X1900 on the way

[Trinitus]

Both of yall take flicking Chakura!!! Allyuh make some really good points there, but this got me a little scard of what the furutre of gaming holds as in terms of spending money to keep up, esp with the graphic cards...but then again idont think game developers will have much far to go again nowadays to squeeze the demands of the latest and greatest of cards....may take them a while to max it out and then another generation will emerge!!!

[W1nTry]

Now that's not altogether true Beo, at least not the way I see it. Sure a console has a limitation on where it can reach, but considering we only after 4 year saw the real potential of the PS2 with games like GT3 and 4. It takes game houses years to fully utlilize the hardware at its fullest and we can and do get soem seriously noticeable leaps in quality from the first gen of games. Not to mention the revisions to the systems they make to let them run cooler and such allow them to tax it a lil more. Plus be hones with yourself, PC gaming is going the way of the Dinosaur. I am a HARDCORE PC man... but the console has MORE games, more variety and the BIG titles tend to hit them first save and except SOME FPS and MMORG which is still pwned by the PC. Fact is gaming on a console is just much more sensible as you're guaranteed to have it for at least 5 years. And the next thing to factor in is that consoles are becoming increasingly powerful and can infact be used as a PC. That's one of the intentions of Sony and well an Xbox is a rebranded PC... (well kinda a Mac as PowerPC architecture is at its core). Heck the PS2 has a Linux development kit. And the Cell processor is boasted as having mad processing power as well as its multithreaded applications. Did you know Sony intends to put cell processors in ANYTHING and EVERYTHING it can? to make them smart devices. Then you could call uponur fridge for more processing power once its networked... they're alot of things in the works I assure you, the console ain't just a gaming box no more than teh PC is a office tool alone.

[Beomagi]

the playstation 2 was a monster to code for, and that was a major historical mistake - i.e. letting other companies create their tools, when they themselves didn't make much. Other console releases were far better.

One other company that stands out is supernintendo - they moved processing from the system itself to the cart with their fx chip, and again with another chip for other carts.

I honestly cannot see pc gaming going the way of the dinosaur. It's been a GREAT year for pc gaming - not as many games, but it's the kinda games i can take my time sit down and really get immersed in. With vista coming out, the BASE system would make a huge leap - with vista, for the full gui, a card like a 5200fx or 9600se, onboards like the 6100 or R580 would become standard. it would be necessary to supply fill rates, and dx9 which would give the average Joe buying a basic pc, the ability to buy games, and play them - not the best quality, or res, but they'd run.

For every reason for console, there's a reason for the pc. e.g. FACT - i'll have a good pc 5 years from now, and instead of paying an ever increasing price for a console, i'd pay my $200 for a solid midrange card, and push it toward and extreme. FACT - the more usable consoles get, the more limitations you'll see developers using - e.g. prepare for serial numbers, and games not letting you play on live eventually because another person is using your key. If they give consoles too much leeway, it would happen.

As far as sony is concerned, well i'm betting on nintendo with this one Dont need super expensive hardware for a good gaming system, i'd prefer the wand (gyration mouse?)

Yes consoles are getting more powerful - but the more powerful (in relation to current video tech) they get, the more people are going to have to spend. up to a point, people are going to start taking nintendo's route, and others are going to WANT hardware upgrades - the graphical options of a pc jump with releases every 6 months. The stuff the console-only gamers are seeing with the xbox360, we saw when dx9 debut, and again when the next full line of cards came around.

To be honest with myself, i'll admit noone can truly say what's going to happen. We've only had commercially available dedicated 3D acceleration for 10 years, and that's not enough history to go on.

[Trinitus]

OK W1nTry Just said a huge fact that PC gamers try to hide from, and it is a high possibility. It is the possibility of having a company like Microsoft or Sony make a system but that is like a PC, lemme explain what imean, Its like Having an Xbox, but with all the peripherals as a PC, with the limitaitions of an Xbox as far as doing things are concerned, u buy games install them tralalalalah, when that happens thats it for X1900s and 7800s and what not, cause just what was said about consoles lasting a good while these things will too. Companies mught start establishing new systems for u to trade in an older version for a newer version and u pay a discounted fee or something..... oooo my ah way off topic here think i show start a new thread about the future of gaming?

[Beomagi]

there's been to many already
suffice to say, it's been tried, and it never succeded.
Gamers wont change the standard computing platform.

As far as gaming, there's profits to be made on the pc - even if it's less, there's always going to be pc developers.

I doubt you'll get trade in at the company itself - at stores like eb games, and gamestop, you can, but companies are making a sick loss this round on consoles.

[TriniXaeno]

Well Said Beomagi, well said!

Pure poetry.

[Trinitus]

Pure poetry indeed, It came to me that, even if they did what i said to consoles, ppl will stil want to have pcs cause of its range of Freedom, like surfing the internet, doing your homework, and what not, how could i have been so blind!!!!!

[W1nTry]

the playstation 2 was a monster to code for, and that was a major historical mistake - i.e. letting other companies create their tools, when they themselves didn't make much. Other console releases were far better.

I agree with you here, hence why I said we stand to see the same HUGE leaps in the console as the Cell has NO history and its a completely new approach to programming as the cell's strength lies in multithreading.

I honestly cannot see pc gaming going the way of the dinosaur. It's been a GREAT year for pc gaming - not as many games, but it's the kinda games i can take my time sit down and really get immersed in. With vista coming out, the BASE system would make a huge leap - with vista, for the full gui, a card like a 5200fx or 9600se, onboards like the 6100 or R580 would become standard. it would be necessary to supply fill rates, and dx9 which would give the average Joe buying a basic pc, the ability to buy games, and play them - not the best quality, or res, but they'd run.

Unlike with the release of Apple OS X Tiger. Most if not ALL OSes have required hardware to become more and more powerful. Vista is no different and btw buddy Vista is gonna have DRM coming outta its ears so i'll explain more on this shortly

For every reason for console, there's a reason for the pc. e.g. FACT - i'll have a good pc 5 years from now, and instead of paying an ever increasing price for a console, i'd pay my $200 for a solid midrange card, and push it toward and extreme.

FACT, we've been paying more and more each year for the TOP end models which only become mainstream after a generation upgrade. And more so even the mid level cards top out at the higher end more like 299. Also fact, cards that are relegated to mid range are wiped out as old stock b/c they usually introduce a new product to replace it with updated support (eg. X8xx series did not support SM3.0, X16xx does and both in same price range).

FACT - the more usable consoles get, the more limitations you'll see developers using - e.g. prepare for serial numbers, and games not letting you play on live eventually because another person is using your key. If they give consoles too much leeway, it would happen.

Here's where I bring up DRM and Vista. AND STEAM, LETS NOT FORGET THAT. Steam has been locking ppl out of their LEGITIMATE account for the same reasons. Ppl using ur key, bleh yuh locked out some not getting a response for 2 weeks. Also DRM... Digital Rights Management. Which is HEAVILY built into Vista. Imagine I can't watch my DRM protected movies cause I DOH HAVE THE DRM certified MONITOR. Its all part of Intels Viiv as well. POint is DRM is the consumer enemy, cuase its a strategy that computer hardware and software manus are working hard on to make sure u have everything legit. A strong point of a PC is that u get copied games (although u can mod a console as such). IF they start enforcing it like steam more with its STRICTLY online registration to play, you're screwed. Look how long it took to get a working crack of HL2 and they still work iffy. BTW ppl I would encourage you to be legit and support the game developers.

As far as sony is concerned, well i'm betting on nintendo with this one Dont need super expensive hardware for a good gaming system, i'd prefer the wand (gyration mouse?)

I completely agree with you here.

Yes consoles are getting more powerful - but the more powerful (in relation to current video tech) they get, the more people are going to have to spend. up to a point, people are going to start taking nintendo's route, and others are going to WANT hardware upgrades - the graphical options of a pc jump with releases every 6 months. The stuff the console-only gamers are seeing with the xbox360, we saw when dx9 debut, and again when the next full line of cards came around.

And what do u call SLI and Crossfire? 7800GTX 512 x 2... is like OVER 1G..... yeah... price my @$$. Think of it on a 1 to 1. The new console is the top, so u compare it to the top available PC graphics and you have 2 cards, EACH by themselves is MORE expensive but about the same in capabilities. The 7800GTX 512 is comparable to the R500 based graphisc in teh 360... so how is that any different?

To be honest with myself, i'll admit noone can truly say what's going to happen. We've only had commercially available dedicated 3D acceleration for 10 years, and that's not enough history to go on.

Agreed.

[Trinitus]

Yuh Make vista sound scary dey boy W1n....but i guess it will come to past, this was inevitable...we cant fight it,cause for one thing, if ppl figure out to crack these new systems, a better one will come out and the law will definitely have a say in it...

[Beomagi]

The amount of DRM in vista is subject to change - Seeing vista run, it's going to need lots more hardware acceleration than any other OS - least if you enable the glass mode I have a friend RIGHT NOW playing with vista on his standard x700 and standard monitor. There's a Lot of pretty animations and all - no DRM to prevent him. Microsoft didn't get where they are by making rash business decsions. MS windows is where it is today because it didn't force people to buy new hardware. OSes may have needed more powerful hardware, but not video cards. NOW to run looking glass, you'll NEED powerful 3d. Once pushed, It may push the bottom system, to help repopularize pc gaming among pc newbloods.

I paid, $270 for the 6800 a year ago which i have in this system right now - but careful shopping when i got it, also got me prince of persia, pandora tomorrow, and some other apps, which would easily be valued at more than $70. Roughly equal in price to the ti4200 it replaced.

You can get a 7800GT for $289, with COD2 or quake 4, and a couple more games standard to the package, driving the stock price of the 7800GT below $230.

unlocking/biosflashing :
3 or 4 years ago - friend of mine got a 9500 - great card. bios flashed to 9700 - still capable of playing todays games. My card is running at 16/6 for a nice 33% boost. A coworker got a 6800LE for $140 about 6 months ago, unlocked it just the same - it's purring like a 6800gt core with 750MHz mem. The x800GTO˛ - bios flashed to x850xt pe speeds.

SLI and Crossfire.
You dont need it. Computer gaming Means CHOICE, FLEXIBILITY. You can run ANY modern game on a $105, x800 with ease. ANY. You may not be able to max out the graphics, or in a couple games like fear, you may not get better than 1024 res, but that is the flexibility of pc games. You choose to spend less, and be satisfied. You make the decision what quality suits you and your card. Some choose SLI. It's EXISTENCE does not make it a necessity. It only increases the choices available. And seeing 2 7800GTXs in my network admin's machine only told me that that was HIS choice. HE wanted to play the game all the bells and whistles, maxed resolution on his 24" Sony. I decided, to spend a sixth of that to play the same game, with settings that still made it look outstanding. THAT'S choice.

wait 6 months for the next refresh. Then through out the remainder of the life of that console, you can see for yourself. When the xbox first came out - it was a souped up geforce 3. Then the geforce 4 Ti series came around, and the quality once again surpassed it. We went up FOUR generations of the Geforce, before seeing improvement in the xbox console hardware. Do you really think that the 360's shader advantage is going to last for much longer?

And yes, i'm leaving it at a shader advantage. It will still have problems with high res gaming, because of 700MHz memory, and it would still not have the super high res textures supported by PC cards, because it's sharing that memory with standard RAM. It features 48 pipes, so it has a lot of shader power, But most pc games are bottlenecking on resolution, which translates into a need for faster higher bandwidth memory.

[Trinitus]

Tears to my eye....*sniff* PC GAMING SHALL NOT DIE!!!! I JOSHUA CAZOE!!! DECLARE THIS!!! that was a really nice post right there by Magi, made a lot of sense, those prices, oh what exciting times we live in...esp for PC gaming, but what do yall think will be next after this season of cards, what will be necessary to replace the now top-of-the-line cards?

[Beomagi]

Tears to my eye....*sniff* PC GAMING SHALL NOT DIE!!!! I JOSHUA CAZOE!!! DECLARE THIS!!! that was a really nice post right there by Magi, made a lot of sense, those prices, oh what exciting times we live in...esp for PC gaming, but what do yall think will be next after this season of cards, what will be necessary to replace the now top-of-the-line cards?

Higher parallelism. And i dont mean dual core - acccording to an interview with the CEO of ati, they've been doing this for some time now - it's just more pipes, ROP's, etc.

Now, it's going to come down to tweaking features, pipes efficiency, number of pipes, speeds etc.

Features to look forward to would be stuff like avivo. If nvidia decides to join in the video transcoding bit, ati would get their act together on it REAL fast. Physics processing on the GPU is also being toyed with.

I really more than ever want to see the lower end cards sporting 256bit bandwidth interfaces. The x1600 and x1300 are real dissappointments.

[Narcissus]

unlocking/biosflashing :
3 or 4 years ago - friend of mine got a 9500 - great card. bios flashed to 9700 - still capable of playing todays games. My card is running at 16/6 for a nice 33% boost. A coworker got a 6800LE for $140 about 6 months ago, unlocked it just the same - it's purring like a 6800gt core with 750MHz mem. The x800GTO˛ - bios flashed to x850xt pe speeds.

is that the same as overclocking? yes i know i'm a hardware n00b...still learning

[Beomagi]

In a way - both get you performance you dont pay for When you overclock, you make parts of the card run faster - run the memory faster, run the pipes faster etc. When you unlock, you turn on that which the manufacturer turned off. Now overclocking doesn't always get you very far for graphics cards. BUT if you haev an 8 pipe card, and unlock another 8 - such as the 6800le, then you more or less doubled the core processing speed. ATI's GTO needs a bios flash to unlock. Nvidia's AGP cards unlocked through riva tuner.

[W1nTry]

Nvidia is working on their answer to Avivo its known as "pure video" we'll see what comes of that in time. It does seem nvidia went for 3d power as opposed to video so we'll see what they can squeeze out of their hardware. Now whilst I agree with what you're saying about being able to scale down the graphics to squeeze the life outta ur system as I still have a Geforce 3 Ti200 that my younger siblings use and it still manages WC3 and such decently. However once you get accustomed to a certain level of gameplay and once you appreciate how much of a difference a smooth running, clean looking game makes to your actual gameplay you'll find it increasingly difficult to play games toned down and reduced.

I have seen it time and time again where a player esp in LAN games Particulary in FPS really benefits from a top of the line system that will play the game above and beyond 60fps with bells and whistles. With more power you get cleaner graphics and smoother play which ensures that you don't falter other than on ur own lack of skillz. Its amazing to see how much more accurate some men get on a truly fast system as opposed to a mid range ok running one. I am not saying that u don't have a valid point that u can stretch it, I am saying once you move up you won't want to stretch as much. Worse yet when u see a game running sweet on another padna system.

Here's where consoles differ. You are pretty much gauranteed that the games will look better and play JUST as WELL on ur system (unless the developer sucks). As with time they hone their processes and take better advantage of hardware. With PCs the developers have the benefit of newer, faster, more dynamic and powerful hardware ALL the time so they just keep getting the best of the best to develop on and the games get more and more demanding and sure better looking but they also have the benefit to avoid tweaking and optimizing code once the latest greatest hardware will run it. Then they just put a nice label saying the min and recommended specs. On a console you are safe in that you buy a game and it will work without having to turn sh1t down.

I am a PC gamer to heart but imagine I walk in a store recently to buy NFS MW and they had to ask me three times if I am sure I read the PC specs right and I want to make the purchase. My machine is WAY above what is the minimum and the fact that they pointed it out repeatedly tells me they've had problems with customers and the requirements. With a console its no hassle. You walk in you buy you walk out, talk done. I love meh PC and as a active gamer I can tell you a console makes more sense for gaming lately (save and except PC games are cracked alot, which is good and bad). I like to play games smooth and with bells and whistles cause whats the point in getting a great new game if you can't get the full experience. NFS MW looks FANTASTIC on my system running at FULL specs at 1280x1024 with AA and AN. And to be very honest (though not all ppl need it) I wouldn't have it any other way. Imagine playing Farcry and not seeing the water effects and all the crazy sweet scenery. Then its just another FPS. Remember that what defines games is graphics and gameplay. COnsider there haven't been any great breakthoughs in gameplay lately. A FPS IS A FPS IS A FPS. So are RTS unless ur in online or LAN play. If you take away the gameplay the ONLY thing u have is graphics and if ur graphics are .... 'aight' then whats teh point? Its like going to watch a silent movie, without sound its really NOWHERE as good. Esp if its a horrow movie. My point is I upgraded 2x in 1 year JUST to play Doom3 at a decent speed and then to play newer games like NFS MW. I will keep my system safely for about 2-3 years again (but thats due to funds) if I had the cash, its worth it to me to get better stock to ensure that I have the best gaming experience. I mean what do u game for, if not for the experience of it?

[Narcissus]

aite so i'm thinkin wit my limited budget...i'm gonna go wit 2 6800's and try that unlocking thing u talkin bout...see where that gets me

[Czar]

aite so i'm thinkin wit my limited budget...i'm gonna go wit 2 6800's and try that unlocking thing u talkin bout...see where that gets me

Some free advice...I was thinking of doing the exact same thing...getting 2 6800GT's and doin SLI, but ended up getting a 7800GT which gives more frames for much less $$! Better yet now that the 7800GT has dropped in price and you can get one for around $275 on NewEgg. The 6800GT is $235...do the math and you'll see that you would have to shell out $470 for those 2 6800GT's...hell, for that kinda cash...you might as well get the 7800GTX ($450 on NewEgg)!

Check out this article and see the benches for yourself... http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2496&p=1

In most cases the 7800GT beats the 6800GT in SLI, and sometimes even the 6800 Ultra SLI! And in case you're wondering...the 6800 Ultra is way expensive...if you can even find them now...they're not even listed in the dropdown on NewEgg...

[Beomagi]

no to mention that in many cases, SLI systems would be VERY sub par in terms of gain over a single card.

[W1nTry]

I agree with Beo here. SLI and Crossfire only reap the rewards at RIDICULOUS resolutions. So if you doh have a nice Low latency Flat panel (8ms and lower) it not worth it man.  If you read reviews u'll realize these days they only use 1200x1024 and higher 1600x1200 and now there is 2048x something so. In SLI with 16xAA and 32xAN its ridiculous
Fact is if yuh running a 17" monitor u stuck with 1024x768 most likely as anything higher will give u glasses if yuh doh already have them. At normal res most cards doh make much difference. SLI helps with AA and AN thats about it really, at least at those res.