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AMD's New Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 Cards Debut
MojoKid writes "AMD has officially launched their new Radeon HD 6800 series of graphics cards and the company has managed to drive cost and power consumption out of the product, while increasing performance efficiencies in the architecture. The Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 are new midrange cards that offer similar performance to previous generation high-end offerings, but at significantly lower price points and with an enhanced tessellation engine for better support of next generation DX11 game engines. The cards compete well with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470 and 460 products, besting them in some scenarios but trailing in others. Word is AMD is readying their flagship high-end Radeon 6900 family for release in Q4 as well."
I've got a 4870 and I've been eyeing these cards. Not for performance, but for power consumption. Particularly idle power consumption. I believe the 6870 uses about the same power under full load as my 4870, but 70% less at idle. Should be almost silent when I'm using Firefox and Word.
Meh a Ferrari
Well... yes.
I can appreciate the engineering, even be interested in test driving one, but OWNING one? Too much extra cost for too little extra value.
The same goes for graphics cards ; I have an nVidia GTS8800, which is getting pretty long in the tooth, but it plays most of the games I own pretty reasonably (could be a bit faster on Crysis, I suppose ;-) ), largely because I haven't been buying new games with heavy 3D needs recently.
Why not? Well, partly because I'm less interested in playing games as I age ; playing with ideas seems to be more interesting. Partly because the games that do appeal to me are increasingly indie titles that don't need much in the way of graphical grunt. And partly because most of the big titles that do need a powerful GPU are marred by either being a total pile of arse, an MMO game for which I don't have the time, or encumbered with such offensive DRM that I'd rather not let the box near my computer.
A platform only has value so long as it has a killer app - in the case of new GPUs, I don't have a game that I want to play, or a large set of numbers I need to crunch. I'm guessing that some time next year when Deus Ex : Human Revolution comes out, I might feel a small urge to upgrade.
I'm guessing that Slashdot attracts a substantial proportion of engineers who also see no practical reason for getting a new GPU beyond the "OOh, shiny!" factor, so I'm not surprised to see so many "Meh." responses to this article.