Fastest Graphics Ever, Asus ARES Rips Benchmarks

MojoKid writes "Over-the-top, killer graphics cards are always fun to play with, though they may not be all that practical. With a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs on a single PCB and 4GB of GDDR5 graphics memory on board, the recently released Asus ARES is one such card that can currently claim the title of being the fastest single gaming graphics card on the planet. This dual-GPU-infused beast rips through benchmarks, besting even the likes of a Radeon HD 5970 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480. You can even run a pair of them in CrossFire mode, if you're hell-bent on the fastest frame rates money can buy currently."

Comments

OpenCL?

[im_thatoneguy]

Yeah but what about OpenCL performance?

Some of Anandtech's Fermi benchmarks put it 4x+ behind in GPGPU tests.

Re:OpenCL?

[BikeHelmet]

Folding seems to indicate the same. nVidia's recent changes to their architecture boosted power consumption, but made double-precision floating point ops about 4x faster. Good for GPGPU, but not so good for games. (which don't really use double-precision floating point)

Re:OpenCL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that AMD doesn't even bundle an OpenCL runtime with their drivers yet, I think it goes without saying that AMD is still behind the curve on OpenCL.

However performance often comes down to how an application was coded: applications can often be much more efficient for AMD's GPUs if you write them to pack instructions in a manner that better fits their VLIW architecture. As a result NVIDIA does better on average, while AMD can rip apart embarrassingly parallel tasks such as key crunching. Unfortunately for AMD, VLIW is much more dependent on the compiler and programmer than NV's scalar architecture is.

In any case, much of this is moot with the Ares. In spite of the fact that GPUs are super stream/parallel processors, most consumerish GPGPU applications can't scale to multiple GPUs as they require high-speed (on-chip) communication to work.

Re:OpenCL?

[makomk]

I seem to recall that the double-precision performance of NVidia's latest graphics cards would've been truly impressive... if they hadn't intentionally crippled it on all of the gaming cards in order to force people to buy compute cards costing several times the price. Works out that double precision runs at 1/8th of the speed of single precision - the same ratio as the previous generation - as opposed to 1/5th on ATI Radeon hardware and 1/2 on NVidia's really expensive professional cards.

Re:OpenCL?

[Moryath]

Isn't the real problem the fact that the performance of this card is meaningless? There's a refresh limitation on monitors. Since the PC gaming market's been basically dead for 5 years, what is really going to tax its performance - you don't really think anyone except for masochists are actually willing to subject themselves to Crysis's "gameplay", for instance, rather than just running the glorified tech demo as a benchmark over and over again.

And if you're looking for maxed frames on World of Warcraft, or any other MMO, chances are you can achieve it with cards from 4 years ago still.

Re:OpenCL?

[Mashiki]

My first question is what is openCL(blahblahblah googlit), my second question is why is it important on a card where I'm going to be using it for gaming in a super-dominated DX market as it is? Because as it stands, I don't see it.

Re:OpenCL?

[maxwell demon]

If you're doing GPGPU, you don't care about the monitor refresh rate. You might not even have a monitor attached.
Also for gaming, while higher frame rates are clearly useless above some point, a faster GPU also means you can do more per frame without your frame rate going unacceptably low. I could even imagine games offloading some non-graphics work from the CPU to the GPU if the graphics doesn't completely max it out at the desired frame rate.

Re:OpenCL?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a refresh limitation on monitors.

Yeah. Mine is 150hz, and it's really hard to hit that in a modern game on any card, and probably will continue to be.
Not everyone uses lcds, and even those that do.. 120hz lcds are still around the corner thanks to 3d tech pushing the need.
And even at a 60hz lcd, the resolution keeps going up. We're already above 1080p being easily available.

Since the PC gaming market's been basically dead for 5 year

No? Bad Company 2 came out last year and is demanding as hell on resources. MoH is in beta and I'm hearing its even more demanding.
Natural Selection 2's alpha runs at about 5 fps on my computer, admittedly it hasnt been optimized, but it will definitely push GPU hardware especially if they dont back down on their all dynamic lights policy.
Thats just off the top of my head. There are plenty more coming out I'm sure.

And if you're looking for maxed frames on World of Warcraft, or any other MMO, chances are you can achieve it with cards from 4 years ago still.

As someone whos been playing WoW:Cataclysm since alpha I have to say you might want to rethink that. They added DirectX11 water support and the spell detail is only getting more complex. Running WoW at solid framerates is downright hard. Admittedly I'd rather have a new cpu than a new gpu for wow, since so much of its lag is in event processing rather than rendering, but it's still not an easy to max out game.

And if you think the solution to any of this is "lower your settings", you don't understand PC gaming or the need for this card. PC gaming is about evolution and progession. If you bought this card, you can suddenly run all those games and engines that before you had to turn your settings down for, but now you can max up post-processing options like AF/AA and make it even better.

Re:OpenCL?

[masshuu]

You know the fancy physics, like a plywood board exploding into 400 pieces and sending each pieces of shrapnel in every direction, or maybe a house that breaks into a million peaces when it collapses? Good luck running those calculations on your CPU, WHILE keeping your frame rate up
openCL lets you offload work to the GPU.
Given physics is all i can think of, its like nVidia's CUDA. CUDA is limited to nvidia cards, but openCL is designed to let you write one piece of code, and run it on the CPU, or any supported GPUs

Re:OpenCL?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

120 Hz is good for 3D with shutter glasses; each eye gets 60 fps.

Want that, and in the 3-wide monitor configuration. Don't care about lameass flat pseudo-3D anymore. :)

Re:OpenCL?

[PopeRatzo]

Since the PC gaming market's been basically dead for 5 years

Valve has been counting an awful lot of money for a "dead" market.

How long has it been since there's been a model upgrade on any of the serious game consoles? Notice how long it takes for Uncharted 2 scenes to load on the PS3? You'll watch that little dagger go 'round and 'round long enough to make a sandwich before you can play. The XBox360 and PS3 are long in the tooth and the Wii is for children. Most of the biggest games of 2010 came out for PC as well as consoles and performed a whole lot better on the PC. Now which gaming platform is "basically dead"?

Re:OpenCL?

[dave420]

This happens already. PhysX can be offloaded from the CPU to the GPU if desired.

Re:OpenCL?

[shutdown -p now]

Since the PC gaming market's been basically dead for 5 years

It was? Interesting how the number of games in my Steam account has more than tripled in that time period...

Re:OpenCL?

[Mashiki]

PhysX does the same thing and operates on both nvidia and ati cards. I'm still not seeing a distinct point here.

Re:OpenCL?

[starfire83]

Actually, PhysX only runs on NVidia cards natively as it's their runtime now (purchased from Aegia a couple years ago). ATI cards don't process PhysX at all, it's all off-loaded to the CPU. You would need a dedicated PhysX card to get accelerated PhysX while using an ATI GPU. That can be accomplished with something as simple as an 8800GT or equally cheap Nvidia card that can process PhysX (but won't be used for graphics) in a second PCI-e slot or getting an actual PhysX card.

GPGPU?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Lots of frames is neat, but how fast can it run my BOINC client?

Re:GPGPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, even the blurb says it's two 5870s, so I guess as fast as two 5870s?

It's a new card, not a new architecture. There's not going to be a significant difference in performance from other cards built on the same GPUs modulo clocks.

But you knew that.

5890 Ultra

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's actually a ATI Radeon 5890 Ultra. You will be cheaper off buying two discrete 5870 cards and running them in Crossfire. Thermals will be better and thus you will be able to overclock them further.

Re:5890 Ultra

[AHuxley]

Thats like 5770 cards, doing it cheap with batmobile plastic coolers, buy the bigger real $$$ card now. Feel that 6 month tech bump as you look for any shipping game to enjoy :)

Re:5890 Ultra

[Vigile]

This article also compares the ARES to a pair of HD 5870s and you are mostly correct:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=953

Keep in mind that with 2GB cards you are actually only saving about $200 by NOT using the ARES.

Re:5890 Ultra

[sortius_nod]

No idea what you just said dude.

Re:5890 Ultra

[AHuxley]

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4049/4512283334_1ff93a52f9_o.jpg
Just the idea of buying the best card today or linking to cards like the 5770 together then hunting for games to play.

Re:5890 Ultra

[PitaBred]

And you won't be able to run 4 5870's as easily as two of these.

Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Asus ARES commands a hefty $1200 MSRP.

What the fuck

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

it comes with an aluminium briefcase, has a box 3x the size of a typical asus graphics card and weighs 5 pounds. Therefore 1200 bucks. I'd rather buy half a pound of bc bud/

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[dnaumov]

The Asus ARES commands a hefty $1200 MSRP.

What the fuck

I am not really sure what your price expectations are for the fastest videocard ever made, of which the manufacturer makes only 1000 to be sold?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[roman_mir]

Don't worry, nobody is forcing you to buy one, besides only a thousand will be sold in the US anyway, I am sure this Ferrari of a video card will find it's buyer.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

I only spend ~$100 on average on my videocards.

I got a GTS 250 for $100 close to a half-year ago. A friend of mine just got a Radeon 4870 for $100!

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[dnaumov]

I only spend ~$100 on average on my videocards.

I got a GTS 250 for $100 close to a half-year ago. A friend of mine just got a Radeon 4870 for $100!

Great. Now what does this have to do with anything?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[V!NCENT]

That there are always people that are too stupid to buy such a thing when you can get a great GPU for 100 dollars? In other words parent explains why this card is totally useless...

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[dnaumov]

That there are always people that are too stupid to buy such a thing when you can get a great GPU for 100 dollars?

In other words parent explains why this card is totally useless...

So you are saying that the current 200, 300, 500 and 1000 $ cards offer no value over 100$ ones? That's true I guess, if you are playing games a decade old and/or have a small monitor.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

What price range were you expecting for 'fastest video card'?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[V!NCENT]

Crysis Warhead at 1680*1050 at max setting 'enthusiast' or something gives 30+ fps on Windows XP SP2 with my AMD Phenom 9950 X4, 8GB RAM, HD5770...

So you were saying?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[dnaumov]

Crysis Warhead at 1680*1050 at max setting 'enthusiast' or something gives 30+ fps on Windows XP SP2 with my AMD Phenom 9950 X4, 8GB RAM, HD5770...

So you were saying?

I am saying that:
1) 30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate
2) 5770 is a 150-200$ videocard.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[mangu]

30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate

It is perfectly playable, for anyone with human eyes

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Vectormatic]

not to mention that lots of people these days play on 1920*1080 or above screen (the ones spending 500 bucks on a vga card anyway)

and with eyefinity out on the loose, some people play these games spanning three monitors

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[dnaumov]

30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate

It is perfectly playable, for anyone with human eyes

I can't believe anyone still tries to bring up the old "human eye doesn't see beyond 30fps so anything higher is useless" mantra. It has been debunked a hundred times.

http://www.boallen.com/fps-compare.html
http://kimpix.net/download/60vs24.avi

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[mangu]

I can't believe anyone still tries to bring up the old "human eye doesn't see beyond 30fps so anything higher is useless" mantra. It has been debunked a hundred times.

I can't believe anyone has seen a spoked wheel in a movie and never wondered why it rotates backwards.

This "debunking" shown in your first link is not showing the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. Considering the fourfold symmetry of the rotating square, what it's actually demonstrating is that 7.5 fps looks choppier than 15 fps.

There will always exist some particular geometries that will appear choppy at any frame rate. The right way to make it smooth is not by increasing the frame rate, but by motion blur.

As for your second link, it proves exactly the opposite of what it meant to: there's no practical difference between 24 fps and 60 fps. They are using the same arguments audiophiles use to justify paying $500 for a network cable: I have eyes/ears that are so much more accurate than yours that I wouldn't be satisfied with that cheap gear you use.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[asdf7890]

1) 30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate

FPS is one of those subjective issues where there seems to be a lot more "I don't like X so you are daft for suggesting someone might" then hard facts.

For lot of people 30fps is perfectly fine if it is a minimum rate rather than an average. A lot of people talk at cross purposes on this one, the "30 is fine" crowd assuming that the people looking for 100fps+ when there monitor probably refreshes at 60Hz are daft and want 100+fps everywhere and the "30 is no were near enough" crowd thinking that the 30fpss would be happy with 30 on average. For games that require decent graphics hardware the demand on that hardware can vary a lot, so a card that gets 30pfs in some areas will drop below 15fps in others, likewise that card that pushes 100Hz in the lighter scenes may drop below 50 on the really heavy ones.

So any quote of an fps requirement or recommendation is completely useless unless you qualify the figure in more detail.

Another factor that needs to be considered is screen size. An object moving from one side of the screen to the other at the same framerate is going to look smoother on an smaller monitor than it'll look on a full-wall projector (unless of course you are far away from said wall, to the point where it is effectively the same size as the small monitor in terms of how it appear on the back of your eye). How far objects on the display travel between frames is what needs to be measured, not just how many frames there are in a given time. This brings up another point as to why this sort of thing is subjective and difficult to sound reasonable discussing (without so much supporting detail that you bore people to death) - it very much depends on what games you play and how you play them.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[sa1lnr]

Think yourselves lucky it's equivalent to $1800 here in the UK.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-230-AS

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[dnaumov]

You're grasping at straws. Try talking to any people who do serious video recording (like actual movies). Try telling them with a straight face that it doesn't matter what FPS they record quick-moving action sequences (where camera is being panned around a lot) with as long as it's above 24 fps and see what kind of reaction you get :)

As for the second video link, if you honest-to-god cannot tell a serious difference between the 2 sequences of Unreal Tournament shown, well... you should be glad I guess, because it means YOU can get away with using a lot cheaper hardware. Me? It pains me to even look at the 24fps video, playing at such a framerate is much worse because it also screws up the precision of player movement.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[V!NCENT]

Movies do just fine with motion blur and so does Crysis.

But if you are a pro online FPS gamer who gets loads of cash then the extra frame that half renders without vsync can make that tiny important difference between who shoots first in a crytical encounter.

But when you are not a pro FPS gamer playing for money on a LAN then higher than 30min - 60max FPS is totally bullshit.

Besides, all hardcore gamers play in a little less high res and everything but lightning, reflection and model detail is as much downscaled as possible. And then there are hardcore gamers who believe gameplay is so much more important than HD graphics.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[V!NCENT]

For video editing that is crucial so that you can get overlapping frames inside of that 24fps timeframe.

Games however do not work like this. They crank out as much frames per seconds and your HW can handle and then without vsync it is all hit and miss. Ask your movie expert and he'll tell you why that is.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[V!NCENT]

OK even if you'd buy two 200 USD graphics cards every two years than you'll always be able to play the latest games and tech compared to one 1200 USD card every six years. 200*2 = 400 ... 400*3 years = 1200 USD.

Not to mention that you stay up to date with the latest OpenGL (currently version 4 if you missed it) and GLSL and DirectX

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also I can "see" when an old CRT is at 60Hz, it's blinking and I get a headache. This wouldn't be possible if we could only see at 30 FPS.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[smash]

Exactly. This thing is going to be desperately looking for a market. Fact is that PC games can be played on quite average hardware these days because they are either ported from, or intended to be ported to consoles.

Couple that with the fact that by the time games can really take advantage of that horsepower in about 12-18 months time, you'll be able to get the same throughput on a $400 card that takes up less space, runs cooler and uses less power.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[smash]

I doubt they'll sell all 1000 of them in the current economic climate, either. Unless there are some REALLY fuckin' stupid people over there in the states with lots of money, but big $ and small brain seems to be mutually exclusive elsewhere in the world.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[smash]

Back in the day we played games at sub-20 fps and we liked it.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[sznupi]

I don't get why people are saying that; among the most popular PC games you'll find WoW, soon Starcraft 2 (and, unfortunately not soon, Diablo 3 - but how late it will be only strengthens what I'm trying to show), numerous games based on Source, Galciv2, Sins of Solar Empire, soon Elemental (really can't wait for this one); also such nice gems as World of Goo, Aquaria, et al. Many of those supposedly showing "what PC gaming is all about", most of those not touching consoles in any way, also most with quite "modest" GFX (but, via nice artistic touches, often looking phenomenally). And now you're saying it has something to do with consoles?

No, publishers simply got their senses some time ago and don't want to limit their group of customers just for pointless bling (helps that laptops are a majority of PCs sold)

And there's also Solitaire, Farmville or Peggle...

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[sznupi]

"Big $ and small brain" aren't a prerequisite for wasteful spending. In fact, if you look around, you'll notice that many of those who really should be more frugal (considering their real level of "$"), are actually often first in line for pointless shopping.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[raynet]

But 15fps is still very playable, especially if it is constant 15fps. What makes games unplayable (or atleast annoying) is having 30fps, then 15fps, then 60fps and then 1fps. I usually can enjoy games as long as they get to the 15-20fps range, anything slower than that and aiming becomes difficult.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[roman_mir]

I think you are actually wrong on this, it is the government policy to get 'consumers' (used to be called citizens) to consume, that's the entire premise of Keynesian economics. In fact look how stupid the entire country is: waiting for the spending numbers rather than production numbers to decide whether the economy is going up or down. All of the state policies are aimed at getting you into the shopping malls, the economy is debt based, it's all about borrowing and printing and staying in debt without any idea of how to repay it and in fact without the expectation of repayment.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[asdf7890]

15fps is often fine if it is constant, though I would usually demand more (and be willing to drop things like texture quality, AA, and so on to compensate) from a fast-paced game.

A drop from ~30 to ~15 in a busy scene, if you are watching intently, can be a bit jarring though (I assume the change in timing is enough to kick off a "something is different, best be alert" reflex in the brain's optical processing). Much more so then the same relative change in a drop from ~60 to ~30 (which I'm not 100% sure I'd particularly notice if I'm honest - though I'm not a big gamer with good eye-sight!).

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, sorry, it is easy to perceive the difference in smoothness between 30fps and 60fps, whether or not there is any motion blur.

Go to any modern TV and enable/disable the "video smoothness" function while watching a movie, and you'll see it for yourself.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[drinkypoo]

It's trivial to tell the difference between 24fps and 30fps because a quick sideways pan on TV (even interlaced) is just some stuff moving but a quick sideways pan in the theater, even from the back row, makes me wanna puke. And frankly, you can trivially tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps in a big pan on a large HDTV.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Divide By Zero]

Unless there are some REALLY fuckin' stupid people over there in the states with lots of money

Sir or madam, speaking as an American, I can ASSURE you that there are more than a thousand people here who fit your description. If you desire evidence, I would like to remind you of the kind of candidate Big Money likes to elect in this country, and the judgment (or lack thereof) that illustrates. I don't think they'll have any problem selling out of this particular piece of hardware. It just won't be to working stiffs.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Dogtanian]

The Asus ARES commands a hefty $1200 MSRP.

What the fuck

And the name is still (barely) an anagram of "arse". :-)

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Jenming]

Here is a simple test. Try adjusting the refresh rate on your monitor. Start above 75 and go lower. At some point you will start to see it flicker. Note that the point you start to see it flicker is well above 30.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Straterra]

The fastest video card ever made? Is this the last video card ever made or something? I think maybe you meant the fastest video card to date.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[KibibyteBrain]

I don't know, while for almost anyone reading this thread such a mentality is true, if I were a millionaire gamer I guess it would be stupid NOT to get one of these. Mind you some people in this world pay more than $1200 for clothing, or even dinner.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Yvanhoe]

I have been working enough with video acquisition hardware to be able to telle the difference between 30 Hz and 60 Hz. It isn't that easy to tell but it is possible. Some colleagues had more difficulties though. It is easy to debunk with a double-blind experience though : buy a PS3 eye webcam. It can do real 60 fps and 30 fps. Make a software start a video at random in one mode or the other, and see if people claiming to see a difference can spot it.

People may have a hard time seeing something occuring in less than 1/30th of second, but an animation that goes at 30 or 60 Hz, especially a fast moving object (wave your arm in front of the camera) results in a different kind of motion blur in the eye. One looks more discontinued than the other.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your eyes don't see at a specific frequency as if you have a rotating shutter installed in each eye that discretely breaks up information for your brain. In fact the conditions in which flicker will occur are strongly dependent on the brightness in the room and the brightness of the display along with the frame rate. If you watch a visually dark movie on an old CRT in a dark room, it is very unlikely you will see flicker. This is because the flicker on your CRT is your ability to see darkening of the phosphors between frames. If you have problems with old CRTs, try turning down the brightness or darkening the room.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[V!NCENT]

"But but but but but..."

That's motion blur. Maybe the TV creates extra frames but that's still motion blur in your head. No matter what way you look at it. Your brain just puts all these frames into one frame. That's how motion blur works in the first place.

And the reason games do not work like that is because that makes your view lag 1-2 frames behind, so all you're seeing is smoother frames, but not more than about 24 frames per second.

Now you can get a monitor that has the perfect response time that is able to view all these extra frames in 1/30 of a second but blurring, then that would be cool, OR it creates frames so fast that it reaches 100FPS in which case only your subconscious gets to see it but you will not process it.

Too bad so just get over it.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[kno3]

I don't infer from "fastest card ever made" that it will be the last card made.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[chocapix]

And then there are hardcore gamers who believe gameplay is so much more important than HD graphics.

Wait, there's another kind? (Of hardcore gamer I mean.)

To me, graphics are good when they make it straightforward to understand what's going on in the game. Graphics can be pretty or not, highly detailed or not, I don't care. I want clarity. And if the game is real-time (eg RTS or FPS), I also want smoothness and low latency.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Straterra]

The word 'ever' implies past, present and future. Unless video cards cease to be made, this will not be the fastest video card ever made.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be surprised if they aren't all sold the first day.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Luckyo]

The problem with "playable vs non playable" FPS is personal, because the part of the eye that can see the difference is personal and changes with the person.

Essentially our focus cannot see the difference. It's physically impossible for pretty much any person to see over 30 pictures per second in eye's focus due to the way focus handles image capture and transfer to the brain.
However peripheral vision is far greater in this aspect due to its original design purpose - to spot movement. The image seen by peripheral vision typically lacks color and detail due to far lower optical cell density, but is taken at a much greater frequency. As a result a person with really developed peripheral vision can see the difference between 30 and 60 easily, and ofter found even largely accepted as "not flickering" 85hz frequency on old CRT monitors to clearly flicker (I had to run monitors on 95hz+ or my head started to hurt after a couple of hours because of this, and 75hz was not just visibly flickery but give me serious headache within 30 min).

You can test this out yourself very easily. Look at the monitor. The look at the side of the monitor so that monitor image is just barely in your field of vision. You will notice that CRTs start to flicker noticeably where you saw none before, and you'll likely see that 30fps is pretty choppy.
And the more developed your peripheral vision is, the more your eyes rely on it even when monitoring stuff that is near focus. And the more choppiness you see at low FPS. But this is a VERY personal trait, unique to each person. So one person can watch low fps and won't notice much flicker even at 60hz CRT. Another will get headaches at 85hz and can spot the difference easily even at high FPS.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[hairyfeet]

I hate to burst your bubble buddy, but as a PC builder and repairman I've met a few gamers which will probably buy this thing. All they care about is having the biggest ePeen at ALL costs, one even gave me the cash up front to score him a Skulltrail when THAT was the biggest ePeen board, and had me wire his whole system up to a massive watercooler. Crazy bastard was even paying for the fastest cable PLUS the fastest DSL, and had me set him up dual KillerNICs so he could switch between the two so he would always have the fastest ping. Some folks blow money on cars, he blew it on his ePeen.

That said as much as I hate consoles (or as I call them DRM...in a box) I have to give them credit for lowering the cost of PC gaming in a major way. It used to be back in the days of Quake 1-3 I'd be buying a new card yearly and a new PC every other just to keep decent framerate, but thanks to console R&D becoming crazy expensive and MSFT and Sony stretching out the time the current model stays on market it really has made things cheaper for those of us that don't care about ePeens and just want to play. Now I'm playing on an AMD quad (925, 8Gb of DDR2 800, dual 500Gb for less than $650) with an HD4650 that cost me a whole $36 after MIR and it plays the games I want like Bioshock 2 just fine on this 1600x900 monitor. Thanks to the consoles slowing down the need to constantly upgrade I just built a new gaming rig for my guitarist, and the whole dual core rig set him back just $400 after MIR at Tigerdirect.

So if guys want to go nuts with ePeens that is fine and dandy with me, for those of us with GFs or kids or other expenses that just want to enjoy blowing some shit up after a day of work the current situation makes me VERY happy. And the extras you can do with these newer GPUs, like hardware transcoding even on my 4xxx, is really a nice bonus. and unlike my old Nvidia rig it doesn't sound like a jet engine or heat up my place in the summer. Win/win as far as this old greybeard is concerned.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[ultranova]

That depends on the speed of movement in the image. The more things move between two frames, the harder it will be for your eyes to connect the two images together. This is made even worse when the whole image moves, since you aren't getting corrective feedback from your inner ear.

What I'm saying is that 30 fps seems smooth, but 60 fps makes it easier to keep track of what's happening.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is really easy to see the difference between 30fps and 60fps if you know what to look for. The reason you (yes, you too) can easily tell the frame rates apart is that you can choose to track moving objects or let them move across your field of view. If you track them, they should not be blurred, as they don't move relative to your retina. If you do not track them, then they should be blurred. Current display technology usually fails both ways: The most common display types are hold-type displays, i.e. they display the picture for most of the duration of a frame, instead of just flashing it quickly like CRTs did. If you track a moving object across such a display, it becomes blurred even though it should be sharp. This effect is reduced if the frame rate is increased. If on the other hand you look at a fixed point on the screen and an object moves across the screen, you can distinctly see the places where it is displayed. Again, this effect is reduced when the frame rate goes up. The latter can be worked around with software motion blur, but that worsens the other type of failure, that you can't track a moving object and see it sharply. The only way to improve both failure modes is a higher frame rate.

The human eye does not have a frame rate limit set in stone. It all depends on the contrasts. For example, you can easily see 60Hz flicker, at least in your peripheral field of view. That's something which 30fps video can't show at all (maximum 15Hz).

The argument against audiophile claims isn't that some commercial standard's limits are deemed good enough for everybody because those who want more are perceived as snobs. Audiophiles make the same mistake as you: They don't understand the way their senses (in their case the auditory sense) work and base their claims on flawed assumptions. In the end, you have to do proper scientific tests to see what can and what can not be distinguished: Audiophiles regularly fail these tests, but one of the reasons why CRTs were used with more than 60Hz is that the human eye has no trouble at all seeing 60Hz flicker.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[vbraga]

Lord, thank you for the $500 network cable Google search. My life changed after reading Amazon comments:

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/product-reviews/B000I1X6PM

I knew my day was going to improve when the truck pulled up at my home with this cable deep within. No ordinary truck, this one was Holy White, and the gold Delivery logo sparkled like a thousand suns reflected through shards of the purest ice formed with unadulterated water collected at the beginning of the universe. The driver, clad in a robe colored the softest of white, floated towards me on the cool fog of a hundred fire extinguishers. He smiled benevolently, like a father looking down upon his only child, and handed me a package wrapped in gold beaten thin to the point where you could see through it. I didn't have to sign, because the driver could see within my heart, and knew that I was pure. Upon opening the package, an angelic choir started to sing, and reached a crescendo as I laid this cable on my stereo system. Instantly, my antiquated equipment transformed into components made from the clearest diamond-semiconductor. The cable knew where to go, and hooked itself into the correct ports without help from me - all the while, the choir sang praises to the almighty digital god. With trepidation, I pushed "play," and was instantly enveloped in a sound that echoed the creation of all matter, a sound that vibrated every cell in my body to perfection. I was instantly taken to the next plane, where I saw the all-father. I knew with my entire soul, that all was good in the world.

But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.

Almost all comments - joking or not - are very funny.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[KingMotley]

First 30 FPS is probably too low for a FPS because you are likely stating what the FPS is when you are motionless and in one particular spot. Now, replay a few matches and tell us what your minimum frame rate was, and I best it's in the very low teens or worse. That isn't acceptable, and you are more likely to lag when the action gets thick and you need your FPS the most.

Secondly, Crysis/Crysis Warhead is a 3 year old engine that's a generation behind. Of course playing games from 3 years ago play fine on $100 video cards, but those cards would have been the $600+ cards 3 years ago too. Try picking at least a current gen game.

And lastly, 1680x1050? My LCD's native resolution has been 1920x1200 since I got it 5 years ago. Try getting a decent monitor.

Playing old games on low resolution monitors and cherry picking frame rates only proves how wrong you are.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[siride]

It doesn't really. It depends on the context and the tense of the verb it's used with. Example: "I wondered if he'd ever seen a computer before" is entirely past-tense in meaning.

Regarding the discussion at hand, "X-est ever" really is more or less equivalent to "X-est to date". If you want to include the future, then you'd say "X-est that will ever be made".

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Straterra]

The only reason that "I wondered if he'd ever seen a computer before" is past-tense in meaning is because you used the word "had", which means past-tense. Because no other word was used to imply time frame, its a valid assumption that the poster meant past, present and future.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[LordLimecat]

I really doubt the $1200 card is 12x faster than the $100 card, so yes, unless youre doing "important" stuff (and if you get the ARES, youre not), yes, its a phenomenal waste of cash.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[siride]

So you actually implicitly accepted my point, then went on to say the same wrong thing. I like how people just make shit up about language solely to be pedantic trolls on places like Slashdot. Never has it been true that "ever" means past, present and future by default. But here you are, just making it up and then using it to tell someone their perfectly valid and well-understood (by non-dipshits) idiom is, in fact, wrong.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Straterra]

I didn't just make it up, actually. Here, I'll save you the trouble of Googling for the definition of ever yourself.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ever
http://www.yourdictionary.com/ever
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ever

Please notice the definition "at any time" and "at all". At any time means past, present and future. Does the word "ever" always mean this definition by default? No, but context clues were not provided for any other definition.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[digitalhermit]

It's all relative.

Would you pay $150 for a single dinner for one? I do it on a regular basis (i.e., at least bi-weekly). I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, wealthy but I enjoy the experience. In fact, I don't eat out during the week, drive an older car, live in a small house, buy clothes maybe once a year, and forego many of the other things that co-workers with similar incomes see as normal (video games, movies, smart phone) just so that I can eat out.

You can get a great meal for $10. Hell, you can get a meal for $5.

Your argument is the same as saying that it's stupid to buy bottled water, name brand clothing, "luxury" vehicles, a coffee at Starbucks, buy a CD of music from a signed band, etc..

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[siride]

No, you just made that up that it means past, present and future. It *can* refer to any of those times, but it doesn't necessarily, if ever, refer to all of those times at once. Only context indicates that it should. Idiomatic expressions trump even that. "X-est ever" is an idiomatic expression and mean "X-est to date". No native English speaker, except you, apparently, would be confused by that.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[asdf7890]

That is another reason that display size and your position relative to it makes a difference. The 23" widescreen unit I look at most now fills my field of vision much more fully than the little old 14" CRT I played the original Doom on all those years ago did. That means peripheral vision is probably getting used more these days.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[kimvette]

The word is rarely ever* used that way in this context.

* "rarely ever" as in practically never

HTH

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[JDeane]

I would have just pointed out the fact that the sentence also contained the word "made".... I would find it hard to "made" something in the future. The word made means it has already in the past, make is in the future.

So the sentence "The fasted video card ever made" means exactly that it is the fastest card made yet.

The sentence may not hold true for very long but on this day it is correct lol

Besides if the wold got blown up this afternoon then it would be true for all time (unless you believe that E.T's also make video cards then who knows lol)

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[blahplusplus]

"there's no practical difference between 24 fps and 60 fps"

Except you are incorrect, in computer terms _there is_ a practical difference _the amount of detail that can be rendered will be faster on a 60fps card. This is what FPS really is measuring. It's an abstraction to be able to render more detail at a decent clip.

And it's not framerate so much that matters as it is the _minimum_ fps at a level or games most taxing points for a video card.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[siride]

Yeah, I just thought of that while I was in the shower (where all good thoughts come from).

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly don't understand how movies are shown in the cinema. Movies may be shot at 24 frames per second, but that is not what is displayed.
With film projection systems, you have to move each frame down, so you have to close the shutter inbetween frames. Modern projectors use two or three shutter periods to increase the effective flicker rate to 48Hz or 72Hz, so they are not showing 24 frames per second, they are showing 48 or 72, but half of them are black and the rest are repeated frames.
Motion blur is a trick to make the mind think that it is seeing fluid motion, but it requires careful planning and expertise during the filming stage to look right.
LCDs don't have blanking periods, or shutters, or frames to pull down. Stop trying to compare the two. If you can't see the difference between the 15/24/60fps examples in the video, you are clearly blind or in denial.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah Grasshopper, but I am most happy with the cheap wallet that I infrequently drain!

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[stewbacca]

I am not really sure what your price expectations are for the fastest videocard ever made...

My price expectation is that this thing will cost $150 in 18 months, just like every expensive video card that came before it.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[ildon]

Look, I trust my eyes, and they can definitely see a CLEAR distinction between 24 fps and 30 fps, and 30 fps and 60 fps, (and when I had a CRT and played Q3 in 640x480 so I could use 120 hz, 60 fps and 120 fps) in video games on my computer monitor.

I can also say that a lot of times at the theater action movies look choppy as FUCK to me (to the of distraction in some cases), even with the built-in motion blur (a choppy transition between two blurry pictures still looks choppy to me). And yes, I realize that sometimes it's the cinematographer purposefully slowing down the frame rate for some supposed dramatic effect, but all that usually accomplishes is pissing me off and keeping me from telling what's going on.

I don't know the methodology of measuring "what frame rate the human eye can see" in these experiments or what other mitigating factors might be coming into play in the real world on a computer monitor that might cause different results than these methodologies, but I know what I can see.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[node 3]

The only reason that "I wondered if he'd ever seen a computer before" is past-tense in meaning is because you used the word "had", which means past-tense. Because no other word was used to imply time frame, its a valid assumption that the poster meant past, present and future.

Your original post:

"The fastest video card ever made? Is this the last video card ever made or something? I think maybe you meant the fastest video card to date"

I bolded the past tense for you.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[PaladinAlpha]

If you are claiming that you cannot tell a difference between the 24fps (even with the blur) and the 60fps you are lying to attempt to support an incorrect point.

I will grant that 24fps with motion blur is acceptably close to 60fps, but submit that this only proves the worth of a powerful card, as what started this was someone getting 30fps -without- blur, and applying a blur like that requires horsepower (which could have gone to just increasing the frame rate to begin with). Real-time rendering is not cinematography in which you have all the time and data you want to smooth each frame.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

You also left out one more factor - game type.

World of Warcraft, for example, is well playable at 30fps. First person shooters are the worse because viewport motion depends on the framerate, which makes it difficult to aim at lower framerates.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[maxwell demon]

I would have just pointed out the fact that the sentence also contained the word "made".... I would find it hard to "made" something in the future.

However I don't have problems to think about something that will be made in the future.

The word made means it has already in the past, make is in the future.

The word "made" can also indicate the passive voice. And since in this case it was not about something the graphics card made, but about the graphics cards which were made, the form did only indicate passive voice. The sentence did not contain any direct indication about which time frame was meant, because there was no verb which would tell you. If he had written "for the fastest videocard which ever was made" it would have been explicit that it refers to the past, and if he had written "for the fastest videocard which ever will be made" then it would clearly refer to the future. However, he just wrote "for the fastest videocard ever made," so the grammar doesn't tell you what time frame is meant. So you have to refer either to idiomatic usage (if he meant the future, he surely would have written "for the fastest videocard ever to be made"), or to common sense (which in this case clearly indicates the past).

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given current exchange rates, shouldn't it be *CHEAPER* over there? WTF.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference between 30hz, 60hz and 120hz - if you see a video @ 120hz on a split screen with 60hz, there is an amazing difference - most TVs suffer from sample and hold (and other problems) which means that a panning shot @ 60hz is actually really jerky and unclear. If you are only displaying something at 30hz (or 60hz), there is a benifit to be obtained from increasing framerate to 120fps (and possibly 240fps).

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using a CRT, anything under 120Hz is going to show a visible flicker. I have my monitor set to 85Hz and it's not hard at all to see the flickering.

I don't know how people tolerate 75Hz refresh rates. I'd get a headache in minutes!

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Travoltus]

Don't worry, nobody is forcing you to buy one,

You'll eat those words upon the next release of the Crytek engine...

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[couchslug]

"Don't worry, nobody is forcing you to buy one, besides only a thousand will be sold in the US anyway, I am sure this Ferrari of a video card will find it's buyer."

May it find MANY buyers, and become inexpensive as do other vidcards over time! I love early adopters, I don't give a shit what they spend because I"M not spending it, and may they continue to pay for betterfaster stuffs for me.

This is All Good.
No likee expensive vidcard? Don't buy one, but don't discourage anyone else.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

Both cards play almost any game. Something from 2007 and back can probably be played on Maximum. Something from 2010 and forward can be played on anywhere from Medium to Maximum, if you don't mind AA being off, or if you have a smaller monitor.

I was supporting the OP's "Am I a cheap bastard?" question by pointing out (through demonstration) that there are many more people like him.

But of course, I did it without a simple "My thoughts exactly", and instead by adding more info to the thread. A discussion piece, if you will.

Hmm... this post was entirely too analytical. I may be overthinking things. :P

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

Actually, in Crysis 30fps is fine. It's totally playable down to about 20fps.

On the other hand, in a game like L4D or TF2, not having a stable 60fps is going to hurt your playskill a lot.

One other thing to consider - a 4870 is about the same speed as a 5770 - or perhaps 5% faster in a few games. $100 for 4870, or $150+ for 5770? You pick. You pay if you want DX11.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

60 fps adds a super-realism, though.

I first noticed this firing up the old Quake with its software renderer on a more modern machine (PII in that case, vs. Pentium Pro)

Though blocky as hell, it was like looking through a window at a real world. It was that smooth, even when turning and moving. Now that I think about it, it's kind of like the super-fast framerate on some parts of sporting events. Each frame is so fast there's no blur, much less stutter.

Unfortunately, graphics cards, no matter how powerful, cannot keep up with that unless you are not, as mentioned, moving, which causes stutter as well as generally slower framerates.

3dfx, just before they went out of business, went 180 degrees the wrong way, adding motion blur to their cards, as if it was a feature, instead of a defective liability from the movies and TV.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Well, don't forget the 18 billion percent VAT tax (hidden inside the displayed price), import duties, and god knows what.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

FPS is one of those subjective issues where there seems to be a lot more "I don't like X so you are daft for suggesting someone might" then hard facts.

It really depends on how the game is built. For lack of a better way to describe it, some games actually have multiple CPU frames per GPU frame. You can fire in the frame that doesn't get rendered - you just won't see it. (or perhaps more aptly, games can have more input frames, so even though you're running at 20fps, you can still have 100fps accuracy, if you can guess where to shoot)

As an example, I tested this in L4D1 when my old GPU was acting up. I had to downgrade from an 8800 to an 8300. My FPS dropped from ~60 to ~15-20. Frequently I'd move my crosshair, click where I thought my zombie was, and when the next frame rendered it was on the other side of a corpse flying through the air.

Of course, L4D2 messed this up by having zombies randomly change directions and speeds, making it much harder to predict where they'll be. Plus the hit detection is just plain funky - at 60fps, I can fire to the left of something running right, and kill it - but it doesn't work nearly as well at low framerates.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

Modern games lack a way to limit the framerate.

I'd be quite happy at a stable 30fps, but 30fps, 45fps, 60fps, 45fps, 30fps makes aiming more difficult. Especially if it starts fluctuating as soon as the action starts.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Alarindris]

God I wish I had mod points, those comments made my day, hilarious!

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

Not all of us have money to blow. Some people are college students, or *gasp* teenagers, scraping together money for their own computer.

Blowing $600 on a videocard when all you've got is $1000 is a bad idea. It'd be much more prudent spending $600 on a computer. If you maintain the rest as a buffer, then you can pick up whatever games come on sale, and you aren't totally screwed if a part fails.

Since you've clearly got money, go ahead and spend it. You pay the R&D so other people can get things cheaper, later. :P

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

I agree with your point of view. I never go to a movie - unless someone else is paying - because it takes away money that could be spent on computer upgrades or games. I have an entertainment budget that I apply to all entertainment.

$150 for a meal?... if that's what floats your boat, I'm glad you enjoy it. I'm one of the $10 spenders. :P

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Miseph]

There is an idiomatic usage here implying "to date". It's a rather common usage, and given that humans lack the ability to perfectly predict the future, one that is entirely reasonable. Furthermore, your assertion that "ever" has a clear and unambiguous definition is demonstrably false: it is heavily dependent up context, and can take on several distinct meanings in standard usage.

TL;DR: quit being such a pedantic bitch, especially if you're wrong.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure the apostrophe will find its place, but that wasn't it.

How come you guys can keep up with the latest in imperceptible changes in graphics, but can't grasp the elementary distinction between its and it's?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[V!NCENT]

Yeah duuuuuhhhhhh....
The reason CRTs get to be 120Hz is because the time you make the image in your head could niot sync with the monitor flicker and thus you get headaches. but this has nothing to do with the amount of times the framebuffer on your card gets updated,,,

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[roman_mir]

Well, I am just trying to become indistinguishable from a native English speaker/writer.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[madprof]

Not only are you not cheap, your reaction is normal for most people. This card won't be worth $300 next year though so you have the last laugh by not buying it.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at the square on the downward path when it's not rotating. Your 7.5 fps vs 15 fps argument falls flat on its face.

The difference between 15 and 30 is readily apparent. Between 30 and 60 it's harder but still discernible.

If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a difference between 60hz and 120hz TVs. Love it or hate it, people can tell.

Motion blur at low fps is just a hack to simulate fluidity, when you pan your head all the background details are not lost to the same degree as you'd see in movies and TV. Why not show 60 fps and let the eyes generate the motion blur naturally?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[smash]

OK. most of the games with a budget have consoles in mind. Those without a budget aren't pushing for quick hardware in any case, so bit of a moot point for the purposes of video card discussion really...

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to understand the effect of shutter speed so I have two experiments that you should try (in addition to thinking about why you're not bothered by the natural blinking of your eyes that you don't pay attention to and that takes much longer than 1/25 of a second):

- go to a night club and watch people dance when lit by stroboscopic light. The frame rate is that of your eyes yet the shutter speed is imposed by the stroboscopic light. What do you see? Choppiness.

- play with a light dimmer - or preferably, have someone else do it whilst you watch. Even when changed slowly, can you tell where one frame ends and the next begins? You have the same frame rate as above but control the shutter.

Since you obviously cannot tell the precise moment at which it was at its maximum or minimum, you should understand that there is a certain region within which it could actually have the same level or increase or decrease without you knowing the difference. If a frame changes within that region on film, you cannot tell the difference and thus it is all about motion blur, which depends on shutter speed.

The fact of the matter is that you barely need 20 fps to make film so fluid that you cannot tell it apart from real life (demonstrated e.g. by waving something in front of a projector creating a shadow or having the same waving on film shown by that projector). So any choppiness you perceive, is due to entirely different reasons than frame rate but in games it is easier to reduce choppiness by increasing the frame rate instead of improving motion blur (especially if you're a graphics card manufacturer instead of a game developer). In films, motion blur is obviously trivial to do right and any choppiness you perceive is due to some entirely different reason. Perhaps you cannot tell what's going on because you're retarded?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[JohnnyBigodes]

I'm sorry? "there's not practical difference between 24fps and 60fps"?

Few people will be able to tell motion above 60fps, sure, but up to that point any human can and will notice the difference. Ever wondered why a movie's motion will look completely different that the motion of your standard news / soap opera / etc? That's the 24-to-30fps difference alone.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some games (Quake, atleast II and III come in mind) require you to have over certain fps to be able to play the game to fullest extent. Some moves, especially trickjumps, are impossible to do without high fps. This is due to how the game has been programmed. Having less than required FPS makes the game unplayable to large extent in any competitive environment.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[raynet]

Yeah, I remember playing one game on MSDOS and VGA which had fractal based terrain and smart level of detail system. You set the target fps in the configuration and it would just tesselate more polygons if it had time and when something massive happened, instead of getting huge drop in framerate, the terrain just temporarely got simpler. But I guess doing something like that today cannot be justified in the development budget.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to burst your bubble buddy, but as a PC builder and repairman I've met a few gamers which will probably buy this thing. All they care about is having the biggest ePeen at ALL costs, one even gave me the cash up front to score him a Skulltrail when THAT was the biggest ePeen board, and had me wire his whole system up to a massive watercooler.

How come I never get customers like that? Maybe I don't look like a guy who is eager to get his hands on some other guy's ePeen?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to burst your bubble buddy, but as a PC builder and repairman I've met a few gamers which will probably buy this thing. All they care about is having the biggest ePeen at ALL costs, one even gave me the cash up front to score him a Skulltrail when THAT was the biggest ePeen board, and had me wire his whole system up to a massive watercooler. Crazy bastard was even paying for the fastest cable PLUS the fastest DSL, and had me set him up dual KillerNICs so he could switch between the two so he would always have the fastest ping. Some folks blow money on cars, he blew it on his ePeen.

That said as much as I hate consoles (or as I call them DRM...in a box) I have to give them credit for lowering the cost of PC gaming in a major way. It used to be back in the days of Quake 1-3 I'd be buying a new card yearly and a new PC every other just to keep decent framerate, but thanks to console R&D becoming crazy expensive and MSFT and Sony stretching out the time the current model stays on market it really has made things cheaper for those of us that don't care about ePeens and just want to play. Now I'm playing on an AMD quad (925, 8Gb of DDR2 800, dual 500Gb for less than $650) with an HD4650 that cost me a whole $36 after MIR and it plays the games I want like Bioshock 2 just fine on this 1600x900 monitor. Thanks to the consoles slowing down the need to constantly upgrade I just built a new gaming rig for my guitarist, and the whole dual core rig set him back just $400 after MIR at Tigerdirect.

So if guys want to go nuts with ePeens that is fine and dandy with me, for those of us with GFs or kids or other expenses that just want to enjoy blowing some shit up after a day of work the current situation makes me VERY happy. And the extras you can do with these newer GPUs, like hardware transcoding even on my 4xxx, is really a nice bonus. and unlike my old Nvidia rig it doesn't sound like a jet engine or heat up my place in the summer. Win/win as far as this old greybeard is concerned.

Christ. Stop saying 'ePeen'. It sounds retarded.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[demonrob]

I've never ever read such rubbish. will this discussion ever finish?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Doggabone]

I've never ever read such rubbish. will this discussion ever finish?

It's the most rubbish ever discussed.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Doggabone]

Christ. Stop saying 'ePeen'. It sounds retarded.

That's the point - he's characterizing the people who would buy the card, or upgrade a PC just for the performance stats, as having an idiotic desire to prove something meaningless.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[masterwit]

Me too... I just was scrolling through and went, oh that's a big'un!

All I have to say is, at 5bph (beers per hour), 10fps does just fine for me!

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[sznupi]

WoW? SC2? D3? Valve? No budget?...

Even if assuming that's maybe a good indicator - well, in that case (in practice), you'd want the really shiny PC games to have even higher, ridiculously exorbitant, budgets.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[LBt1st]

Myself, and countless others can see a difference between 30 and 60fps. You can quote papers and talk theory all day long. I know I personally much prefer to watch something at 60fps then 30. It's not a minor difference to me. 60fps looks vastly smoother. Even when shot with the same camera with the same exposure settings. Now maybe that's not everyone. Some people can't hear ultra sonic frequencies. Some people have better night vision. I'm willing to accept the idea that some people can't perceive anything over 24fps. But I know what I prefer.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[bronney]

Your time groupthink is too linear. I am going back to my tachyon convergence experiment ;)

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[bronney]

MS Flight Simulator can. And it used to matter when we had crappy hardware.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[asdf7890]

I think that would go down badly with some players, and certainly some (p)reviewers. Many games are sold on their shiny shiny at least in the early marketting.

Also with some modern games and engines the plain number of polygons is not as important as other effects that are being applied, and turning off the atmospheric lighting effects when something happens might jar a lot more than drawing less detail in the distance.

A good idea though, if your game is one that can take advantage of it.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[hairyfeet]

Trust me man, you do NOT want them as a customer! I was happy to teach the guy to DIY and build his own boxes to keep from working on his gear. Sure the margins were great, but those type will try every dumbass thing they read about on the net trying to squeeze that last 4FPS, and then you gotta go deal with it when he fucks the whole thing up. You know the scene in "History of the World:Part One" where the artist makes a painting and the critic pissed on it? It felt like that to hand such beautiful hardware to such a schmuck.

He wasn't happy unless he had OCed his system to the screaming edge, was RAID-O with the fastest drives he could get, pushing his GPUs so far OCed they practically needed to be kept in a freezer, and for what? Who the fuck can tell the difference between 150 FPS and 160? And most of the time the little shit was playing WOW! What a damned waste of fine machinery. I would have had that baby transcoding, doing video editing, rendering, hell anything other than pissing it away on WOW.

So trust me bud, after seeing such beautiful machine you crafted with your own two hands used used and abused by a talking monkey it just wasn't worth it. At least with my normal customers I build a quality machine that will do what they want/need and will last them a good 5-7 years or more. I take pride in my work and build my machines to last, but that dumbass would push them so far beyond spec it was just shameful. Then a year would roll around and he would give that beautiful badass to some relative who would only use it for web surfing just so he could get the latest ePeen. I'm telling ya, it just ain't right!

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

you barely need 20 fps to make film so fluid that you cannot tell it apart from real life

Oh FFS, stop perpetuating that myth. You can get away with 1fps if what you're filming is a crawling snail or grass growing. Fast action needs much more than 20fps to look smooth, regardless of the display type.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

It *can* refer to any of those times, but it doesn't necessarily, if ever, refer to all of those times at once.

You just used the word "ever" to, as far as I can tell, mean "past/present/future".

I think you owe the GP an apology.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Trent Hawkins]

won't the new Crytek engine be designed for consoles? That would mean I could safely use my three year old graphics card to run it.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[MikeBabcock]

Some of us are adults with mortgages and car payments and throwing away $1000 on a new video card seems pretty stupid too. I gave up the rat race, bought a PS3 and realized 90% of my gaming needs have been satisfied for years now without a hardware upgrade.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Zixaphir]

I think he was being ironic, but whatev. I also think that people here need to understand that there is often an implied context to what people are saying. Also, arguing over the rules of grammar borderlines idiotic.

It's just a stupid god damned sentence. It's obvious what he meant to say and there is nothing explicit about the definition of the word "ever" which implies that he made any mistake. This entire thread is nitpicking at best. Don't you guys have some one better to degrade? Like, perhaps, someone with the gull to us a goto?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back off.
It's my right as a human to play games on my 17" CRT and 1024x768 resolution without being called "wrong".

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

But you lose out on game prices if you do that. ;)

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[MikeBabcock]

Most of my games cost between $15 and $25 from the 'slightly used' rack at Blockbuster after they've been rented out a few times. New games I often purchase once they've hit their half-million sales and get auto-discounted to $40 by Sony as a Greatest Hit. For a few games, I purchase at full price, exactly $59.92 at Walmart because I really like the publisher and know I want to play it online during the initial and busiest phase of the online component.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[BikeHelmet]

Which is exactly my point. Steam has huge sales, often with 75-90% discounts. A lot of these games show up for $2 to $10 on Steam. Mass Effect has been $5 no less than a couple times.

For games with online communities, as soon as they hit rock-bottom prices, hundreds of thousands of people buy them. That leads to quite a lot of active players.

In the past year I've spent perhaps $400 on games, and amassed over a hundred of them. Far more than I'll be able to play over the next couple years.

With a console, you spend half as much as you would on a computer, but you're constantly spending $25 here or $60 there to keep entertained. At the end of a 3 year run, you've probably spent 3x as much, even if you factor in computer upgrades to keep current.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[soppsa]

1600x900? Jesus christ, could you get a more useless resolution?

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a myth. The AC above suggested some pretty good experiments to try and you should really think about why you're not bothered by the blinking of your eyes. Furthermore, if you read more about the history of film, you will understand how the industry settled on such a low frame rate since it actually is enough with proper motion blur. And btw. slower movements are harder to make non-choppy, if the frame rate is low.

And the games?

[AHuxley]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support
When will we have some new eye candy to make the new cards melt?

Re:And the games?

[Narishma]

When the next generation of consoles arrive.

Re:And the games?

[AHuxley]

Then we get dx 10 support? In like a few years :)

Re:And the games?

[Plekto]

DX11 has one major difference to it that will require that type of speed and power, and that is real-time ray-tracing.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334
An older article on it. Hollywood almost exclusively uses ray-tracing, so once it is an option for games and consoles, well, even games like Final Fantasy 13 will look quaint and computer-generated.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=506
But there is some hope. If you have enough cores and enough cards, you can manage. ie - it's a matter of raw analyzing and math-crunching power versus pipes or textures.

Current computers cheat, essentially, and do a pretty good job of faking it(Halflife 2 lighting effects, for example). It's not "required", but it will exist as a feature to utilize. Over time the industry will transition to ray-tracing, since once one title does it acceptably well, the others will have to as well to not like bitmapped graphics by comparison. Estimates are that it will require up to 75x the processing power of DX9/XBox 360 titles to ray-trace the exact same game. Thankfully we've made a lot of progress in video cards in the last few years, but there's still 4-10x more to go. Nvidia's new card should get quite a bit closer. Two together might be able to actually pull it off.

And, of course, five years from now, when it's commonplace(the code is surprisingly easy to add to the games in question), it will be another "feature" to turn on in the menus.

limited edition

[visualight]

Have other cards been offered as 'limited editions'? I was reading the review and thinking "cool, I'll have that in a year..." but then noticed they're only shipping 1000. Then I thought, no way, it might be _that_ card that's just 1000 units, but I'm pretty sure one almost like it will follow.

Re:limited edition

[asdf7890]

Have other cards been offered as 'limited editions'?

From what I've seen there is often at least one for each generation of each major manufacturer's chip. Sometimes there is more than one, as two or more board builders compete with each other to see who can earn most nerd points by pushing a given generation of chip the furthest (by over-clocking everything, over-speccing other parts, including the require cooling system to keep the out-of-spec setup inside an acceptable thermal profile, and turning marketing up to 11).

I tend to ignore such limited editions though. More often than not the price/performance ratio of them is many times more ridiculous than the officially (by the chip maker) sanctioned top-of-the-range cards which them selves offer poor p/p compared to the next layer or two down.

This sort of card has two purposes. It is aimed at selling to the sort of people that want the best of the best no matter what the cost and even if they know something better will be along next month, and it raises the profile of the company a bit via coverage on hardware review sites and news agregators like ./.

Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the "benchmarks" were windows games. How does the card run on Linux?

Re:Linux?

[gazbo]

Dude, Nethack fucking SCREAMS. As long as you install the proprietary binary drivers.

Re:Linux?

[V!NCENT]

Slower than Windows 7: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_windows_part1&num=1

Re:Linux?

[V!NCENT]

Stupid troll... This OpenGL hotness runs on Linux: http://unigine.com/screenshots/ Crysis would whish it would come close to that, ROFL...

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, Nethack fucking SCREAMS. As long as you install the proprietary binary drivers.

I think you find in the case of NetHack that should be 'proprietary ASCII drivers'

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah that game is awesome... oh wait.

Re:Linux?

[V!NCENT]

Oh yeah sorry... I forgot to mention that that engine is actually used to make this commercial game that is comming to Linux: http://www.primalcarnage.com/website/

Re:Linux?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

EBCDIC?

Re:Linux?

[fat_mike]

So OpenGL and Linux have finally reached 2003? Personally I don't trust videos that don't show actual gameplay.

Re:Linux?

[MikeBabcock]

Its funny, I played Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Neverwinter Nights, and many more games on OpenGL and Linux long before this.

Why this doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

This was over the top, totally bonkers, hilariously exaggerated just 10 years ago. With not two but 5 of the hottest graphics processors of the time on one board, it would smoke the competition in any benchmark (particularly Bungholiomark). Now tell me, what good would five times the performance of a ten year old card do in one of today's games? The ASUS ARES is just as ridiculous, but it's real and they expect you to pay real money for it. If you do that, the joke is on you.

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[AHuxley]

lol owned by Apple :)

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[mccalli]

This [techbuket.net] was over the top, totally bonkers, hilariously exaggerated just 10 years ago.

"Just"? Just ten years ago? The only thing I've got left from 10 years ago is the mouse. If you're still using it ten years later, I rather think you've had your money's worth.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Even today people get owned by this card.

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're still using it ten years later, I rather think you've had your money's worth.

Interesting. So if I understand correctly, you throw out everything you own after 10 years even if it's still in working condition because not doing so would be unfair to the industry (after all, you had your money's worth)?

That's about the only way I can make sense of your comment. Sure, replace what's broken, and upgrade what doesn't perform adequately anymore, but if something is working and still performing well, why replace it?

For example, I've got a microwave that's about 25 years old now. Nothing fancy about it, but it's built like a tank, and it's working. I could get a new one, but why? It still heats food like it's supposed to. I'll buy a new one (and a fancy new one for that matter) the very day it breaks, but before that, why should I throw it out just because I've "had my money's worth"?

Really, I cannot understand you.

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[MoFoQ]

dunno...the Chrome and the Volari would've slowed things down...greatly.

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[mccalli]

Interesting. So if I understand correctly, you throw out everything you own after 10 years even if it's still in working condition because not doing so would be unfair to the industry (after all, you had your money's worth)?

No - clearly not. But computers are of their time - a ten year-old machine that's still doing good work today represents excellent, and I do mean excellent value. Same for a peripheral. I'm typing now on an...erm...I think 4 year-old MacBook Pro - it's the newest machine I've got and I have absolutely no plans for an upgrade yet. I actually do have a ten year-old PC doing good work, acting as a MAME box. I have older retro kit too but I'm discounting these as they're not part of my 'normal' computing set-up.

That's about the only way I can make sense of your comment. Sure, replace what's broken, and upgrade what doesn't perform adequately anymore, but if something is working and still performing well, why replace it?

Never said you should. Said quite the opposite in fact - said that if you're still using a ten year-old card today, you've had excellent value. Thing is though, I doubt you are and I'll bet there are good, sane reasons for this.

For example, I've got a microwave that's about 25 years old now. Nothing fancy about it, but it's built like a tank, and it's working. I could get a new one, but why? It still heats food like it's supposed to. I'll buy a new one (and a fancy new one for that matter) the very day it breaks, but before that, why should I throw it out just because I've "had my money's worth"?

Nonsensical. The demands on your microwave haven't changed - it needed to cook food then, it needs to cook pretty much the same food now. The demands on a computer certainly have changed though, particularly those on a high-end graphics card. High end of ten years back could be breezed through by anything on sale today, high end of today will be breezed through by anything on sale in 2020. It's not a static environment.

Incidentally, you might want to look at your 25 year old microwave. Bet you you'd save by buying a new one that's more power efficient.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[sznupi]

Never said you should. Said quite the opposite in fact - said that if you're still using a ten year-old card today, you've had excellent value. Thing is though, I doubt you are and I'll bet there are good, sane reasons for this.

Joining the discussion - that's actually quite possible and not much of a stretch. In fact, one of my most often used PCs has...Matrox G400 16MB; one that will be 10 years old in a month IIRC (and the type is available for 11 years, I think). Most of the components in that machine are a bit younger by now (not by much), sure - but the GFX card does not really limit anything, not for what this machine was and is used (web, IM, TV, a little writing & small dev stuff, even basic video editing in its time - though I could easily edit 720p or 1080p via proxy editing...and basically can watch the former if I really want to, for some reason; all mostly a matter of proper, efficient software)

I doubt newer microwaves are in any appreciate way more power efficient BTW - they are still made pretty much in the same way, which is determined by the basic concept behind how they work and pretty basic, straightforward and long-known implementation of it. Old one might lose, somewhat, due to aging of transformer / caps / etc., but probably not by much (certainly not justifying throwing it away)

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[Gadget_Guy]

The ASUS ARES is just as ridiculous, but it's real and they expect you to pay real money for it. If you do that, the joke is on you.

No, they don't expect people to pay for it. They just create these cards so they can say that they have the fastest consumer card on the planet. It is hoped that this will raise the prestige of the brand and people will buy the affordable versions.

Re:Why this doesn't matter

[Viceice]

It's even older than that. This is just an update of the original photoshop job done on the 3Dfx Voodoo2. Remember that card? ;)

Flying fuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

How relevant is that for a gaming card?

Remember, this is a product that comes with a GAMING MOUSE thrown in. It's like asking how much of a load the latest supercar can haul. It's irrelevant, as long as there's no games using OpenCL. Trust me, when OpenCL is a big thing in gaming, these cards will be long forgotten.

Re:Flying fuck.

[im_thatoneguy]

I would flip the question: How relevant is it AS a gaming card?

Maxing settings and still matching your monitors refresh rate isn't uncommon on 'ancient' video cards.

If however this beast of a card could accelerate GPGPU tasks then it would be useful since I know of no GPGPU task which couldn't benefit from more processing power.

Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it Bitchin' Fast?

Re:Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, go ahead and mod me redundant. I guess I just wasn't Bitchin' Fast enough :-(

Crysis

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Finally, something that can run Crysis at any resolution.

Print layout ...

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

is here for you pleasure.

Go Back in time with it

[Zeussy]

Imagine, going back in time with that card, in its case, to the time of the Voodoo 2.

"Look, I have brought a graphics card from the future!"
*Crack open the case (with added dry ice for the appropriate smoke effects)
"Compared to your puny Voodoo2 with 8mb of ram, this has 4GB! Weighs over 2 kg and requires over 200 watts of power and other fancy numbers. Tremble at it's heatsink!"

Anyway, I digress, I wonder if this card is faster than all the Voodoo2s sold put together?

Re:Go Back in time with it

[mangu]

I wonder if this card is faster than all the Voodoo2s sold put together?

Who knows, but that's not of the essence. Unfortunately, computer games have gone the way of Hollywood movies, all glitter and no substance.

My favorite game genres are adventure games and car simulations. Ten years ago i used to play the Need for Spped - Porshce game and I still have to see a similar game that's as fun for the casual gamer.

Racing games today have much better graphics, the cars look almost like photographs, but they aren't fun to drive. Either they have no physics engine at all, they are arcade games meant to be played with a gamepad, like the Need for Speed games since "Underground", or they are like Richard Burns Rally, so hard to play it starts looking like work.

As for adventure games, the golden age of 1990s is gone. There were EGA or VGA games like Space Quest and Monkey Island that were so fun to play and have no modern successors.

It's a pity that the availability of so much visual power seems to have derailed the creativity from making fun games to enhanced visual effects.

Re:Go Back in time with it

[jones_supa]

As for adventure games, the golden age of 1990s is gone. There were EGA or VGA games like Space Quest and Monkey Island that were so fun to play and have no modern successors.

It's not that sad. There's still gems here and there.

Re:Go Back in time with it

[sznupi]

Bringing back two Voodoo 2 cards, found for pennies now, (or some nice Voodoo 3) would be probably a bit more practical.

Re:Go Back in time with it

[sznupi]

Though "Porsche Unleashed" was an arcade game already...as pretty much whole NFS series from its inception. Which isn't strictly a bad thing, really - after all it essentially means that a game knows it's a game.

(generally, consider you might be also falling a bit into simple nostalgia; and overlooking lots of indy stuff, which gives often quite close experience to "golden days", whichever time period we mean by that in given discussion (~= from your youth); with "mainstream" expanded, and popular stuff being what fits nicely into current level of technology)

Re:Go Back in time with it

[ZosX]

You do realize that was only 12 years ago? (98?) We've come a long way. Then compare it to smartphone development, which has grown light years faster than the PC side of things. It goes to show what competition can bring to innovation. The PC has become a stale fixed platform. Sure we get a faster processor every couple of years and the amount of ram in PCs now is astounding, but at its core, its still basically the same machine that existed 15-20 years ago. 64-bit is the only thing relatively new, and to be honest, that's fairly old hat by now. When 4GB or RAM started to become relatively cheap, it forced OEMs to start throwing 64-bit windows on their machines so consumers could upgrade eventually. Most vista machines shipped were shipped with 32-bit Vista, the tides finally seem to be shifting with windows 7. SMP on the average dell desktop? Surely that's progress, but most workstations in the 90s had SMP. Its only taken us 10+ years for that to become common and cheap. The only thing that keeps intel pushing forward is the fact that amd is right on their coattails, and has demonstrated that they can beat them time and time again when they become lax. Now apple uses nothing but intel, so there aren't even any alternate platforms for the PC anymore. The smartphone space may be interesting to watch, because lots of interesting PC-like technologies will start to appear with the flood of pads following the ipad being only the beginning. Over time these devices will become more and more PC-like, and I personally think that people desire smaller and smaller form factors. Witness the fall of the desktop to the notebook to the netbook, and now perhaps to the pad. If you can give people hulu, facebook, and farmville, you really have satisfied the masses. The future is certainly going to be interesting in a lot of ways.

Re:Go Back in time with it

[Shark]

The first FlatOut still has soul. It's quite a blast to play with a steering wheel and a bunch of friends.

Re:Go Back in time with it

[Alarindris]

Try Dirt 2.

Re:Go Back in time with it

[epine]

I find it tedious this need to equate happeningness with innovation.

Cell phones would look pretty pathetic if not embedded in an ecosystem which made it possible to efficiently produce the software and content and phone designs you implicitly rave about. Just about every great innovation that makes the modern cell phone possible was developed primarily on giant PC workstations.

Just like it's easier to have a lot of spare cash in early adulthood (and the coolness associated with that) if you still live in your parent's basement and leach off the free utilities.

It was the same thing with the success of scripting languages on the back of the nasty compiled languages such as C/C++. When Python runs fast, which language to you think is doing the real heavy lifting?

Standing on the shoulders of giants and poaching the low hanging fruit is a time honoured tradition, but why is the hulking giant always portrayed as a dim gallumph? It's like saying peaches are cool, but peach tree step ladders aren't.

Coolness ends up being how much newness one can take credit for, while disregarding long years of hard work by the better established that made the niche possible in the first place. OpenCL based media encoders running on massive GPUs is only going to make your cell phone decoder even more cool and bit efficient.

So I get your message. There's nothing happening on the PC platform because the cell platform has figured out how to take all the credit on the unassailable logic that the most important component in any technology ecosystem is the pocket-sized gratification device.

Re:Go Back in time with it

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

What cracks me up is that the Voodoo5 6000, which was never officially released and needed so much power that it required an external power brick, draws only about 70W. That's less than a mid-range card today.

The amount of power required by modern high-end GPUs has reached an absurd point.

Wow

[ShooterNeo]

This just in : spend $1200 on a graphics card and you'll get a card that destroys everything else on benchmarks! (til next month) And you'll have to wait 3 solid years before games are out that really need the card!

Film at 11.

Re:Wow

[ZosX]

Trust me. If they think they could sell a $2400 card, they certainly would try. When the front of the pack started costing about $500 for the price of admission, it was clear to me that they would just keep increasing the limit higher and higher. $1200 is a lot, but at only 1000 cards, I think they realize this is a very limited market.

what's the point of the briefcase?

[MoFoQ]

sure...it's cool..but at the same time...gimmicky..
once I install the card...it stays in the there and not in the briefcase.

And the "gaming mouse"....I'm sorry, I like my G5 (rev 2).

Plus the price makes it un-attractive.

Re:what's the point of the briefcase?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Just so if you go on vacation, and decide to take your gaming graphics card, instead of your girlfriend . . . it should be great for getting flagged, when going through airport security.

TSA agent: "Sir, what exactly is this . . . ?"

Gamer: "It's the fastest graphics card in the world, as we know it! And it costs $1200 . . . and came with this great briefcase!"

TSA to colleague: "I don't see any Apple logo on it. Cuff him, and put him on the next flight to Guantanamo. Send the briefcase to the lab in Langley, and see if they can figure out how this weapon of mass destruction works . . ."

Re:what's the point of the briefcase?

[ChienAndalu]

getting on /.

Re:what's the point of the briefcase?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the "gaming mouse"....I'm sorry, I like my G5 (rev 2).

That's OK. They're not forcing you to use the bundled mouse, y'know.

Re:what's the point of the briefcase?

[MoFoQ]

that's what my LAN party rig is for...

Re:what's the point of the briefcase?

[ZosX]

I was going to make a snarky remark about how it would be unlikely that you would have a gf if you bought this card, but come to think of it, if you have $1200 to blow on a video card, there is a very good chance that you have a girlfriend.

Re:what's the point of the briefcase?

[ZosX]

The card costs $1200. Do you think that they would just put it in a static bag and drop it in a cardboard box? The packaging of a high-end retail item is typically one of the most important aspects. Companies spend a lot of time and money to have really interesting packaging.

Re:what's the point of the briefcase?

[MoFoQ]

but u'r still paying for it....

Except on Linux where it's yet anotehr DUD !!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a dud dood !!
    It's a windoze is for lozerz money pit !!!!

One page

[cffrost]

http://hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1532

Re:I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

but it probably doubles as a egg fryer (caution: the warranty does not cover frying eggs).

Gaming driving video card development

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Now all we need is the next iteration of Crysis to suck the life out of the latest and greatest video card so people will be pining away for something offering the performance of 3 of these puppies in crossfire mode @ 1/3 of the price.

Geeks all over the world are going to have to live with mom and dad an extra few months to pay for that indulgence. :)

And don't forget

[NotSoHeavyD3]

In 3 years when that game comes out, there will be a card available to run that game and it'll cost about $100-$150.

Re:And don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point: 8800 Ultra. Back in 2007 it was the single fastest card. Now? You can get similar (even superior) performance at around $100/$125. Not to mention that they use less power and in the case of the HD 5750, it has DirectX11.

IO limited?

[32771]

Assuming the card provides 4.64 TFLOPS and PCIe offers 8GB/s I would assume one can perform 2320 single floating point operations per single float send. Is this what GPU programmers want, or do you feel that the card is twiddling its thumbs?

I could imagine that the io-flops rate is just like it should be but I'm curious what people think about it.

Re:IO limited?

[kc8apf]

Typically for graphics cards, the only data sent over PCIe is texture data, vertex lists, and commands. The bulk of the operations done by the card are running the commands over the vertex lists while bringing in texture data. The commands are almost always a multi-pass or pipeline so each vertex will be used in computations more than once. The result is the pushed to the monitor, not the PCIe. So, yes, in general, a graphics card will have more FLOPs than I/O bandwidth.

Not for me...

[MacGyver2210]

Do they have this in a non-ATI version? I will never use ATI again after several years of constant problems with their products.

I'll buy an effin' Matrox card before I ever touch another ATI.

Just a 5970

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange how the summary paints this as being something extraordinary and special: "besting even the likes of the 5970". It's not that special. It is just a 5970, albeit one with more RAM than most, and higher clock speeds.

Slow news day?

nice card..

[xmorg]

but does it run on freebsd?

4870

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought dual 4870 X2's 18 months ago and haven't got round to sticking in the 2nd one in get simply because no game exists which can stress the first one to the point I notice slow downs yet.

Also if this card is anything like the others in the same line the fan sounds a little like a very loud hover when running.

Yay....

[Anonymous Coward]

...for Moore's Law.