Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Blackhearted
Yes, in a year. PC technology moves fast. And while the 9800 isn't a bad card, it's quite behind the times in raw pixel, texel and shader power. Even if you can run the said games i doubt your FPS is notably high.
|
No, it doesn't. Moore's law hasn't held in PC market for at least 5 years. The hardware, instead of doubling in performance, only increases at fixed rate of about 25% a year.
In 5 years, the hardware will only provide slightly more than double the performance, which adds 1.4x more image fidelity (it takes 4 times as much power to double the quality).
BTW, what is texel, shader and pixel power? The only radical performance difference in recent cards comes from completely dynamic rendering pipeline, and this mode is not even fully supported in DX10 cards. Again - for DX9 generation, quadrupling the pipelines only doubles performance. Majority of this performance boost is artificial due to more pipelines, and the difference between 32 and 8 pipelines is only 2-times the performance increase.
DX10 promises to provide much bigger leap, but still nothing revolutionary. When looking at raw polygon throughput, the performance of graphic cards has been constant for a while. The difference comes only from certain extensions which allow quality to be faked better, and from smarter algorithms that simulate water, cloth, sky, reflections better.
Quote:
|
And about your link.. The reason why one of those games didnt sell well, namely UT3, was because the game itself was heavily rushed and in turn pretty bad compared to its predecessors. Not because it requires a beastly PC. Which it really doesn't need tbh.
|
No, it really is because most people can't play it. Almost all titles today need to support DX7, and cards without TnL, such as Intel's embedded cards.
I know there's the hype about posting raw numbers about who has the leetest processor, graphics card, who overclocks most. With graphic card today, there are exactly two limiting factors: bus (AGP, PCIe, and others), and GPU memory. Everything else is at its peak for years now.
Same for CPU. Adding RAM that runs at 20% higher frequency improves performance much more than replacing the CPU with one that is 20% faster. Doing both will result in at least 50% higher performance, not 40% at most.
So my answer when it comes to future proofing is, make sure your bus is recent, this has future benefits as well since PCIe cards are cheaper than their AGP equivalents.
Second, make sure you get fastest available RAM, at least 800, preferably 1000 bus. Everything else is secondary, since for several years now, memory and system bus are bottle-necks in systems. CPU and GPU spend most of their time waiting for data, and run idle for surprising amounts of time.
Quote:
|
Microsoft confirmed it's working on DX 11
|
It's a patch and part of marketing, which basically fixes the most critical bugs, but doesn't add any important functionality. It even removes some of it which MS added into version 10 just to look pretty, but was called on bluff, and now has to fix it. Same as Vista, DX10 was at least a year early, and isn't even remotely supported by current cards. They all just implement something "like DX10" - DX10 however isn't standardized.
