New nvidia cards? Smart or dumb?

[Lynch Hung]

I am currently in the process of building my new pc and am pretty confused with wether I should go out and buy my nvidia 7800 GTX or just wait for the new cards to come in. Could somebody please help me with the following questions?

1. Roughly when will they be available in Australia?

2. What would be a fair estimation of their price point on release?

3. Will there be a major difference with the new card and the 7800 GTX?

If I do wait, I would maybe purchase a 6600 GT just to have something to play with until the new cards are released. Is this a good move? If so which 6600 GT do you guys recommend? (evga isn't available in Aus)

Thanks in advance guys. Cheers!

 

[The_Tobes99]

Well the 7800GT will still be the best value one in the range, Gigabyte make good cards.

 

[beedubaya]

Definately wait for the 7900 series, GT or GTX will do fine. It comes in March and is going to more than double performance over the 7800 series. I imagine many 7800 users will upgrade to the 7900 series after its release because games comming up will really demand that kind of power. 7800GT is a good card now, but I don't have a good feeling about it in about 6 months. Wait for the 7900 series.

 

[FghtinIrshNvrDi]

Definately wait for the 7900 series, GT or GTX will do fine. It comes in March and is going to more than double performance over the 7800 series. I imagine many 7800 users will upgrade to the 7900 series after its release because games comming up will really demand that kind of power. 7800GT is a good card now, but I don't have a good feeling about it in about 6 months. Wait for the 7900 series.

Well put. I totally agree. Don't ask Flanker if you want to hear that though.

Ryan

 

[beedubaya]

Well put. I totally agree. Don't ask Flanker if you want to hear that though.

Ryan

Isn't Flanker the one that always bashes Opterons?

 

[FghtinIrshNvrDi]

I think at one point... I'm not totally sure, but he did this whole shebang with me... Here's the link.

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=89217

entertaining to say the least.

Ryan

 

[gaara]

The G71 has no officially specifications announced yet therefore it is wrong to assume it will "double" performance or anything similar. Thusfar, the only conclusive information known about the new core is the fact that it beefs up the already existing G70 core to include 32 pipelines and most likely higher internal clock frequencies

That said, nvidia is taking a rather silly approach to GPU development at this stage, ATI muchlike what AMD has done has redefined GPU architecture and increased pixel operations to three times that of the normal clock cyle. In other words, this means ATI cards won't have as much raw power as nvidia cards, therefore in pure speed situations an nvidia card will start to take the lead. However, once you start throwing HDR and AA/AF and other shaders into the mix, the number of pixel operations start to play a factor as detail come into mind.

Basically, in the case of nvidia, the pixel will have to pass through the pipeline over and over again in order to achieve the desired number of pixel operations, this is normally the bottleneck issue with video cards. ATI has instead decided to keep fewer pipelines, and muchlike original speculation regarding the r520, each pixel pipeline is effective 3 times as powerful as your normal pipeline as it performs roughly 3 times the number of pixel operations.

So, for those of you who supported the "SM3 is everything" ideal of the last year when nvidia were gods because they were the only GPU to support the instruction sets, you should set your sites on the x1900 as it's a much better card for the job than the G70 or G71 for that matter unless the G71 has ridiculous pipeline counts and high internal frequencies

If you don't believe me, look at FEAR, terribly optimized because each pixel contains a huge array of different shaders from shadows to particles. The x1900 cards outperform even 7800 "ultra" cards in SLI with AA enabled

 

[Tyler1989]

I will be using eVGA's step up program December next year once when the whole Vista requirements mess is finalized and it's released and the DX10 cards are out.

 

[gaara]

You do realize you can only use the step up program within 3 months of the purchase of your card right?

 

[Tyler1989]

3 months...


I'm sorry that can't be right

Please Note: We have recently expanded the eligibility of our Step-Up™ Program. Please review the new terms and conditions carefully to see if you are eligible.

Terms and Conditions

* The EVGA Step-Up™ Program is available to all EVGA graphics card customers who purchased their graphics cards on or after 1 FEB 2004, and are within 90 days of their purchase date (based upon their invoice). Customers who received their EVGA graphics card as part of a complete computer system are not eligible - except for those listed on our approved system vendor list.

http://www.evga.com/stepup/default.asp?switch=2