Future-proofing my GPU...

I've been playing GW for awhile now using my 8500 GT and 20" widescreen monitor. I like to play in high res of course, and recognize that currently my card is at the limit of what it can handle. For GW2, I realize it's anyone's guess as to how much GPU power will be needed, but does anyone have a guess as to what might suffice? I've heard rumors of DX10, along with increased system specs (although GW remains amazingly scalable for different systems), but I'm not sure what to shoot for. Spending $300+ for a graphics card also seems like a waste to me, as all I do is play GW and run data analysis/scientific computing. Since I'm looking at doing a more thorough upgrade soon, I'd thought I'd prep for the future as I don't know that I'll buy again before the beta/release. Thoughts anyone?

U got several options since u dont want to spend a lot or decent money on ur GPU I advice maybe to SLI 2 cards.Obviously u dont have a Motherboard that supports it :P so maybe u can wait until the 9800 is released and buy the 8800GT/GTS/GTX/Ultra

hope this helped ya

There's no such thing as future proofing the graphics...

8800GT is still the champ wrt performance/dollar. Get the 512MB version - the 256MB version is gimped and the 1GB version hardly ever get the utilize the extra RAM. A quality brand one (from ASUS or MSI, say) should be less than $250.

If you're on a tight budget there's the 9600GT. It's a brand new card, very capable although not as fast as the 512MB version of 8800GT. On the other hand it uses less power and thereby generates less heat and noise, and it's a sub-$200 card.

SLI'ing two graphics cards almost doubles performance, but at the cost of enormous energy consumption, noise, and heat, plus of course the cost of two graphics cards. Personally I don't feel SLI is worth it.

Both these cards will run all present and near-future games comfortably, and it would surprise me greatly if GW2 was more demanding than, say, Crysis.

Future-proofing was the wrong term to use probably. At best, I meant in the sense of having something that will run GW2 at high settings. I realize that this won't be the next "crysis" in terms of poorly-coded games (I hope not!), but it will take a bit more than I have currently. The 8800 GT is a possibility, and maybe a 9k series GPU, but more likely an 8k series GPU at a discounted price since the 9k are little more than re-hashed G92s. SLi is a waste, as I'd rather buy 1 decent card and spend any extra cash in my budget on other components.

Thanks for the input!

Just for the record, Crysis isn't a poorly coded game!

you should look into changing mobo/cpu before graphics cards...alot of people don't realize how much their cards can be bottlenecked using older cpus etc.

If you going for SLI there is a decently cheap Nvidea chipset board with dual-PCIe slots too: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...594&CatId=2541

I would suggest 2 8800ultra's in SLI
And now back to the real world.... I'd say get a 8800gt. Mby with 1GB of memory if you have high resses, cuz you need more memory with higher resolutions

I've got an E8400 and P5k w/ 2 gig ddr2 800 memory. I got that part covered .

The best advice I can give you is to take the money you would spend on a card now, set it aside, and double-treat yourself to GW2 and a new video card when GW2 comes out...

yup. it's not like technology prices go up with time. buy something now for $250 and feel bad for yourself in a year when it sells for $50 and it's obsolete. get something for $250 at a later time and you will surely be more happy with it.

How does that really make any difference? Regardless of whether he spends the $250 now, or if he spends it later, the card is still most likely going to be obsolete and much cheaper in a year or so after purchase anyway. Going by that logic they'd end up never buying a card...

I totally agree, but that's only if he wants to play games now which need High sys- requirements. Seeing as he only plays GW, and even my old 7300LE can run GW, he wont need to upgrade right now. I also totally agree with Biostem, but that's just because he only plays GW. Wait till GW2 comes out, and then buy a new graphics card. But if you want to play current games like crysis and bioshock, I would say get a new graph card right away. (It's what I'm doing, because I really wanna play Halo 2)

If he only wants the card upgrade to run gw2 then there is no point getting the card till the release of gw2. if he waits he can spend thesame amount of cash on an even better one closer to release.

In a year? Geez...

I'm still using Radeon 9800 Pro, which is probably some 4-5 years old. The card at the time of purchase was around $300-350.

I can play the latest Unreal without any notable problems, and any MMO that's out there.

Obviously, it wouldn't run Crysis - but then again, I don't care for that.

And in my experience, games that require Star Trek-grade hardware are invariably just eyecandy, but have little to no longevity. Why is CSS still the most popular FPS? It doesn't require a $10,000 machine.

Read here for the basic problem with these games - They Don't Sell on PC market.

You must have very limited experience. When Half-Life first came out, it required a high end computer (at the time). Half-Life 2 - same thing. I'm sure you're not going to call them just eye-candy!
And, when it come to the games mentioned in your link, they don't suggest the graphics are just eye-candy, they only point out the need for high-end equipment.

Today's "Star Trek grade" hardware is tomorrows junk.

I can remember the magazine headlines "Intel 486! The power to run today's apps!" (The Commodore64 was "Star-Trek grade" once.)

But, anyway, in answer to the OP - I would generally agree with those who say wait until you actually need (or want) a better card before buying one as they always get better and cheaper. If you want one now, I'd say go for an nVidia based 8800 of some sort, or an ATI 3870 (?) based card.

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.

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.

It's been said from various sources that GW2 will support both DX9 and DX10.

I would wait till the "new" Dx 10.1 cards comes out. Current Geforce and Ati cards are 10.0 based cards.

Geforce 9xxx are the first 10.1 DX based cards and I would wait till get a few versions under there belt.

Microsoft confirmed it's working on DX 11.... to release who knows when. They did say DX 10.1 is the last version of DX 10 there going to release.

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.

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.

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.

Look, let's say your budget is $250. In a year or so from now, you'll be able to get a card that's $500 now for what you're willing to spend. If you spend your money now, you'll get a card that's pretty good, *now*. In a year, you'll be lucky if it's minimal...

So what exactly does this argument you've so eagerly jumped into have to do with the price of oranges? The guy says he plays guild wars and looks at numbers. Does he honestly need to see you babbling on? He's likely to ask what public transportation speeds have to do with a computer! You think you're dazzling with brilliance where really you're just baffling with bullshit.

xVeinx- if you're honestly looking to get a new graphics card to play GW2, then wait for GW2. From the sound of things, everything you have now is working just fine. Take your money set aside for the new card, and put it into a CD, or maybe a mutual fund, hell a plain old savings account will work too. Store it away, wait for GW2, then when you buy GW2, buy a new graphics card with it. No reason to spend your cash now.

Actually, I'm reasonably savvy on computer architecture and such, so I understand what the "bus" is that he's referring to and how it operates. Your right though, it probably is better to wait, minus the fact that the fan is starting to die on my card (its a cheap thing anyway). Might have to replace it with something like a V700 or similar. But I digress.... Thanks

Your best bet would be a 8800 GT if in time you want abit of a boost buy another and run them in SLI. Unbeatable performance for value atm.