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The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 Series
An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has posted their evaluation of the new GeForce 7900 technology. They fully cover widescreen gaming this time around too. 'NVIDIA has worked hard to try and produce a more powerful, albeit power-efficient GPU in the 7900 GTX and GT, and they've succeeded. They run cooler; are smaller, have less transistors, and they don't make you stuff cotton in your ears. The 7900 GTX and GT are just more efficient while being lightning fast.'"
And yet another graphics card is released. Is it worth my money to upgrade my dual 6800 XTs? Let's find out by reading the review.
Unfortunately, I can't. I'm better off going to NVidia and trusting their product sheets. Why? Because I'm not looking to play Need for Speed Most Wanted or Quake Four or Half Life Two, I'm looking to do some actual graphics processing with an SLI setup. Yes, brace yourselves, I don't actually use these beasts for gaming.
If you read the reviews, it may look like these cards have no purpose other than to play the higher end games.
It is my responsibility to make a kind of "Google Earth on Steroids" for my employer. And this requires that five (yes, five) terabytes of mapping data be available for a multi-monitor (and by "multi" I mean many) display. What's my current choke point? Simply data bandwidth into the card.
Where does this review leave me? I now know intimately how high I can get my frame rate up in a first person shooter. Huzzah!
I know there are product sheets that tell me what kind of bandwidth I have but I'm more interested in what a non-interested third party has to say about it. Where are the real benchmarking tests? What about a simple program that loads up the card with as much data as possible as quickly as possible? I'm not even sure if the choking point is on the card or at the interface level with the motherboard (PCIe 16x).
Why can I not find objective reviews that aim to look at cold hard numbers?
My work here is dung.
While I agree with the other respondant - that simplicity is inversely correlated with featureset - I was turned off by the Xbox 360 demo I saw at the store. It went something like this:
Click the game I wanted to see...
Wait...
Get the developer logos...
Wait...
Get the instructions...
Wait...
Select character...
Wait...
Watc^H^H^H^H Skip intro movie...
Wait...
After 45 seconds of waiting for the game to load, I forgot why I was even playing.
I mean, UT2004 didn't take that long to get me into a game on a 600MHz laptop.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.