The Glade 4.0

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/featur ... ps_its_380

DO WANT!

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Holy shitsnacks!

Nice. Depending on how things turn out from nvidia's end, this line of cards may be enough to take the sour aftertaste of ATI out of my mouth that's been in there for over 5 years.

But, can't justify an upgrade now. Already have a very decent video card that I purchased 9 months ago.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Very nice. Daddy needs a new video card.

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The Dude abides.

Now that ATI is part of AMD, things are really looking up. They are not the same crappy cards that they used to be.

I've been using my ATI HD 4830 since around march, or so, and I'm really enjoying it. No problems at all, so far.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

that card tingles the nono spot liberally.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Holy Toledo! Me wants! Me wants!

Have to wait for tax refund...

Grr. I'm really annoyed and bewildered by the decision to launch a new revision of DirectX. It makes zero sense. And nVidia is getting screwed over by it yet again.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

As an ATI Fanboy... mmm the tears are delicious!

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Holy shitsnacks!

I don't have a problem with competition between ATi and nVidia to make the best card. I have a problem with DirectX development explicitly (or implicitly) favoring one or the other, usually by looking at whatever the next card to be designed is doing and say "yeah, we'll call that the new DirectX standard." It doesn't promote competition, it stymies it. And that slows down advancement overall -- as evidence, look at the performance increases (by either/both companies) in the DirectX 9 generation vs. the DirectX 10 generation. DirectX 10 is leaps and bounds faster now than when it was first released, vs. the relatively marginal increases made over DirectX 9's generation. At the end of DirectX 9, Radeon 9700's were still perfectly fine, power-wise, because there just wasn't that much advancement despite 5-6 years. Why? Because there wasn't the competition driving things since nVidia got stuck with its FX 5xxx series architecture that DirectX standards negated the strengths of (FX cards were capable of better precision that nobody used because it wasn't a DirectX standard since the standards for 9 were cribbed from the spec sheet of the 9700). Thus, nVidia does a full redesign of their architecture to mimic the DirectX 9 standards that they were left out of the loop in contributing to, and because of the lack of competition the FX series posed, the Radeon x series and x1's were pretty **** unimpressive performance increases.

Furthermore, now is a really lousy time to be releasing a new version of DirectX. Or at least, it lacks any compelling reason to. DirectX 10 still hasn't made significant market penetration because so many people are skipping Vista. But (a lot of, at least) the people who were skipping Vista have DirectX cards, by now. So what's the answer now that you think people will finally upgrade off XP?

1) Make Windows 7 continue DirectX 10, perhaps with an incremental sub-revision, ala 9c. Now everybody has DirectX 10, yay!
2) Introduce a DirectX 11 for 7 and Vista users. Now people will have 11-capable OSes running DirectX 10 cards, and they don't want to upgrade their cards yet (especially since they just dropped a couple hundred on a new OS!)... And we can continue the terrible multi-version support that's been crippling engine advancement for years now and the reason virtually nothing to this day does anything of import (to the game/gameplay/presentation) that couldn't have been done on 9.

And we chose option 2. Why!?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Putting "DIRECTX 11 SUPPORT" in really big letters is going to sell a hell of a lot more video cards than "DirectX10c compliant".

Prepare for the incoming marketing campaign telling us how our games are going to look SOOOOOO much better if we buy a DirectX 11 card.

Nah, the beast of a video card that NVidia just announced supports DX11 as well, so I don't think anyone is getting screwed on that end.

I agree though, it's silly to bring out a new revision, when DX10 still isn't mainstream.

Looking at the new NVidia card though, I'm actually really tempted to hold out for that one...it's pretty insane.

I dunno. Seems to me the only reason DX10 isn't mainstream is because Bill (or Steve, or whoever) decided XP users wouldn't get to play. Also, from what I understand DX11 is a superset of DX10 and doesn't change much, just adds more, so developers won't need to change what they are doing, unless they want to.