Especially not a 4:3 resolution like 1280×1024 – have you any idea how ugly games look when they’re being stretched into 16:10 aspect ratio from 4:3?

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I’ve got a mildly overclocked Core Duo 6420 at 2.6GHz, one 8800GT, and 2 gigs of PC-800 RAM… Not really the most impressive system in the world, but I still run Crysis at an average of 40fps with everything on “high” and my resolution is at 1680×1050. Even on the second highest setting it’s still (technically, at least) the best looking title I’ve ever seen.

I don’t use Vista, so I can’t vouch for the Very High settings, exactly, but I’ve tried the DX9 hack and I still get a solid 20-25 fps even with shenanigans going on– I really don’t think it would take much more to kick it up into the 30fps range.

Point is, people bitch about how nasty Crysis’ requirements are, but the truth is that they’re really not that bad. If you max everything out, play at 2500x whatever resolution, turn on AA and AF as high as they can go, well, sure you’re gonna take a nasty framerate hit, maybe, probably even into the unplayable range. Since when has that not been the case with PC Games? I never expect to be able to ratchet a games settings to the hilt unless I’ve got hardware a least a year newer than a given game.

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SLI and uber high-end GPUs are a noisy power-hungry irrelevance for the vast majority of PC gaming. Let’s have some real innovation please. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when ATI/AMD start putting CPUs and GPUs on the same core, for example.

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Think of it as a huge 600 stage assembly line, with people doing a different job at each stage processing incoming materials. While it may take 600 units of time for a piece of data/material to get rendered/made, on average 600 units of work have been done each time a stage is processed. That means the bandwidth is high, this is what makes the cards better than a typical cpu, which to keep in with the analogy do just a few stages of work in their assembly line. Actually they’ve reduced it recently with the move to multi-core architecture, hence the drop from 4 ghz to 2 ghz, the pipelining and other implicit parallelizing tricks making the 4 ghz seem faster even though it was clocking more at the 2 ghz range. Apologies to the pedantic if I’ve over simplified or exaggerated for effect.

In this case the two cards just agree that they’ll share the job, scan-line by scan-line for your display resolution. They don’t work together and put extra strain on the cpu (driver) to feed them. That’s a fairly brute force, power consuming, hungry approach. To refer to the assembly line from before, we’ve basically got two assembly pipelines, and they need two factories worth of materials. Not very elegant at all. Due to power constraints there are hard limits on this for now. Even if there weren’t, managing the data to get graphics unit on the card from the cpu (a full copy of the scene geometry, textures etc for each unit) is going to be a bottle neck or at least synchronisation issue. Which is why this isn’t done in the first place.

I’d expect future, sustainable speed ups to come from new techniques like unified shaders (yeah, I know that’s been done, hence why I said “like”), advanced culling systems, more pipelining (assembly stages), power reduction, smaller circuit boards etc.

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For example the X1950, used as an example above, came in XT, XTX, Pro and GT flavours, as well as different memory configurations. They were certainly fond of the letter “X”, that’s for sure. :D

If there’s anyone trying to decide which card to buy, you could do a lot worse than visit Tom’s Hardware VGA Charts (they have one for SLI, too). It’s a great way to get an at-a-glance idea of where each model fits performance-wise, and eases the confusion brought about by the cryptic naming conventions.

Anyway, I won’t be trading in my solitary 8800GTS for the new GX2. I’ll hang back ’til the autumn, and see what either ATI or Nvidia cook up. I’ll grab whatever’s best – there’s no brand loyalty here.

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8800 Ultra
8800GTX
8800GTS 512
8800GT 512
8800GT 256
8800GTS 640
8800GTS 320
8800GS

And there’s also a mobile 8800M GTX, though I don’t really know where that would fit in the table. There’s no way it’s as powerful as a full desktop GTX. Also I’ve not included all the factory overclocked cards which could add to the confusion.

But still, any normal consumer (i.e someone who doesn’t obsessively follow the development of these products like myself) is likely to be mighty confused by this.

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Say you have a Radeon X1950.

It’s from the X1000 series, and it’s a very high end card in that series (950).

nVIDIA do the same – an 8500 is a mid-range 8-series card, so your idea that bigger numbers = better card idea is flawed, since a 7900 will beat the utter crap out of the 8500.

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AMD just started doing a new system that actually makes sense. the first 2 digits denote generation whereas the second two show the position of that card in the lineup. No XT, no GTS, no AlphaPlus3MegaShinRyuKenBetaZetaMega Edition…

That’s it!!! NVidia are copying Capcom!

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