Random Thought on this whole Video Card Thing - Vent

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 3:19 pm

I buy ATI cards because they are less expensive normally and go up the DirectX ladder much faster than nvidia.

I think the vast majority of people like me really want to buy a much more neato Nvidia card like a 260GTX but do not as it is uses a retarded dx 10, not even dx 10.1, and obviously not dx11.

I keep buying ati cards and knowing that an Nvidia card is what the games from 2005 onward are designed for. I keep buying ATI because of supposed dx features that are being developed for it. Yet my logic never kicks in and realizes that nvidia controls and works along with game makers and so my rationale for buying ATI is stupid.

Price is irrelevant as nvidia's quite old 260GTX destroys stuff still and is faster than the card I am gleefully waiting to get, the 5770 ATI.

Then there is a question of power requirements. Using 35 watts more power is meaningless. You still can't cool passively a 90 watt card on max draw, so a 125 watt card uses the same cooling solutions, just runs slightly higher temps on load which are meaningless. I could see if a nice gaming middle of road speed card had like 40 watts draw, then we are talking passive and silent.

I think like 80% of the people on here or more want to buy nvidia but we talk up these dink, hard to find cards like 4770 which still require multiple fans in the case for gaming. I buy them too and wonder why.

that's about that. I will be online tomorrow looking for the first non-reference 4770 to be benched, hopefully.

psiu · Post by **psiu** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 5:11 pm

Aren't the ATI cards destroying Nvidia's cards at comparable price points though? That seems to be the general idea I get from all these reviews--although I don't read them that thoroughly, as I am way out of them budget wise (I stick under $100 usually).

I basically buy ATI cards for a few reasons:

the older cards I had of theirs were higher performing (Radeon 9700, X800)
the newer cards I have of theirs are good performers for the class they are in (Radeon 4670, 4350)
I'm used to their drivers and setup
know their product line better so I can gauge what I need/want

edit: I'm waiting for the Radeon 6670 to come out

double-edit: what's ATI gonna do when their model numbers get back around to 7000?

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 9:02 pm

no way, the 260gtx is cheaper than than the 5770 and runs faster. it just doesnt have dx 11 on it. It also is compatible with

LINUX.

no ati card is compatible with linux. Cedega, even a paid program on linux is not compatible. Oh you can make it "work" but its always catch up and plan made to fail at various points during your computing year.

the 5870 level beats out nvidia, yes, price wise, yes a bit. It still is expensive though. The only real deals are the 5850 and the 5750 in terms of beating out nvidia as they are of similar pricing yet have better thermals and dx11

see, it's just about dx11, the thing that stops everyone from saying Nvidia rocks. Yet how many games that are GOOD and that you still PLAY use dx 10.1? Eh, yeah thought so, and next is dx11. eh. Notice how sites explain that dx11 will be around this later Winter?

Notice how "fermi" nvidia's dx11 is also coming out then? Yeah, not a coincedence.

yet, I will be buying an ati card, like a moron, shortly. Carrot in front of me keeps me going to next dx.

Heck i dont even have vista yet!

I will need to blow 300+ dollars on windows 7 Professional full install just to use my 129 dollar video card..... hm...

I am as well used to ATI. I never had nvidia ever. I was a big fan of the AIWonder however.

had the pci version, agp 9800 pro (was awesome), the x1900 pro AIW was very very cool, and then blam nothing. I got the 3870, fantastic card at 1920x1200, runs cold. 2000 series sucked, passed on it. the 4x series wasnt a big enough jump and the top end card was a fireball.

so yeah im like you in many ways but i always wanted a nvidia secretly.

xan_user · Post by **xan_user** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 9:31 pm

I buy ATI because nvida drivers caused me endless problems, back around the turn of the century.

-I wish I didn't hold grudges so long.

spookmineer · Post by **spookmineer** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:58 pm

Up to a point, I am all for getting new hardware/OS to get the best eye candy. Up to a point.

Dx10 cards are compatible with Dx11 (not all improvements will be implemented obviously, though).
Dx10 has been out since 2007, yet all games are still backwards compatible with Dx9.
Dx10 has been out for years but still has to be implemented properly. Dx10 is a failure, or the needed OS for it was...

I concluded a while ago that all that eye candy is marvellous etc, but it doesn't keep you playing a game. Moreover, people keep on playing games even from Dx7/8 era on their GTX 8800's because the gameplay is to their liking.

Ofcourse, when buying a new card, the newer features should be considered.
When viewing screenshots though, you will find no mind blowing differences between Dx10 and Dx11, apart from tesselation and other neat new things. And to be able to use these features to their full potential, you will need a pretty high end card.

This is all interesting and it sure shows how games keep on improving, but to me it's just not what gaming is about. From what I've seen, the improvements of Dx11 over Dx10 are visible, when taking a screenshot and enlarging certain areas. Things you will hardly see while gaming.

Perhaps I'm not representing the majority of gamers. Whenever I feel I need a new card, I will obviously look for the best one in my budget with the most features. After I buy it, I find I never play games that fully need all the features though.
In a way you might be right about a "conspiracy" (Dx11 games releasing at the same time of Fermi).
If you feel comfortable with ATI, I'd stick with it. I never bought an ATI card, and always had fun gaming. I wouldn't even buy a high end ATI now, even though they clearly have the lead at the moment. I mean, the brand doesn't make for the best gaming experience. The games do.

Is investing 429+ bucks going to make you experience the games you play in a better way?

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 6:27 am

for that price I could get a 3 hookers and have my own "lan party"

I try not spend over 229 dollars for a video card every 2 years. I think that is a fair deal. Currently, there isnt a card that I would buy that costs more than 199 dollars, so that's where I am at.

I am considering the 250 nvidia card or the 260gtx.

How much of 11 is in 10.1? and, will a dx10.1 card in a dx11 game use all the graphics of 10.1 besides whatever is exclusive to just dx11?

or will it be dx10? reason I say this is that 10.1 improves performance and has better visuals.

Post by **CA_Steve** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 7:12 am

Here's a decent article at Driver Heaven comparing DX11 to DX10.

For the user, DX11 should provide a higher quality image and higher fps when compared to DX10.

For developers, DX11 will be MUCH easier (and take much less time to) develop games to use multiple CPU cores/threads than it is for DX10/10.1. So, expect an explosion of new games that make use of more than 2 cores.

Olle P · Post by **Olle P** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:15 am

Interesting comments in this thread...

I got my first 3D-capable graphics almost exactly 11 years ago in the form of a computer featuring ATI Rage LT Pro.

Went to the nearest supermarket to get me some cool games to utilize all that graphics power. Bought a collection called Front Line Fighters that featured "3Dfx" according to labels on the box. "Cool," I thought, "3D-effects is just what I want!"
After installation I got some error message declaring that some glide32.dll was missing. Bummer!
Learned the hard way that "3Dfx" was a company featuring some proprietary API that wasn't supported by my computer. Instead I had to run the games in CPU-rendered mode, which wasn't nearly as neat as possible. One down for ATI.

Then came the game Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord, released in the summer 2000. This game and its two successors made use of fog tables to draw transparent textures. Even though at least some Radeons were support to have hardware support for fog tables, that feature wasn't implemented in the drivers. Even though Big Time Software, the developers of Combat Mission, discussed the issue with ATI, there seemed to be no solution in sight for users of ATI graphics, ever! ATI users were stuck with the "fast and compatible" graphics settings in Combat Mission, missing out on the marvellous details of fog, smoke and transparent buildings.
That was sufficient to make me decide: No more ATI for me!

By the end of 2000 I bought a new computer with GF 256. That graphics card was later replaced by a GF 3Ti200, GF FX5900LE and the current GF 7800GT.

After AMD bought ATI and fixed the general driver issues I've found out that today the ATI drivers do support fog tables, so I actually do consider upgrading to a faster Radeon when I replace my current graphics card...

(And I do believe that DX11 will soon be as big as DX9 is right now, since DX11 is supported by both Vista and Win7.)

Cheers
Olle

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 11:35 am

For me, it's all about the idle. Well, I guess I do require a card to have a load power requirement of under 100W, but as long as it idles low, I'm happy. Nvidia did a good job with the GT200 series against the HD 4000's, but compared to the 5000 series and the 3800 series, the idle power left room for improvement. Sure, prices of the 5700's is high now compared to the competition, but at the same time, the cards have just barely been released.

spookmineer · Post by **spookmineer** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 6:32 pm

spookmineer wrote:Is investing 429+ bucks going to make you experience the games you play in a better way?

~El~Jefe~ wrote:for that price I could get a 3 hookers and have my own "lan party"

...

~El~Jefe~ wrote:I will need to blow 300+ dollars on windows 7 Professional full install just to use my 129 dollar video card..... hm...

I'd go for the hookers this year, and the upgrade next year. Prices of hookers will rise or stay the same, while windows 7 and any current video card will only drop

coreyography · Post by **coreyography** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:09 pm

Out of curiosity, what's so hard about DX11? Why is NVidia not supporting it yet? Is it just NVidia getting weary of Microsoft changing APIs like most people change underwear?

I bought a HD4870 because for ~$165, as at that price it seemed to have the best performance out there (I just can't bring myself to pay >$200 for a video card. Hookers -- that's another matter

). Power usage was not the best, but that was a secondary criterion. Contrary to El Jefe's statement, it worked great in Arch Linux 64-bit. The Catalyst Linux drivers _were _ crap, I admit, but the Xorg open-source drivers were completely painless, if not blindingly 3D-accelerated.

I'm not using that card anymore due to botched heatsink surgery (and crappy stock VRM cooler design), but since my primary environment is now Linux, I decided to get a GTX275 (for advanced capability support in Linux, and for CUDA, which I found out about after I bought the ATI card). Had to pay about $190 for that. The NVidia Linux binary drivers do work well, though if you ever want to switch back to ATI, you have to do some Linux surgery as NVidia replaces some key X shared libs with their own. Bad NVidia!

Overall, I've used various products from both vendors over the years, and never had serious issues with either. My biggest gripe was not being able to use later Catalyst releases on my Dell laptop (with ATI X1400 graphics), though this was more a Dell issue, and fixed nicely by the MobilityModder utility. I don't game a whole lot, but I do some 3D CAD work and video/photo postprocessing.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:37 pm

From what I gather, dx 10.1 is like dx 10.5.

the 0.1 made it sound so trivial, yet it runs faster and looks better on the cheap. I really do think that nvidia has the better cards, but ATI just went psycho since the 3870, making ultra efficient affordable cards.

I too wonder how freakin hard is it to make dx11 now or 10.1 a year ago. Believe it or not, nvidia is the BIGGER company!

shrug?

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 9:10 pm

spookmineer wrote:
spookmineer wrote:Is investing 429+ bucks going to make you experience the games you play in a better way?

~El~Jefe~ wrote:for that price I could get a 3 hookers and have my own "lan party"
...

~El~Jefe~ wrote:I will need to blow 300+ dollars on windows 7 Professional full install just to use my 129 dollar video card..... hm...
I'd go for the hookers this year, and the upgrade next year. Prices of hookers will rise or stay the same, while windows 7 and any current video card will only drop

If I keep going for the hookers, I'll never be able to game! Hm, if I save up another 300 bux I could upgrade to much better ones.... similar to the whole video card concept!

spookmineer · Post by **spookmineer** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 10:08 pm

There are upgrades for hookers?!

Olle P · Post by **Olle P** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 1:20 am

coreyography wrote:Out of curiosity, what's so hard about DX11? Why is NVidia not supporting it yet?

It's new. To have hardware fully support it the hardware must be a new design.

Nvidia simply doesn't have anything sufficiently new in their current portfolio. They've been busy flogging as much as they can out of their older designs rather than speeding up the development of the Fermi products.

Cheers
Olle

psiu · Post by **psiu** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 4:46 am

Browsing over at Phoronix it sounds like the ATI Linux drivers are doing better...also, *throws gasoline on the fire* who puts Linux and gaming in the same sentence anyway? It's all on Windows anyway

That said I play older games anyways--heck I run COD2 MP in DX7 mode...I play older games and get the newer ones when they are old and down to $20-30.

And yeah, my router runs pfsense (a BSD based OS) and I'm pretty much done with Linux for at least a couple of years.

alecmg · Post by **alecmg** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 5:29 am

psiu wrote:I play older games and get the newer ones when they are old and down to $20-30.

I'm sorry, this just reminded me of http://xkcd.com/606/
The cake is a lie

Let me add to all FUD rampagin in this thread: ATI cards have better image quality!

psiu · Post by **psiu** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 11:02 am

alecmg wrote:
psiu wrote:I play older games and get the newer ones when they are old and down to $20-30.
I'm sorry, this just reminded me of http://xkcd.com/606/
The cake is a lie

Let me add to all FUD rampagin in this thread: ATI cards have better image quality!

It's only 2009. I had to look up the cake reference.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 3:58 pm

Well. I am buying the 5770. I guess I might as well get the non reference. I wish someone had one with the cover off of it. I want to check out what is cooling the VRM. I am considering using Enzotech copper beauties on it. They are the best and not that pricey as they can be reused.

thejamppa · Post by **thejamppa** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 7:04 am

I got 3 Ati's running in 3 computer's

HD 4850 512MB first Patch. I bought it when it was released. Was best performing card in that price segment. I wanted nVidia 9800 GTX+ (prio name change) but availability sucked atm and none were available. So I bought Ati. I bought it for 180â‚¬'s during its release.

I have HD 4670 fanless in one. nVidia never could provide card with similar specs in price/performance when I looked it. 9600GT was faster but also bigger and needed PCI-E. Was prior Green Line edition releases. Cost me 105â‚¬'s with shipping and Zalman passive cooler.

I got Sapphire HD 4850 in 3rd machine. I bought it this summer when I originally wanted HD 4770 but due aivalability and significant price drops I bought my Sapphire HD 4850 512MB for 99â‚¬'s when I had reserved HD 4770 for 95â‚¬'s. At the time nVidia had not dropped prices of their cards and 250's cost 130â‚¬'s. 4 days after I installed sapphire GTS 250's came in same prices. I'd bought nVidia if nVidia had dropped prices earlier. Since Ati brought problems for not fitting in Ubuntu without heavy modifications and nVidia was prior but did not fit in my budget.

So, every time I wanted nVidia (8800 GT, 9800 GTX+ and so forth) nVidia has not been able to bring the produce in market in enough quanities so I have had at least twice take Ati instead nVidia when nVidia's products were not available.'

3rd time it was matter of money and timing. I guess I basicly lean nVidia in cards but they've been screwing too much after 8800 GT.

But I buy card's that suit my need and fit my budget. Wether best price performance is nVidia or Ati I buy best in category I need. Lately points have been for Ati's favours but when nVidia gets amazing gaming card sub $200 and I am looking such card I'll buy nVidia if Ati then doesn't have better to buy and vice versa.

Being product fanboy has no positive things at all. We'll see how situation is once nVidia gets off its high horse and manages to get their head unstuck from where sun doesn't shine they'll bring something into competition... once they get rid of few incompitent fool's in nVidia leadership...

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 8:31 am

Yes, this is my experience!

I currently really WANT a 260gtx. I think it is a superior card in every way:

runs games faster, kinda a plus
doesnt run ANY games slow - ati's always crap out on 2 major titles per season due to ATI not ever being a part of the financing or development or cross marketing of anything
Doesnt come with a free Dirt2 coupon - honestly, I am not 12 years old playing smash up games on my xbox360, so thanks for playing.
Doesnt come with any games that run slow on it - Prior to AMD owning ATI, ATI would only release really cool utility software or a decent game that was sure to run max on that card. I have bought ati since and they often bundle games that work faster on the much better models. ah-hem.
Runs PHysX - wouldnt we all want to be able to run this? Yes.
Runs things like folding at home and scientific crap - This is just pimp
Doesnt have lots of crap versions of it that roast at 80C out of the gate. Ati makes this whole "reference" choke hold on its partners, now we wait for a much better version of the 5770 because of it (possibly waiting for post-Christmas it seems)
And of course, linux.
And it's cheap.

just dx10.0 blows my mind.

blech

spookmineer · Post by **spookmineer** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 4:04 pm

Seriously, if that's the deal, you need to take another look at some screenshot comparisons.

You are giving all that up for DX?

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:05 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote:I think the vast majority of people like me really want to buy a much more neato Nvidia card like a 260GTX but do not as it is uses a retarded dx 10, not even dx 10.1, and obviously not dx11.

Realistically, most PC games being released at the moment (October 2009) are still using DirectX 9. The ones that do use DirectX 10 only have a few small tweaks. If you look at the PC games which have come out over the last few months many of the fairly high profile titles are only DirectX 9 games eg:

Prototype,
Armed Assault 2,
Overlord 2,
Wolfenstein,
Bionic Commando,
Need For Speed:Shift,
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising,
Dragon Age Origins,
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,

Some games have DirectX 10 support but it's questionable how much of a difference it makes. You maybe get a little more smoke or dust on screen but it's hardly an essential part of the gameplay.

These are the PC games out recently with some DirectX 10 support

Resident Evil 5,
Red Faction: Guerilla,
Borderlands,

This wikipedia list gives an idea of what games use DirectX 10:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ga ... 10_support

There are hardly any games with DirectX 10.1 support. Unless you want to play Stormrise and Battleforge in DX10.1 then it shouldn't really be something that affects your buying decision.

You could argue that that's because the consoles don't support Direct X 10 so there's no real incentive for the developers to bother on the PC version, also many of these games are still using older game engines which don't have DirectX 10 incorporated. You hardly even need a new card for new games anyway. They mostly run well on older hardware. The exceptions being really bad console ports (eg: Saints Row 2 PC) which are unplayable on anything.

Post by **CA_Steve** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:36 pm

It'll be interesting to watch how well (or poorly) DX11 is received by the game developers.

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:19 pm

The problem with going for the first DirectX 11 cards to come out is that you don't actually know how well they will run games in DirectX 11. You could buy a mid range "DirectX 11" card now, only to find that when you buy a high profile DirectX 11 game, and enable all the effects, that your graphics card will simply grind to a halt.

(eg: Crysis 2 which is supposed to be out sometime next year apparently)

That's what happened when Nvidia released their "DirectX 10" cards in 2007 before any DirectX 10 games were available. Models like the Nvidia 8600GT/ 8600GTS were supposed to have full DirectX 10 support but their performance in DirectX 10 games was terrible.

This page lists some upcoming games which are supposed to have DirectX 11 support:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ga ... 11_support

There are some preview DirectX 11 SDK demonstration movies and articles but they aren't that impressive really.

Dirt 2 DirectX 11 compared to DirectX 9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDFszGI3FwQ

Some DirectX 11 links

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6863 ... tion/News/

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1040/1/

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... type=&aq=f

spookmineer · Post by **spookmineer** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:24 pm

After watching this "old" Unreal Tournament 3 Tech Video (DirectX 9), can someone explain me what the real, hands on benefits of DirectX 11 are?

After reading some reviews, it's clear that it enables developers to code engines more easily, and that it handles shaders even more uniformly which speeds up things.
So that is: quicker development, and quicker (more fluent) gameplay (for gamers, that would be 5870 X4).

But, aside from some hardly noticable tesselation, what are the differences in what you actually see on your monitor? And, I assume not many players will stand still during some firefight to see how the glass breaks, or how the ripples in the water are progressing, or how that neat little brick sticks out of a wall and casts some nice shadow.
Real visual differences?

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:36 pm

A) Crisis is a shitty game and programmed by a retard
B) that's all there needs to be said, as most agree, but one letter makes for a bad list
C) dx11 and dx 10.1 allow for MORE fps than in dx9 or dx10.0 trying to do similar visual quality. If it adds little, it will give at least what you saw before but smoother and with less stress on the system.
D) Dirt2 is dx 11, it's rather sick graphically, check the demo. The 5750 is meant to pump it out and is the sort of demo game for the ati series
E) Most new games use dx10. I cannot think of a well known company that has no dx10 support in 2009 or this fall
F) nvidia makes a better card, none of which I will be buying even knowing that fact

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:50 am

spookmineer wrote:After watching this "old" Unreal Tournament 3 Tech Video (DirectX 9), can someone explain me what the real, hands on benefits of DirectX 11 are?

Have a look at this AMD demonstration video from Quakecon 2009 where Neil Robison goes into some detail about what graphical and performance improvements DirectX 11 offers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wp4Y-u8-Qw

~El~Jefe~ wrote:E) Most new games use dx10. I cannot think of a well known company that has no dx10 support in 2009 or this fall

Of the PC games released in 2009 so far, and including the ones due to come out before Christmas, the vast majority don't actually use DirectX 10 at all. That includes ones from high profile developers like Bioware (Dragon Age Origins) and Infinity Ward (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). I don't think that Left 4 Dead 2 (due to be released by Valve in November 2009) supports DirectX 10 either.

The PC games that are due to come out in 2010 are going to increasingly support DirectX 10. There are still going to be a lot of games which don't use it however. The games which do support DirectX 10 will still run ok in DirectX 9 mode as there are very few games due to be DirectX 10 only. The most well known being Alan Wake which keeps being delayed and doesn't look that good anyway.

That's not to say that there's no benefit from newer DirectX versions, just that having DirectX 10 or DirectX 11 (which is available for Windows Vista as well as Windows 7) isn't essential to be able to play the latest games with good graphics. I think that's unlikely to change in the short to medium term due to the large install base of Windows XP (DirectX 9 only so no DirectX 9 support would cut out a large part of the potential market) and the predominance of multiplatform games ported from consoles. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 aren't going to be replaced for several years so are likely to act as a drag on PC game technology due to their static hardware.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:18 am

cod is a console gamer port. I wont be playing that. console ports are normally sub-par in my book. not because they were ports, but because they were written for console. consoles have dx9. I know of no one withing the NY city are who games on pc's who plays any of the COD series or has ever owned a disk. There is little care in this area. I also work a 2nd job at a popular gamestop. No one has pre-orderd COD mw2 for pc, we have 450 preorders for xbox.

lfd2 is dx 10

Starcraft2 is dx10

Bioshock 2, delayed, is dx10

the only major title that is NOT dx10 out this year is l4d regular. This was a strange move for many, but was ok as valve has the most imaginative programmers and artists to compensate for it.

there is no reason to not get dx11 video card being that it costs only 159 dollars to get high end performance and dx11.

spookmineer · Post by **spookmineer** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:04 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote:A) Crisis is a shitty game and programmed by a retard
B) that's all there needs to be said, as most agree, but one letter makes for a bad list
C) dx11 and dx 10.1 allow for MORE fps than in dx9 or dx10.0 trying to do similar visual quality. If it adds little, it will give at least what you saw before but smoother and with less stress on the system.
D) Dirt2 is dx 11, it's rather sick graphically, check the demo. The 5750 is meant to pump it out and is the sort of demo game for the ati series
E) Most new games use dx10. I cannot think of a well known company that has no dx10 support in 2009 or this fall
F) nvidia makes a better card, none of which I will be buying even knowing that fact

I don't know what any of these points have to do with my post, but I'd still like to comment on some of them.

A) Maybe. I only played the demo and I didn't like it. Still a pretty good benchmark though.
C) Most likely. But first, these games have to be released, or there is no benefit.
D) We all like the eye candy, but next year you might say... Well, read your A) again... Eye candy doesn't make up for shitty games, and neither does DX10/11.
E) WR304 provided a list of high profile titles which are DX9.
His link to DX10 titles is fairly short (if you read the last column, and considering just how many games are made - most of us only notice the tip of the iceberg).
Let's take a look at what it says at BioShock (DX10): "enables soft particles, extra water effects and smoother shadows". Whoa.
His link to DX11 games is even shorter: a whopping total of 2 released games (low blow by me, more to come, but seriously... not that many).

From all this, it should be pretty clear that it doesn't matter how much features of DX the game actually uses, the fact that it uses 2 or 3 features already makes it far more marketable. And people buy it. So, DX10 is not DX10 in all cases, but only a fraction of it.

~El~Jefe~ wrote:Bioshock 2, delayed, is dx10

Sorry for singling this one out, but again, you only need 2 or 3 features of DX10 (see above) and you can stamp "DX10 supported" on the BioShock box. Marketing works, and people buy.
BioShock 2 will most likely support more features, but how many of them? If they're using the exact same engine without any upgrades, you're still looking at: "enables soft particles, extra water effects and smoother shadows". This ofcourse goes for all games.

Back in 1999 when Quake 3 was released, there was an amazing promo video, game character standing in front of rotating mirrors etc... That was 10 years ago. Not that much of it ended up in the game. But it was great marketing.

We all have to wait and see what trickles down along the line.
Developers will make sure DX9 is at least supported: they don't want to miss out on the substantial amount of gamers still using XP.
DX9 was released in 2002 (version c in 2004) and in 2009 most games are still released for DX9.

It seems like you are convincing yourself that you really need a DX11 card. I think it will be at least another 2 years (but possibly 5) before you do.

Random Thought on this whole Video Card Thing - Vent

Random Thought on this whole Video Card Thing - Vent

Re: Random Thought on this whole Video Card Thing - Vent