8800 - wait and see...

Mr.E Solved! wrote:
Michael W. Ryder wrote:

I didn't feel like spending $200 or more for another video card only
to replace it in a few months.


Silly, that's what high end PC gaming is all about, constant hardware
improvements to take advantage of more sophisticated software algorithms.

And you are slightly off on your math, it's not $200 every few months,
for the real enthusiast it's $400 (just for the video card) every 6-9
months. Rich buyers move the old equipment like hand-me-downs through
the PC chain. More budget minded folk sell the still useful gear to
defray the cost of new gear, which can be a significant percentage of
the cost.


Well I spent $400 to buy the 9700 Pro when it first came out rather than
waiting the 6 months for the new architecture to "stabilize". There was
no competition for the card for over a year. Sometimes you get lucky.


That methodology affords great performance and avoids all the pitfalls
of early adoption. I look forward to my Geforce 8 series purchase in
about three months when:

1) The chipset refresh will be announced/available
2) Many more choices of card-HSF-system board to suit my needs
3) Many Driver revisions will have occurred
4) Killer DX10 Apps/Games will be available
5) Prices have reached the $400 mark

Tick tock tick tock.

"John Lewis" wrote in message
...
Your memory is very short. There were some very big initial hiccups.

My memory goes back to the ATi 3D Rage and Matrox Millenium days. :-) The
Radeon 9700 was not hard-launched; the reviewers had a chance to thoroughly
abuse the cards before they became available in retail. The initial problems
were not on the same order of magnitude as the 8800 has now. All in all the
9700 owners had a good experience out of the box, and didn't have to upgrade
again for 2-3 years - for once the early adopters didn't lose much, and it
may not get repeated again.

And ATi (er, AMD) are still lagging in OpenGL and Linux driver
support.

ATi's OpenGL support caught up with nVidia a long time ago, since around the
time of the Radeon 9x00 cards. In Doom 3, for example, the 9800 was equal or
faster than the FX5900, despite the latter's optimizations for stencil
operations (having so-called "32 x 0" pipelines). Nowadays there aren't that
many demanding OpenGL titles. Anand's benchmarks in Prey shows the X1950XTX
to be 24% faster than the 7900GTX and only 12% slower than the 8800GTS.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2870&p=26

For what it's worth, ATi has better driver support for Mac OS X and
marginally better support for NetBSD (remember that silly petition?).
Whether Linux support is symbolically more important is open to debate.
Apparently ATi's stance is to dedicate manpower commensurate with OS
marketshare. This ultimately means one coder (out of the whole team) spends
half a day every week developing Linux drivers. For a non-dual-booting
Windows user (all 95% of the market), this doesn't really matter.

When a new GPU architecture is released, it is a very wise (and
money-saving) idea to wait six months for any hardware glitches to be
rectified, the MB and video card BIOS's to be stable and the
video-card drivers to be fully mature. Nice to have all the rich
suckers (er, early-adopters) helping straighten out all the kinks and
finance the bulk of the development cost.

This is usually good advice, simply because in six months nVidia may come up
with something like a 8900, like it had always done (GF3 Ti, FX5900, GF7900
etc.). Also remember DX10.1 is planned for the first half of 2008.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

" wrote in message
ups.com...
Just some FYI for anyone who is considering an 8800 purchase.

I picked up an 8800GTS on an eVGA trade-up for my 7900GTO, since the
trade-up window was going to close soon.

First off, you can crank some unbelievable levels of AA and AF at high
res on this thing. The Anandtech article was not understating what a
big jump forward this is (on par with the ATI 9700 release).

Unfortunately this is at huge cost in compatibility. Not unexpected,
but there are some major issues with fairly popular games. Some brand
cards cannot even load the latest drivers. My eVGA could use the
97.44's direct from nVidia, but the stupid nTune app refuses to
install. I haven't tested on all my games, but Halo is the first one
with game-killing artifacts I've run into. I may do some extensive
testing as I've got a ton of different games. I just got the card, so
all I've played is Prey, COD2, rFactor, GTR2, RBR, F.E.A.R., Quake 4,
and Halo. Only spent any length of time in GTR2, and Halo was the only
one with immediate, unplayable bugs.

Lots of little annoying quirks in the driver and control panel, too.
Could only get the old CP through a registry hack, and I had to use the
reforce util to get refresh rates to work properly in OpenGL.

I'm trying to find good forum info - nZone has a thread tracking the
current bugs. Luckily if I have anything I'm desperate to play I have
an ATI1600 in my "office tasks" PC, and a 6800Ultra in my media box
hooked to the TV.

If people are genuinely interested I'll update this thread with
anything I run into compatibility-wise.

Kendt


While there have always been "fixes" and work-arounds to DOS or Win9x games
in WinXP , I believe with Vista and DirectX 10 there will turly be a need
for a backwards compatible box. Too many significant differences to make a
compatible system.

I recently built a Shuttle SN41G2 box with Sempron 2400+, 1GB RAM, 6800XT
video, 80GB HD to run WinXP and Win98/DOS games. This may just have to work
for me through the next many years until I no longer care to play those
"older" games any more. Granted my up-to-date gaming box is much more
powerful, but usually sell off the PC as a whole, or in parts, every year or
two to fund my next gaming PC upgrade.

It's unfortunate, but reality that I believe we must face with Windows Vista
and DirectX 10, as far as gaming is concerned.

"HockeyTownUSA" wrote in message


[...]

It's unfortunate, but reality that I believe we must face with
Windows Vista and DirectX 10, as far as gaming is concerned.

Google DirectX 9L.

"DRS" wrote in message
...
"HockeyTownUSA" wrote in message


[...]

It's unfortunate, but reality that I believe we must face with
Windows Vista and DirectX 10, as far as gaming is concerned.

Google DirectX 9L.


I know that DirectX 9L is for "backwards" Vista compatibility with DX9 and
prior games, but who knows what compatability issues that will bring?

On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 20:02:05 -0500, "HockeyTownUSA"
wrote something that piqued my interest enough to
reply with:


"DRS" wrote in message
...
"HockeyTownUSA" wrote in message


[...]

It's unfortunate, but reality that I believe we must face with
Windows Vista and DirectX 10, as far as gaming is concerned.

Google DirectX 9L.


I know that DirectX 9L is for "backwards" Vista compatibility with DX9 and
prior games, but who knows what compatability issues that will bring?

I think that the point that DRS was trying to make is that all games
using DX9 up to DX9.0c will run under DX 9L in Vista, the point that was
missed is DX9L is a software interpreting layer so they may actually run
slower on the same PC under Vista as they did under XP, plus Vista/DX9L
offers no assurance of backwards compatibility to DX8 or lower so older
games may fail completely.
--
Alfie
http://www.delphia.co.uk/
The important things are always simple; the simple things are always hard.

"Alfie [UK]" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 20:02:05 -0500, "HockeyTownUSA"
wrote something that piqued my interest enough to
reply with:


"DRS" wrote in message
...
"HockeyTownUSA" wrote in message


[...]

It's unfortunate, but reality that I believe we must face with
Windows Vista and DirectX 10, as far as gaming is concerned.

Google DirectX 9L.


I know that DirectX 9L is for "backwards" Vista compatibility with DX9 and
prior games, but who knows what compatability issues that will bring?

I think that the point that DRS was trying to make is that all games
using DX9 up to DX9.0c will run under DX 9L in Vista, the point that was
missed is DX9L is a software interpreting layer so they may actually run
slower on the same PC under Vista as they did under XP, plus Vista/DX9L
offers no assurance of backwards compatibility to DX8 or lower so older
games may fail completely.
--
Alfie
http://www.delphia.co.uk/
The important things are always simple; the simple things are always hard.


Gotcha. That was my point. I figured he was trying to say that there's no
need to worry since we have DX9L. From experience I say no way in hell.
Backwards compatability is always an issue. Hence my discussion about this
time the need for a backwards compatible gaming box. At least I plan on
keeping mine. Perhaps I will just keep my Athlon64 4800+ X2, 2GB DDR500,
7950GT instead of my Sempron 2400+, 1GB DDR333, 6600GT.

HockeyTownUSA wrote:
[snip]

Gotcha. That was my point. I figured he was trying to say that there's no
need to worry since we have DX9L. From experience I say no way in hell.
Backwards compatability is always an issue. Hence my discussion about this
time the need for a backwards compatible gaming box. At least I plan on
keeping mine. Perhaps I will just keep my Athlon64 4800+ X2, 2GB DDR500,
7950GT instead of my Sempron 2400+, 1GB DDR333, 6600GT.

I'd bet by the time Vista is well established and a must-have,
quad-core will be the norm for high-end gaming boxes. Look at what
Remedy were demoing for Alan Wake, and claiming they used an entire
core just for the physics.

I'm hoping the onset of Vista doesn't make nVidia say "the 8800 and up
are meant as Dx10 only parts, sorry about the bugs, but they're
staying" I don't think they *can* say that with the market the way it
is now. I've been playing some other games, and I haven't found many
other problems. I never did a comprehensive sweep of my games when I
had the 7900GTO, so some of what I'm finding may have been there, too.
With a number of big recent titles having problems, I think there will
be fixes soon. It does worry me a bit that alot of the issues in the
latest driver release notes are blamed on the games themselves, and not
the drivers.

If we're lucky, the normal driver maturation will take care of the
older stuff running under XP, and we can just dual-boot for a while.
My gaming rig had a Win98 partition until the last rebuild. Hopefully
I can just SLI this 8800GTS on a quad-core motherboard for the next
build.

Kendt

The future at MS is Virtualization. Thats why Vista comes with MS Virtual PC
for free. You can install your older windows version and run it from within
Vista, as a virtual PC, with virtually "old" hardware. I find it works
great for the really old games (dx 7, dx8). I think the dx9 games will run
fine nativly in Vista. You can also install your favorite flavor of linux as
a virtual machine. I thought that programs run in virtual machines would run
really slow, but so far I have been pleasantly supprised.

Kurt
" wrote in message
ups.com...

HockeyTownUSA wrote:
[snip]

Gotcha. That was my point. I figured he was trying to say that there's no
need to worry since we have DX9L. From experience I say no way in hell.
Backwards compatability is always an issue. Hence my discussion about
this
time the need for a backwards compatible gaming box. At least I plan on
keeping mine. Perhaps I will just keep my Athlon64 4800+ X2, 2GB DDR500,
7950GT instead of my Sempron 2400+, 1GB DDR333, 6600GT.

I'd bet by the time Vista is well established and a must-have,
quad-core will be the norm for high-end gaming boxes. Look at what
Remedy were demoing for Alan Wake, and claiming they used an entire
core just for the physics.

I'm hoping the onset of Vista doesn't make nVidia say "the 8800 and up
are meant as Dx10 only parts, sorry about the bugs, but they're
staying" I don't think they *can* say that with the market the way it
is now. I've been playing some other games, and I haven't found many
other problems. I never did a comprehensive sweep of my games when I
had the 7900GTO, so some of what I'm finding may have been there, too.
With a number of big recent titles having problems, I think there will
be fixes soon. It does worry me a bit that alot of the issues in the
latest driver release notes are blamed on the games themselves, and not
the drivers.

If we're lucky, the normal driver maturation will take care of the
older stuff running under XP, and we can just dual-boot for a while.
My gaming rig had a Win98 partition until the last rebuild. Hopefully
I can just SLI this 8800GTS on a quad-core motherboard for the next
build.

Kendt