New 3D Graphics Card Features in 2006

Ant writes "This Tom's Hardware article says that in the latest generation of graphics cards, PixelShader has become mainstream. Version 3 features 3D effects like HDR rendering for bright light sources, and parallax mapping for even more vivid features in walls and stones. The brand-new ATI Radeon X1000 series and the NVIDIA GeForce 6 and 7 master these improved graphics features. It looks at today's newest computer games (e.g., F.E.A.R.) and compare the 3D effects."

Comments

Here is a feature I'd like to see....

[Anonymous Coward]

...cheaper graphic cards...

price

[ShaneThePain]

its unfortunate that top of the line cards are getting more expensive. I have an X850XT Platinum Edition myself and its great. but it cost me 470 dollars. These new cards are over 600 dollars. I would hope that top of the line cards would get LESS expensive. Also, my card has been chugging on lowest settings for BF2: special forces, but i can run regular Battlefield 2 max settings smooth as glass. whats up with that?

Re:price

[kfg]

The real question is: why not spend a couple hundred dollars every 1-4 years on a new card instead of spend a metric assload every time?

Shhhhhhhhhhh! I frickin' love early adopters.

KFG

Re:Meh

[mabinogi]

no. actually it doesn't.

There's no formula that says "gameplay = 1 - graphics"
It is entirely possible to have a game that looks good and plays well.
It's also very possible to have a game that looks bad and plays bad. And plenty of old games were bad. The classics are classics because they were good, not just because they're old and don't have the same graphical quality as modern games.

Quite a lot of classics actually did have excellent graphics for their time, and it was one of the things that contributed to their classic status in the first place.

2006?

[pookemon]

Ah these "features" are already available and present in the current generation of cards. They've been around since at least 2004 - and viable on hardware from then (ie. 6800's etc.).

The first example I saw of Parallax mapping was actually something done in DOOM 3 (I can't find the post on the OpenGL forum). So why are these "new features" considered "New". Looks like an advert for current gen Hardware to me...

The feature I want

[rsilvergun]

is a decent card for under $100. I shouldn't need a $150-$200 card to play 8 month old games.

nothing to see here, move along.

[Truekaiser]

this is not a preview for any new technology that will be apearing in graphics cards that are coming out this year. it's just a long winded reveiw of what apeared last year.

Games? What about the basic OS?

[Skippy_kangaroo]

It's not only games that demand these new uber-graphics-cards. Consider what is happening with operating systems. In a couple of years I'm sure the OS will require today's uber-cards.

Core Image in OS X offloads a lot of the GUI stuff to the graphics processor. To get all the eye candy (sorry, usability improvements) you can't have a particularly old card. Vista is doing the same thing.

Now we are really putting the G into GUI.

Cost for production is cost for production

[bradleyland]

When you look at the hardware that's on a graphics card, the cost makes more sense. You've got a GPU with 304M transistors (G70 [7800] core), then you've got up to 512 MB of very, very fast memory (bus speeds in excess of 1000 MHz). That's heavy duty. By contrast, a San Diego core Athlon64 has 114 million transistors, but costs $245 or so. Throw in 512 MB of RAM that will run at a 1200 MHz clock speed, and you will approach the cost of a graphics card, but the GPU's aren't manufactured on the same 90nm process as the A64, so the production costs must be much higher.

Of course, this doesn't factor in R&D costs, but there's a lot more growth going on in graphics processing than there is in x86.

I'm not in any kind of position to make judgments (because I'm not an expert on either industry), but it seems to a laymen that the $400 price tag might just be justifiable for a 7800GTX.

Yes, but maybe not for long.

[ardor]

Right now, OpenGL is on-par with Direct3D 9, now that the framebuffer object extension is out. Direct3D 10 is a wholly different issue, however. It has support for geometry shaders, constant buffers, superbuffers... OpenGL needs to catch up with new extensions or else it will fall behind, again. And this time, it may not survive.