it, and probably not go too far past a grand. I seriously doubt next gen consoles will sell for more than 300, unless they want to go the way of Neo Geo and 3DO. Maybe they will, in which case, Nintendo is *really* smart to go the route they're going (cheaper, mass appeal product with good games, rather than dazzling geeks with specs)
Anyhow I passed on the set, since I'm holding out for 1080p.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
$1000 for a video card when Dell is selling entire desktop systems for $299 now.
Can't they at least sneak an Apple ][ or C64 onto the chipset just to shut the old timers up?! Well, of course it has more X than your first computer did. It's got your first computer in it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I choked when I bought my fx5500 for 139 CND. my Pc is not worth $1000 any more.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
Apparently you don't know the widescreen ones though. My laptop runs at 1900x1200 (WUXGA) and it is nice.
I just picked up a new mobo and skipped the PCI-Express/SLI thing. I bought my card about 2 years ago and as far as I'm concerned I still haven't fully depreciated it yet so I stuck with a mobo with AGP 8X and I'll be fine with it. I did shift to the Athlon 64, bottom of the line Venice core, but that seemed reasonable as it'll use a bit less power and run faster than my old 32 bit Athlon. Anything more isn't justified unless I do video editting which is high CPU demand.
So what's the point of these SLI things anyway? So you can run dual heads at a LAN party?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So in order to make the "bling ding" cards attractive, they quietly drop support for "obsolete" hardware, that is, you don't see any bug fixes or software features being added in ATI's catylyst set for the 9x00 series anymore.
That's not new. ATI did this with their Mach64 cards around 1998, which is why I'll no longer use proprietary video card drivers. Unfortunately I still use ATI cards (9250 and below), since nVidia doesn't release any specs for 3D support and Matrox no longer releases any specs. Hopefully the Open Graphics project will change this.
O'Gara shoots John C. Dvorak about the groin. An unconfirmed report has Mr. Dvorak (54) saying he didn't notice, apparently since he has no balls at all.
Half finished products that require patches and updates to work correctly? Check.
What with consoles being online and having harddrives, there are only going to be more post-release bug patches for games on consoles.
They're out in full force today. It's not Friday the 13th in some other galaxy far, far away, is it?
This whole "patches are bad" argument sucks for one reason--it assumes that console games are always bug free. But they're not. MVP Baseball 2004 came out with a fairly big bug on Xbox, PS2, and PC (left handed hitters had a serious lack of power). The PC version got patched. The PS2 version never did (I don't know about XBox). So why is the fact that the PS2 version can't get patched a good thing?
I think the really interesting question is: Didn't FSAA come a little late to the scene, considering the ridiculous resolutions we can now play our game at?
Every where you go you'll see websites benchmarking at 1900x1200 4xFSAA 16-tap and I'll just go... what the hell?
Anti-Aliasing made a hell of a lot more sense to me back at 320x200 to 800x600... but maybe that's just me. I'm sure we'll have 16x FSAA at 8192x6160 too, and everyone will say it's da bomb! "How can you play without anti-aliasing? Don't you stop and look at the jaggies? <picks up magnifying glass to point them out>"
Oh, well... and don't get me started on the fact that none of the big sites regularly review cards between different generations. When I upgrade I want to know the difference from where I am now, not the 2-5fps different between cards with the same basic hardware but different logos stamped on.
Alright.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
What's the point of SLI? Well, first of all, welcome back from your coma. Second, SLI does for Nvidia cards now what pairing up 3dfx cards did then. You get roughly double the graphics processing power with a pair of cards in SLI mode. There are different modes you can choose for frame/field rendering but overall you get nearly twice the framerate and/or details.
SLI is used so each card takes half the load of whatever graphics are required for the moment and effectively doubles the processing power of the graphics card. It's like having two processors in your computer, however the two cards can actually work on the same output, as one card takes odd lines and the other even lines or the top half vs. bottom half (I don't recall the exact process). It used to be called Scan Line Interleave but unless I'm mistaken it's still SLI although SLI stands for something else now.
~S
The point is you combine the power of two cards, thereby theopretically doubling the performance, more res more frames/sec, higher AA goodness...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
Second, SLI does for Nvidia cards now what pairing up 3dfx cards did then.
Sink the company?
>So what's the point of these SLI things anyway?
The basic idea is to give you 2x the performance by buying two cards, "linking them together" and have them share the load of rendering the scene.
In practice you'd be happy to get ~70% efficiency -- once the drivers stop crapping out.
You complain about Maureen's excellent expose on PJ but you think PJ is nothing but perfect? LOL. Groklaw's credibility has been diminished for very specific reasons, including its censorship policy, hypocrisy and flouting Godwin's law.
Let's be clear: PJ threw the first punch at MoG by publicly accusing her of lying. Thereafter, the Groklaw community regularly attacked MoG in the most vicious and personal terms. If someone was anonymously running a web site attacking me, I sure would want to find out who was behind it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You could actually buy or come close to buying a new PC (maybe sans monitor) video a video card capable of handling more current games...
Or you could buy a PS3 and a not-quite-so-bloody-expensive-but-still-damn-good video card...
Maybe they're just hoping that by offering an obscene initial price the cards will seem really spectacular. A few rich fanboys will buy 'em, then they can dump the price and others will think they've become a good deal...
SLI = Scaleable Link Interconnect
With the Consumer level cards you cannot do DualHead with SLI Enabled. With it disabled however you get access to all of the video ports and could do 4 heads if you want.
Yes, but here we're talking about driver patches. If a console needed it, probably a huge pain in the arse yes (BIOS patch or hardware fix perhaps). But with a PC one of the major issues are the sheer number of different hardware options. On a console, games are built towards the hardware... which will always be the same (barring legacy support such as PS1 games on a PS2, etc).
... X Y Z for every little thing, and thus might miss some weird conflicts/bugs/etc.
The game will always *know* what the hardware is, and during testing they can catch more errors. On a console, the vendor can't test cards A B C D
Now, I drive a big block Chevy. I understand the need for more power and performance than sanity admits. But, with this card, are you actually getting more performance? I know I am with my engine mods. Or is this just a big dick exercise in marketing?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Overpriced Titles? Perhaps on games with monthly fees, but compare any brand new FPS or Strategy game with stuff on consoles. They're generally $40-$50 instead of $60-$70 (canadian currency).
As for the hardware behind it. You just gotta be smart about what you buy & when. You say the 9800 you saw last weekend cost as much as when you bought it a year ago? Don't you think that's a good indicator of the quality of the card. You hit the sweet spot in the market. Why aren't you happy about that? Buying one now may not be the best idea, nor would going out & buying this $999 behemoth. In 6 months though, you'll probably find another gem to last you ages at a good price.
You can't even put the mouse in the window to scroll without all those damned little ad popup things when you hover over a link.
Blah, I hate that crap.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
SLI = Scan Line Interleave.
Like the man said, one card renders one line, the other the next, and so on, so each card individually renders an interleved image, and the main card puts them together to make a progressive scan image.
So, stfu.
The idea that it was introduced to seem cheaper to consumers is a myth. It was originally introduced so that clerks would have to make change on purchases. If something cost $5, the clerk could just pocket it.... if the customer expected change, the clerk had to open the till, which left a record.
Now it has the force of tradition.
You both are right, it used to be Scan Line Interleave circa the VooDoo cards and is now Scalable Link Interface circa current cards.
~S
.... should also add. Who uses a PC JUST for gaming? If you just want eggs, order eggs. Don't order eggs with a side of steak & mashed potatoes & lobster & hot dogs & caeser salad & ...
What do people not get? Seriously, it's not the amount of VRAM that is included in the card, but the speed of the GPU. I'd rather spend that grand on two equally powerful cards, or a dual GPU card.
This is what 3dfx did back in the time. Nvidia's SLI is not scan line interleave, they only use the same acronym for PR.
Hasn't it been stated that so far, 512MB vid cards have not done better than 256MB?
From TFA:
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
You be the judge. You are a self-admitted big dick, after all. Since you have a blood-supply problem, let me clue you in. Do you find yourself short on graphics response? If yes, it's worth a shot because nothing else today can cure it. Yes, it's cost a grand or two, but for big dicks, what's that really.
And stop whining like a little girl. 'Nuf said
This new card is for a small market segment I like to call "suckers". ATI, nVidia, and the publishers of games know this. New games are and will continue to be accessable to anyone who's willing to spend about $1000 every 2 years on computer parts. Why not put out a card for those with more money than sense?
PC gaming may die off, but it'll be cheap off the shelf PC equivilents that resemble the PS3 or 360 that'll kill it. All they need is MS Office 360 edition and the like. Next gen systems are a software DVD and some compatible usb mice and keyboards away from being home computers anyway.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
I'm no expert but I bet VESA sets those standards. They're in charge of everything else video-related. Note that the resolution combinations are all 4:3 or 16:9-10 proportions, the same as the monitors.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
You can pay an extra $500 for the card, and there is ZERO performance advantage WHATSOEVER.
None.
Zero, zilch, nada.
Their only note is "well, with all that RAM, perhaps tomorrow's games will take advantage of it!"
Thing is, in 1 year, you'll be able to get a card with 512 MB of RAM, which is 2x as fast as this card, for $399. In 2 years, that same card will be $199. So there is ZERO advantage to getting it now, because nothing can use it, and by the time technology *can* use it, it will be old hat.
82% Rating? These guys are on the take.
Right, they're killing it... Sure. Whatever you say.
It might be a pain on the wallet if any titles actually required anything that expensive. But they don't and never will, because, well, a game wouldn't sell if most people couldn't afford the hardware to run it.
No, what they're doing is capitalizing on the people that for one reason or another just absolutely must have the latest, greatest, and most (expensive), despite all sensibility.
This is the same type that buys Rolexes, when a Timex would do just about as well... Do you accuse Rolex, Ferrari, and other luxury manufactuers of killing their respective markets? No, that would be stupid. If anything, the advancements made by high end stuff will eventually trickle down to regular bums.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
That's a Big Fuckin' Gun. Er, I mean, card.
I was making the point that with xbox live, console games are that way too.
Halo 2 was unplayable due to rampant glitching and cheating until they released the update.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Gotta have that technology somewhere though before it can be used... otherwise how do you tune the code?
And I figure better to have it available to the public, so that there can be an indy scene too...
The only reason I can justify buying a 512mb video card for gaming (the workstation benefits should be far greater, but this is not a workstation card) is to run Doom 3 at the ultra setting without SLI. The textures in ultra mode are larger than 256mb, so a card without that much memory gets drastic performance penalties. If firingsquad wanted to show off the capabilities of the card, they should have shown that in Doom 3, at ultra graphics settings, with one card, the performance gain for the 512mb card should actually be something to talk about.
Nonetheless, even if you justified buying the card on the grounds that you don't need SLI, chances are you still have to upgrade your motherboard to PCI-E, and you still spend $1000 on video cards without the gain in performance achieved with two graphics processors.
But hey, at least you're ready for Half-Life 3.
Interesting. Make it available for developers for, say, $500 so they can test. And then soak the public by offering it at $1K to offset the expenses and funding for future games :-)
"It's like having two processors in your computer, however the two cards can actually work on the same output, as one card takes odd lines and the other even lines or the top half vs. bottom half (I don't recall the exact process)."
The old Voodoo SLI setup did the odd/even line method that you talk about, the newer Nvidia SLI mode does a top vs bottom half method.
Did anyone else see a flash ad for MS Visual Studio 2005 here on slashdot?
That's like going to church and seeing "cleanse your soul.. sponsored by satan" ads on the wall.
The world is ending.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
A PC by any other name would smell just as sweet. If you put everything you want from a PC into a console, it's going to cost as much as a new PC and would essentially be a non-upgradable, non-customizable PC in a pretty box. What's so great about that?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
One thousands dollars for +5 fps? I'm buying two.
120 Watt peak ... insolent, IMHO.
I've been suckered into buying a few expensive gaming graphics cards in the past, but never again, I think. I spent $300 on a Radeon 9800 around when Doom 3 came out, and since then I've played only two games: Doom 3 and Half Life 2.
PC gaming is dead, and I can't say I'm sad about it. Buying a $300 console every five years certainly beats blowing $1000 on PC upgrades every two years. Especially when the consoles have, from a somewhat objective point of view, many times the number of critically acclaimed titles released in a year that the PC has.
Additionally, because the reasons given above negate the main reason I've used x86 machines, I've decided to make my next computer a Mac. I wonder if Microsoft, in luring developers away from the PC and to the Xbox, is just going to make it easier for the geek population to move from Windows to Mac OS or Linux?
"It's really hard to see the point of PC gaming anymore. What's it got that consoles dont?"
:P
Well I can play with my 3 kids on our lan, hard to do that with consoles without also buying 4 (is that even possible to LAN consoles?) also my wife can play games on yahoo while im fragging away in my deathmatch server while still sitting next to each other (so that we are spending "time together")
"On top of that, those "obsolete" cards haven't gotten any cheaper as new products usurp them. The 9800 I saw on the shelf last weekend still cost as much as when I bought mine a year ago.
"
I've got a Riva TNT2 that still runs the latest drivers as this new $1k card. Still gets performance enhancements from newer drivers too. Not as often, but its not uncommon to see a few more fps after the occasional driver upgrade.
As for prices coming down, Nvidea GeForce FX 5200 AGP8X 128MB DDR is $60 on froogle. I'd say thats came down.
As for PC > Console argument, I'll ignore the HIGHLY important input argument (hrm, 80hz badly shaped ps2 controller whos battery life is unknown, or wired 8 button mouse that updates at 1000hz. Wonder which will be more precise. Alright fine, I didn't ignore it, I can't help myself.)
More importantly though, What about custom content? I can think of only two games that have ever dominated the player market. QuakeWorld Team Fortress, and HalfLife CounterStrike. Neither would be possible on a console that assumes the end user is too stupid to make his own content (Game logic(mods), Sounds, Graphics, etc. All stuff customized regularly in a pc game).
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Despite the fact that nearly all comments here about this card are negative, there's still one thing that they got...
There are lots of people talking about it.
They probably never planned to sell many of these, though I wouldn't doubt that there's a class of people (think rich brats) who will buy one out of pocket change, simply to have the BEST. (==most expensive) But nonetheless, mere Slashdotters are talking about them, and maybe some are getting a little discontent with their Radeon 8500LE, and maybe this article will increase discontent enough to spring for a new one, even if it isn't a 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra for $999. It might be a sale. (But not here, not now.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
bogus. Send a free box full of the cards over to the developers. The hardware vendors should go out of their way to support the developers.
Large amounts of memory only help when a game has a large amount of textures, and that's usually only when it's running at the very highest resolutions. By the time a game that requires that much memory is released, your card will surely be unfit to run it at that resolution.
For instance, you can buy a Radeon 9200 (essentially an 8500) with 256mb. The class of game that could use that much memory is, say, Doom3 running at 1280 or greater - way out of the card's league. But OEMs will continue to happily sell such cards to the clueless, and I can't say I blame 'em.
What else do you use a $999 video card for that's not gaming?
Sure, there are people who use CAD and scientific visualization stuff and all that jazz. I guarantee you: Those four people aren't keeping the market for high-end video cards going.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
too expensive! no need for it, even the latest games dont demand that much anyway. ps3 soon!
Hold on.
You've got three computers on a LAN. What's the difference between that and having three consoles on a LAN?
Why can't your wife play games on Yahoo while you're fragging away on your console?
I mean, sure, there are games I like better on PCs than on consoles, but your reasons don't make a lot of sense to me.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
It's really hard to see the point of PC gaming anymore.
You keep feakin' cool hardware, I'll keep original iedas, complex storylines and non-linearity.
You might note that most game players don't tune code. So, therefore, they've just wasted $500. Which is fine...make that economy go! I will, however, laugh at them.
Yeah, because indie game developers should really be concentrating on how to out-chrome EA. That's a great idea.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Mac OS X Tiger could make use of the 512MB RAM. Longhorn will be able to whenever it comes out.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
i have ordered two of these for my new sli system. I cannot wait for there arival, o btw tiger direct has them for $879 http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1354222&sku=B52-1018
Great, more ammo for the console crowd. The worst part is...this time they have a point. GCard makers are starting to pander to the "my epeen is larger than yours" crowd. Please don't let PC gaming turn into street racing.
"What's the difference between that and having three consoles on a LAN?"
You can LAN consoles? AFAIK you can only play with others using split screen or something like the Live service Xbox has...
Also that would mean 4 TV sets (one per console)?!?!
I only have 1 TV (CRTs are a lot cheaper than TVs)
I agree with that wholeheartedly. Not only the processor, we also need more physics-knowledgeable programmers. What every game today lack is physics realism. One game that made a very big (truly revolutionary) advance in that sense was Grand Prix Legends, released in 1997. Since then, I haven't seen any game that had anything close to a reasonable physics simulation, the closest was Need for Speed - Porsche Unleashed. It really sucks, you spend hundreds of $$$ in hardware to get a system that shows light reflections in raindrops, but the car still handles like a bicycle with two bent wheels...
Yes, you can connect some console games over a LAN, and expect the support for that to increase with the next generation of consoles.
And a console + TV is a lot cheaper than a computer.
You've got four monitors for your PCs, don't you?
PS2 has had a LAN adaptor for at least two years. It's bundled with any of the new consoles.
So, basically, yeah.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Not saying I would drop the 1000 for this but I remember having an $800 dollar video setup and knew many others who did in the mid 90's
:)
TNT 16mb card for main 2d(and 3d) 200
2 Diamond Voodoo 12mb in SLI 300 each
And it was a fairly common setup on system at LAN parties I went to where we were playing Quake2 and others in all its Glide glory
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/23/202 1246&tid=152&tid=164
It wasn't news then, and it isn't now. But then again, firingsquad has been going down the hill - they need all the traffic they can get.
I am purchasing a new computer system and i am going with sli. What do you readers think would be better the asus 256 or the bfg 512? money really isnt a issue i just want the best performance and the card which will last me the longest. The reviews said that the reason that the 512 is not giving a huge boost could be driver related and games dont take full advantage of it. One thing though i want to be able to play quake 4 on ultra high settings..... Also is the althon X2 or fx55/57 a better buy for gaming? Thanks
"You say the 9800 you saw last weekend cost as much as when you bought it a year ago? Don't you think that's a good indicator of the quality of the card. You hit the sweet spot in the market."
Actually, my first thought was "price fixing".
The pretty box sounds nice!
But seriously, where did you get the idea that PCs were upgradeable anymore? We're living in times where CPU sockets change every year (even several times each year), PCI and AGP gets replaced by PCI Express, IDE gets replaced by SATA, USB already having replaced the standard serial port, and I can't even use the RAM from my old computer in the new one!
On the other hand, PCs still are customizable.
http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~tomcat/beapro1.htm
less than because usb is a shit design by intel made to suck cycles on purpose. They try to move everything to the cpu. The best is still a ps2 mouse set to 100-200hz.
Because after you have paid for your graphics card, you can't afford the ultraleet monitor too?
All I can say is some folks have more dollars than sense, but that's just MHO.
I remember when the "high end" cards were priced around $200, and that wasn't very long ago at all.
From the article:
It employs the same six-pin power input you'd expect on any other high-end PCI Express graphics card, and the board sports a very similar active cooler for its graphics processor.
I also remember when graphics cards didn't require a loud, whining fan to keep from catching on fire, not to mention a secondary power connector direct from the PSU.
What really gets me, though, is how normal firingsquad tries to make it sound. It employs the same six pin power connector and "active cooler" you'd expect. No, I don't expect that. It's bizarre. It's wrong.
Gaming isn't about faster and faster hardware performance. It's about games.
As far as I can tell, the only way out of this mess is to buy used hardware and games two or three years after they're released. By that time, the bugs are ironed out and your friends have already emptied their wallets figuring out what's worth playing.
No I agree with the previous poster - it is I think indicative of quality. He's right about the sweet spot. With an older card some games won't run quite so well (without dropping the features down) and new games maybe won't work properly at all. I bought a 9800 about 1 year after they were released. Price-wise it hadn't moved very much at all (and is still expensive) - but through that time I've never had a "gotcha" with a game I've bought.
Um.
You're implying that online console gaming doesn't have annoying 14 year olds? Apparently you've never played a game on Xbox Live.
The reason it makes sense to own a PC for gaming is really so simple I guess you overlooked it: you can do more on a PC than play games. Are you browsing Slashdot from a console? I didn't think so.
I like being able to use the same machine to listen to music, browse websites, and get online and play games with a friend. Consoles have their place, this is true. But they will never replace personal computers.
Oh, and on another note, it's hilarious how full of shit you are -
"[...] they quietly drop support for "obsolete" hardware, that is, you don't see any bug fixes or software features being added in ATI's catylyst set for the 9x00 series anymore."
ATI released the Catalyst 5.5 drivers (support for the entire line of Radeons) TODAY. Go back under the bridge.
So why the hell are we going to pay over $300 for a card when a chip with 10x the performance comes in the next gen consoles which are just around the corner?
ATI and nVidia have been raping the consumers for far too long, how can they get away with selling these to MS and Sony for $100 each then to us for $1000?
1) MOG probably was lying.
2) PJ did not specifically accuse MOG of lying:
"I therefore conclude that Ms. O'Gara has been provided with some misinformation, or she has decided to spread a bit of the Blarney sua sponte."
3) Even if PJ *did* accuse MOG of lying, that does give MOG a license to stalk and harrass PJ.
It could indeed, but that is hardly a glowing endorsement seeing as Mac OS X eats VRAM like there is no tommorow. It is extreme inefficient at how it how it uses VRAM.
How about a keyboard and a mouse? and how about the ability to download and play any game you like without the need for a modchip.
How about the ability for the rest of the family to watch tv whilst you play your video games?
I think we are going backwards in terms of computer component prices....I remember 5 or 6 years ago, you could buy a very high end video card for around $200.00 Of course, there were more expensive cards, but you would rarely see a card sell for more than $300.00
With the currently technology, components should be getting cheaper, not more expensive. It's sad that you can buy a motherboard and processor for less than you can buy a video card...and the the stupid video card isn't anything special..its just a cheap pcb with a semi-sophisticated gpu....nothing complicated or special. We're getting ripped off here.....people should quit buying into the hype and let the prices drop.
Online gaming with annoying mouthy 14 year olds? Check.
To better meet your needs, Microsoft has proudly been providing Xbox Live to give you annoying mouthy 14 yr olds, who cuss like sailors, and because ip based voice chat is standard with xbox live, you can listed to em swearing at you, which most pc online games don't have built in (although there are plenty of programs that will add that functionality)
Overpriced titles, and half-baked content delivery mechanisms?
Overpriced titles, well console gaming doesn't suffer from it as badly as PC, but there are plenty of games not worth $50 being sold on consoles.. and nintendo has some real half game delivery methods... Like putting Ice Climber (a pre NES, nintendo arcade game that got ported to NES) on the back of a trading card you buy a $40 reader to swipe a $10 trading card though to play an obsolete game you can dowload off the net for $0, and chances are if you bought a computer in the past 7 years it's even fast enough to run the emulator...
Half finished products that require patches and updates to work correctly?
Once again, Xbox to the rescue, many 'xbox live' enabled games are simply a way to download the patch to your Xbox HD that you need to play the game.
For what this card costs, I could get a jillion-inch widescreen high-def DLP set
You clearly live in a different galaxy from me, for $999 I can get a cheap 27" LCD tv, maybe. DLPs run 3 grand. High quality lcd tvs aren't cheap either, the cheap ones are, but they have crappy flaws that make them suck.
So basically, PC gaming and console gaming suck equally. It is true that console gaming is planing more and better leaps and bounds in technology, but they've all switched over to having multiple processors, and even multiple gpus.. To really keep pace, ati and nvidia really need to go quad gpu, and have each gpu handle 1/4 of the screen, or some such, so that they're good to go until the xbox3's and the ps4s come rolling into town. The biggest problem with going quad gpu is getting the data to the card fast enough... so you're really going to need a quad channel memory system, and a bus that can handle sending the entire max data rate of all 4 channels of QDR1000 memory to one single Hyper graphics port.
I think you only need to be able to push about 44GB/sec to really keep up with a well designed quad gpu setup... (hypertransport is throttiling at 22 GB/sec so we can keep that around until we're at least up to dual GPUs)
Video games require a platform which is currently either a console or MS Windows. The big advantage of switching to a console is that I will no longer have to run Windows. Console for the games, Linux for everything else.
because consoles aren't at all proprietary?
How about a keyboard and a mouse?
I'm sure consoles will have those soon, since they are adding usb to them.
and how about the ability to download and play any game you like without the need for a modchip
I agree that that is useful. Along the same lines is creating games. It is a lot easier to do that on a computer.
How about the ability for the rest of the family to watch tv whilst you play your video games?
Buy more tvs. Nowadays they are usually less expensive than computers.
The ACTUAL point to one of these cards is to get you used to the idea of paying through the nose for nothing. Wasn't that long ago you could get a top-notch video card for $100. Profit margins on those must not've been high enough, so then they started jacking the prices up.
NOW, when you look at that $300 underpowered video card, you think "At least I'm not paying $1000 for this!" whereas before, you would bitch-slap some deserving fool for suggesting a top of the line card should cost more than about $150.
GeForce 4 is still the most you are likely to need, and you can get them for under $100. Fuck these thieving profiteers!
Some of us have monitors that most consumer cards aren't capable of driving. That's why I'm considering the card purchase. $1k is pricey, but it's better than the $2k+ for a QuadroFX. On the other hand.. I might wait a little wait and hold on to the Quadro card I'm borrowing and hope this card comes down in price soon.
It's really hard to see the point of PC gaming anymore. What's it got that consoles dont?
A mouse?
"Inefficient" if you don't value graphical performance.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The industry will charge based on what the market will bear.
No one needs a PC running at 1Ghz just for word processing, e-mail, and web browsing. But, the dirty little secret that people are afraid to admit is this... It's the gamming industry that is pushing the home PC market in regards to technology!!! Don't be surprised to see a 3 grand video card in the future.
PC gaming is like Golf. Its membership ranges from the casual player to the richest of wealthy elites. Thus, expect the market to price equipment (hardware) accordingly.
Life is not for the lazy.
Is it time to buy some nvidia stock? I mean $999 for a card. I bet they make more money per card sold than dell makes per PC sold. I bet the sound card manufacturers are pissed!
You must be mad to buy this. You could get 2 256Mb GeForce 6800 ultra's and SLI them together for cheaper than the cost of a single 512MB card.
That would still give you 512Mb video memory in total (256*2) but in addition you get twice as much processing power, 4 DVI connectors, and maybe even save some money too.
..come with a big exhaust pipe, fluffy dice, pearlescent paint + spinners?
Brain(s): 0.0% user, 1.3% system, 0.1% nice, 98.6% idle
A GeForce 5200 is 60$ for a reason. That POS may support DX9 features in hardware, but the GeForce ti4400 will outperform it even when emulating those features via cool drivers. I want to get a GeForce 5900XT, because those guys should be roughly 150$ CDN right now. I'd love to buy a GeForce 4 Ti4800 or 4400, on the premise they'd be about 100$ CDN or 80$ CDN. The lowest priced card I can find that will perform better than a GeForce 5900XT or Ti4800 is a GeForce 6600GT. They are 300$ CDN for the AGP versions.
Everything lower than that, well, they don't perform as well. Yes, they have a checkbox that indicates they have the features, but when you benchmark them, you see that they don't push as many pixels, etc.
PC gaming, thanks to CPU pricing and performance ratios, is entirely about the video card. At this point, a GeForce 5900XT will do you for every game. You can run Doom 3 with decent quality settings on any PC, pretty much, that you can afford. For less that 1,000$ CDN, you can have an entire system that does this, plus more.
But you can't buy affordable cards that perform decently. The bare minimum you can buy is something like the 6600GT. There is nothing between 60$ and 300$ that will perform AT ALL.
(Yes, I'm discounting ATI; ATI does not have functioning drivers under Linux 64-bit, nor under the latest rev of the kernel 32-bit, nor do they work correctly on Windows! Don't make the mistake I did in buying a Radeon 8500 a few years back, get nVidia...)
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Oh the irony, the consoles ARE the greatest crap that ATI and nVidia are churning out.
PS3 Nvidia GPU
Xbox 360 ATI GPU
Nintendo Revolution ATI GPU
"a mouse?" Mario Paint, SNES. 'nuff said.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
BINGO! Number one reason I hate console gaming and will be sticking with PC gaming for the foreseeable future. FPS gaming on a PC with a mouse beats out anything on a console. No contest. Consoles are only good for "arcade-type" games... in other word, boring/crappy/eye-candy-only games.
Meh.
If you played Halo 2 on live lately, the first thing you'd notice are the people who are just too damn accurate with the sniper rifle.
Mice have been available for a long time, and plenty of people play with mouse/keyboard. Seeing as how all the nextgen consoles have USB2.0 ports, I think the industry is catching on...
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Everyone's touting 512 Megs of VRAM like it's something new.. Got a few words for ya...
Matrox Parhelia. Permedia/3DLabs Oxygen/Wildcat series.
Been out for years, so, yes, this DOES define a sucker, to the very core. And, from what I understand, those cards (at least in Doom 3's case, IIRC) were what was used to design the game in the first place.
The only reason for all this video memory is for texture storage. The more memory you have on the card, the better you can display higher resolution textures in the application, without a performance degradation. (You try running Doom 3 on a 64 Meg card at the highest texture quality, then you'll see what I mean.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
well i can make a computer pretty cheap, and I already have 4 of them (started before these console had support for LAN)
SO i have 4 multi purpose machines, ALL of the games for PC allow for some sort of LAN play, and they cost about the same as I would pay for 4 consoles TV (figuring a decent TV would be 250 + a 250 console) not to mention I can buy one game and make it work on all four computers on a LAN... can you do that with the consoles?
Then of course I can upgrade my computers for less than the cost of a new console and still have backwards compatibility and play the new games...
Is there enough memory on this graphics card to support Duke Nukem Forever?
There are many gaming areas in which the PC still wipes the floor with consoles. Currently, anything requiring a mouse is inaccessible on a console: RPGs (the D&D kind, not the interactive story-book kind) and real-time strategies come to mind. I also find playing any FPS on a console painful at best, and I know I'm not the only one (I couldn't really stand Halo until I played it on the PC).
In addition, other people here have noted that anything with user-created content won't work very well on consoles, at least as they currently are. Counter Strike, for example, lets you customize all sorts of aspects of the game. Another example is Neverwinter Nights: the included campaigns are all right, but where it really shines is in the custom content community.
I could see consoles overcoming the former limitation, but not the latter.
And incidentally, I can still play most new games on my 4 year old PC (Doom 3 being a possible exception---I haven't tried. I can play Half Life 2).
So you can tow the "consoles have replaced PC gaming" line, as many people here do, but the fact is, the PC still beats the pants off of the console in a few key markets. Your opinion on the subject merely reflects which sorts of games you're interested in (in fact, I have no real desire for any console, and wouldn't want to go without my PC for gaming).
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Why can't your wife play games on Yahoo while you're fragging away on your console?
Because playing first-person shooters with a console controller sucks?
You know, your links aren't very damning. Your link for "Hypocricy" is a slightly tart but highly factual and journalistically permittable article debunking O'Gara's heroic reporting of her own lawsuit to unseal some court records. I don't see how that makes PJ particularly hypocritical, noting the absence of O'Gara's home address and personal details of relatives in the article.
Your link relating to their "Censorship policy" seems to be entirely related to a debate with the owner of another SCO-related site over whether certain media items included would raise copyright issues. I know nothing here, and neither do you I suspect.
As for flouting Godwin's Law - two points here. Godwin's Law is not a law, you can't call the police to enforce it. And since Godwin's Law specifies that, IIRC, the longer an online debate goes on the higher the probability becomes that somebody will mention the nazis gets.... well.. the link you provided actually shows them OBEYING Godwin's Law, not flouting it. Of course, traditionally it is held that once somebody mentions the nazis they're to be quietly considered to have lost. But by the same rules you're not supposed to invoke Godwin's Law either, so you're fucked too.
Care to come back when you're less pompous?
So this means I just plug this card in to an old 486 and I can run Windows Longhorn right on my graphics card's GPU and RAM, right?
Seriously though, it would be neat if you could boot an operating system on a GPU and have it run without a main CPU installed on your motherboard.
-- Marcio
I have this card, and it's absolute shit. It's passable for most stuff, but any kind of smoke or particle effect reduces it to about 2fps. My Ti4200 with half the memory was better. The upside is that I waste less time playing games :-)
P.S. I've heard that the FX 5200 Ultra isn't nearly as bad.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
82% Rating? These guys are on the take.
Don't be ridiculous. It's not the card's fault that it costs what it does, which is probably why the site didn't tank the score. They understand that some games will require 512MB of video RAM (as Tim Sweeney said of UE3-based games, in an interview he did a year ago). It's still a fine card--just way overpriced, even by enthusiast standards. And the price is determined by the marketing/sales department, not the R&D guys.
PC Gamer reviews ridiculously expensive--but highly-rated--systems all the time, and no one accuses them of taking bribes.
But seriously, where did you get the idea that PCs were upgradeable anymore?
I don't know. It just seems to me that way. Sure, the case/mobo/cpu combo may need to be changed from time to time, but you can reuse everything else. Can you reuse anything from a console?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
There is already a device for Xbox that lets you use a mouse and keyboard, called the SmartJoy FRAG. With Sony and Microsoft both touting their connectivity features, I think that the mouse and keyboard combo will see official support in the next generation. Unless they're retarded.
;)
As for community content creation, there's no reason consoles can't support that, since hard drives will either be included or an optional feature with the next gen. The Xbox already has it's own mod scene, though. Guess your interest in consoles is so low you only check in on them once every few years.
The PC has two main things the console doesn't, a mouse and a board with over 100 buttons on it!
the biggest issue with performance is the memory bandwidth. For $999 (£555 in real money). I would reather have half the memory running much, much faster. Imagine a $499 (£277) card with $500 (£280) worth of peltier-heatpipe cooling.
the clock sppeds!
wont somebody please think of the clock speeds!
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Once you reach a certain point in just about any product category, you're usually paying two or three times as much money for a product only a few percent better. The performance difference between a $100,000 sports car and a $300,000 sports car isn't that great, certainly not 3x as much. When people have that much money to pay, they're almost always doing it to impress people. A $1,000 graphics card isn't for people who need more processing, it's for people who want to brag about having a $1,000 graphics card
Well lets see, if I were using floating point textures, that would be 4 bytes per channel, if I have 4 channels that's 16 bytes per pixel, so now the 512 MB becomes, 32 Mpixels, double buffer that and that's 16 Mpixels, maximum addressable size of a texture is 4096 in any dimension, so that would be 2 full size textures, or maybe we should say a reasonable sized fluid dynamics system, plus say some HDR textures, might want to do some multipass effects compositing the result into the double buffered frame buffer (including Z depth buffer) or what if I was doing stereo imageing or two monitors.
I don't think 512MB is much when you start trying to use the GPU as a processing engine. A large amount of time is lost transfering data back and forth from main memory in some situations, in those cases more RAM on card gives you a bigger cache to play with.
I paid a grand for a video card. Imagine 128 from... um... Number Nine. The 128 was the word size, not the memory size. Memory was 4MB.
While a remarkably stupid move on my part, at the time (probably 1994 or 1995), not a lot was hapenning with video cards, and this was still one of the best ones available 3 years later.
Course, I spent a grand on a scanner once, and close to that early adopting a CD-R drive. And $1200 on a dual PPro board (with only one chip at the time of purchace).
Most of my debt is interest on my computer purchaces from 8-10 years ago.
That said, it is even LESS justifiable today to spend a grand on any single part of a system. I spent $1000 on a scanner because the $500 one I got first gave me slight image doubling.
Cards like this are made for a few reasons. The first is that they're making the chips that will be in the consumer level systems in a year or two. This lets them build and test the product and drivers now instead of waiting until it's cheap.
The second, and most important, is that development houses need the hardware of the future. They don't care if it needs a small bar fridge attached to make it work - the consumer product will cost $200 in a year and will be what their customers will buy.
Then there's PR. It's why car companies sponsor Rally teams who use their cars. It says something that the fastest video card in the world is an nVidia, even if only for a week until ATI claims it, and so on.
I think you'll find that these cards are loss leaders - 512MB of the fastest ram, a smoking GPU, etc, likely cost much more than $1000. When the timing isn't as critical and any ram can be used - and likely comes on 1/4 as many chips, and when the GPU yields are better than the single-digits everything starts at, the card will start to sell, but as an already known product line that has stable (we hope) drivers and games written for them.
Or you could get a gamecube and play against/with your kids while being in the same room and interacting with them. If I had friends/relatives coming round I would be way more interested in party games (monkey ball, smash bros, etc.) than in them being in another room playing a first person shooter.
Thats a hell of a price tag, but it doesn't really compare all that to my 256mb Version ?
I guess the real question is, will it run DNF?
"Sweet llamas of the Bahamas !"
1 GB is not really much to ask for about VRAM. If you have textures of 4096x4096 or 16384x16384, then this kind of memory is needed. It is just that it seems excessive to us, because we are not used to it. A person that is born today will think that having 1 TB of RAM and 64 GB of VRAM in 10 years time will be normal, because that's what he/she will first see when start playing games.
Should it just ignore the VRAM, or make use of it?
I'm for the latter.
The cash that it's cushioned in.
How about the ability for the rest of the family to watch tv whilst you play your video games?
And how much is another tv and a console vs. the cost of a pc? Or just plug your console into a computer monitor and enjoy high def gaming. Ahh.
Or get games that are fun to watch, like Resident Evil 4.
And what, exactly, are the benefits of having texture sizes that are larger than your display resolution?
Look, as everyone keeps telling console lovers all the time, you should not by a PC if a console does everything you need. With a PC you pay for additional functionality, such as printing, support for hi-res displays, Internet browsing, support for custom peripherals, etc. If the next generation of consoles provides all that functionality, they will have no other choice but cost as much as a comparable PC. Sure, Sony buys the components for PS3 wholesale, but so does Dell.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
By hard drive of course I mean a card we punched holes in to run our programs...
Programs? We used to lay awake at night wishing we could use programs do stuff or us. All we had was an abacus...
You had an abacus? We had to memorize number and do the calculations on our fingers...
Fingers? Bah..we had all our fingers cut off and had to do the calculations in our head...and we all had mental disabilties..
But kids these days won't believe it when you tell them will they?
--You had to walk 2 miles uphill to the rock quarry and cut another one. Kids these days.-- ...Cause back in my day, we had to do the same thing, but there was 6 feet of snow, and we also had to walk 2 miles up hill on the way back without shoes because we were too poor to buy shoes, but we did wrap our feet in barbed wire for tracton in the snow.
Also on another note, we were hungry becuase we didn't have peanut butter -n- jelly sandwiches. We had to eat silly putty -n- jelly instead.
That just proves there were fools being parted from their money back then also.
The Party will be installing the visiscreens in your home so that the Party may monitor you better. You obviously won't have a problem with this. Doubleplusgood!
You must be one of those "early adaptors" the tech press always mention. SOMEONE has to be the first to buy something, even if it is v1.0. I'm just glad it isn't me!
Why would I want my console to provide functionality that my powermac does perfectly well now?
My consoles do gaming, my powermac does work. After getting an XBox and Gamecube, my pc gaming desktop simply wasn't getting gaming use except for Half-Life 2 so I sold the beast. I still have ScummVM for playing my Lucasarts games on normal desktop hardware and I have a couple of decent games for the mac. But the consoles have essentially taken over my gaming experience. PCs still rule at FPS games and hardcore RPGs. Consoles rule at racing, platformers, action, fighting, etc. etc. You just don't get awesome games like Ninja Gaiden on the PC, and in awesome surround sound. There are a ton of great games out there that are console only, and consoles are cheap. Try one out.
Yes I know that PC games can do 6.1 surround, but I have a hard time justifying connecting my PC to a room-sized sound system (5.1 gaming speaker sets are crap). Connecting my tv, dvd player, media computer, and consoles to a full system makes more sense.
Increased detail when you are really close.
"Nvidia SLI mode does a top vs bottom half method" Actualy, no it doesn't. You're thinking of something alienware tried.
" Or you could get a gamecube and play against/with your kids while being in the same room and interacting with them."
Well the computers ARE all in the same room, and we do interact, we also have a home theater setup where people can sit around on our couch (one of those big sectionals that wrap around the room) and watch movies and such...
I mean we also have a console (PS2) but there are only so many games that have 4 player multiplay (basically the crash team racing line of games) and the 4-way ports you need ot use for the controllers are a real pain!!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Unfortunately, no Mac can use this card because they don't have PCIe yet.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There's no reason they can't support community content in the future, but it's not there now. It's already there on the PC, and consoles are currently no substitute.
Point me to a game coming out for one of these consoles that has the potential for as much custom content as, say, Neverwinter Nights, and I'll admit that I'm wrong. I haven't seen any mentioned so far, though.
Also, make sure that you can do all the content development on the console, too, because people aren't going to do it on their low end PCs that are just qualified enough to do web browsing and word processing. If you need a high-end PC for editing the custom content (and that may include people playing it, as they may have to open up modules in the editor to add extensions that the author didn't think of), then you can play it on your PC, and there's little point in spending extra money to buy the console as well.
Are there any console games planned that are doing this? Or are you just saying that it's theoretically possible?
I've come for the woman, and your head.
So you basically prove exactly what I said. Pamela Jones is a poor argumenter, censors dissenting opinion (shows the strength of her intellectually weak arguments) and resorts to petty nazi references.
Most of what you say doesn't make sense. It sounds like you are just twisting an already thin argument in order to support someone.
Comparing the two douchebags - MoG and PJ, I'd have to say MoG is the one who comes out the cleanest between the two.
Exactly. I expressed the same lament in an earlier post.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
You can actually use those four monitors you already have for the consoles. You will even end up with a better quality image on the computer monitors than on a non HD set.
As for one copy of the game on all four computers, that's against the EULA of many games. If you don't care about breaking licenses, you can make a few "backup copies" of ps2 or xbox games to run one purchased license of the game on all four consoles. If you check the local classifieds/craigs listings, you could probably find non-slim pre-modded ps2s for a good deal, and it's possible to connect a mouse and keyboard to the consoles with an adapter.
"and it's possible to connect a mouse and keyboard to the consoles with an adapter."
But will any of the games support the keyboard and mouse setup (like FPS titles?)