Some seriously epic stuff coming out soon, towards the end of this month ATi's 5850 and 5870 graphics cards will hit. The new cards support upto 3 displays out of the box, for gaming too, it has enough power to do that. A 6 monitor 'eyefinity' version will also be around. Preliminary benchmarks place the mid top end 5850 on par with nvidias gtx285, and the 5870 on par with the gtx295 (the dual chip monster) yet half the price. Specs on the ATI 5870 are a whopping 1600 shader processors, compared to 800 on the old 4870/90, also comes in 1gb and 2gb GDDR5 configurations and also with directx11. A 5870x2 is due end of october, with the presumed power of 2 gtx295's :p
Directx11 offers to make games easier to develop and look and perform better due to a tesselator, which essentially can adjust model detail on the go, eleminating hexagonal curves upclose and allowing devs to just whack massively detailed models in game and the graphics card will scale it fluidly, no sudden LOD (level of detail) changes. Also Shader model 5.0 including the new compute shader, allowing the card to assist in normal everyday desktop tasks, especially encoding video etc, but from a games perspective it may as well be the physics shader, good stuff will come from this, now devs can code games for both nvidia and ati cards. Also multi threading support is better, quads will really start taking off with this.
Nvidia arent taking this lying down, their plans are to make a 512 shader monster (gtx285 has 240, nvidias shaders are different than ati's roughly 4 times less are needed) making their gtx380 about 2.3 times more powerful than a gtx285. But nvidia are struggling with silicon defects from the new 40nm process, they have got about 7 out of 420 attempts back from the lab so far, less than 2%, when 20% is abysmal anyway. Hopefully they get things sorted. But yeah, so both companies doubling the power of their cards in a year, why? cos intels Larrabee is due out soon, the power of these new cards are needed to stop intel wiping the floor with the pair of them. Cpu's were always better at graphics, just needed so many of them its only becoming cost effective to whack like 48 on a graphics card now, and that is exactly what intel are attempting. All little steps on the road to raytracing. The new GT300's shader processors are actually said to more like cpu cores, building immensely on what they demo'd in the gt200 line.
But effectively january/february will be a good time to get some nice graphics power, cheap too. We may even have 3 graphics card companies by then. (Feel free to indulge my geeky ranting with questions :p)
Directx11 offers to make games easier to develop and look and perform better due to a tesselator, which essentially can adjust model detail on the go, eleminating hexagonal curves upclose and allowing devs to just whack massively detailed models in game and the graphics card will scale it fluidly, no sudden LOD (level of detail) changes. Also Shader model 5.0 including the new compute shader, allowing the card to assist in normal everyday desktop tasks, especially encoding video etc, but from a games perspective it may as well be the physics shader, good stuff will come from this, now devs can code games for both nvidia and ati cards. Also multi threading support is better, quads will really start taking off with this.
Nvidia arent taking this lying down, their plans are to make a 512 shader monster (gtx285 has 240, nvidias shaders are different than ati's roughly 4 times less are needed) making their gtx380 about 2.3 times more powerful than a gtx285. But nvidia are struggling with silicon defects from the new 40nm process, they have got about 7 out of 420 attempts back from the lab so far, less than 2%, when 20% is abysmal anyway. Hopefully they get things sorted. But yeah, so both companies doubling the power of their cards in a year, why? cos intels Larrabee is due out soon, the power of these new cards are needed to stop intel wiping the floor with the pair of them. Cpu's were always better at graphics, just needed so many of them its only becoming cost effective to whack like 48 on a graphics card now, and that is exactly what intel are attempting. All little steps on the road to raytracing. The new GT300's shader processors are actually said to more like cpu cores, building immensely on what they demo'd in the gt200 line.
But effectively january/february will be a good time to get some nice graphics power, cheap too. We may even have 3 graphics card companies by then. (Feel free to indulge my geeky ranting with questions :p)
Last edited by KaMaKaZe on Fri Sep 18, 2009 10:40 am; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : trying to make it slightly less confusing and numbery)