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Anyway,
Thinking of upgrading my rig soon. Mainly for casual GTA IV and Americas Army 3. Is it a good idea to wait for DX11, which is scheduled to come out the same time as Windows 7?
Currently I have a 8600GT (256mb), and a AMD 3800+ X2. I don't play that many games, but I don't know :'(
HAHAHAHAHAHA!Quote:
Is it a good idea to wait for DX11, which is scheduled to come out the same time as Windows 7?
Good luck with that.
That said, your computer has about 3 or 4 times the power of mine, and I'm quite happy with mine. But then, I don't play top-of-the-line games.
> HAHAHAHAHAHA!
That's what I think! Hence the thread.
I don't see how they can kill off DX10 so quickly. I hardly game at all, it's either Uni or programming. But I do enjoy the occasional round :). I know Bubba said he might try hold off until Windows 7, Microsoft's release history says it will be delayed ... but Windows Vista's crapness says it will be ontime if not ahead of time!
Oh I don't know anymore :(
8600GT is not a bad card in any case. I think you can wait.
When DX11 comes, maybe your card is as outdated that it's worth the upgrade.
Following the top-end rigs is extremely expensive :P
I just said stop, and bought a console... And now Vista is f**ked and f**kes up the PC everytime it's started for 1 min -.-
If you really want to game, buy a console... even tho console games prices are insane, it's still worth it over time :P
Correction: Xbox 360 and PS3 as insanely priced.Quote:
Originally Posted by Akkernight
(And no, 360 Arcade doesn't count because you need to purchase all those accessories.)
The Wii is reasonably priced, but a tad expensive.
There will always be better graphics. Always. The point is for you to be satisfied with them. For the game to run without any kind of halts. If everything's ok, then stick with what you have. Until something really good comes out and changes your standards.Quote:
Originally Posted by zacs7
lol! an xbox 360 for 1000DKK or a bit over, or a PC worth 10 000? :P And the PC's need
upgrading all the time -.- so it is cheaper, and I'm not including the easy pirated PC games :P
and I have 8800GT 512mb, AMD Quad ~2.6 other gaming stuff, but I'm just not satisfied >.<
Well yes, a PC is not reasonably priced either. It will come close to - or exceed the price of a console if you get everything. But you can get a gaming PC for cheap if you build it yourself.
And I doubt you will find a 360 for 1000 if a PC costs 10 000, no matter what the currency (again, does not include Arcade).
I would say that PC are cheaper for what they offer. The thing is that a PC might offer more than you want since it is built for general purpose and not for gaming only.
Indeed, and that's why we love them - because they can do so much and so well. For its capabilities, it is a reasonable price, but for only gaming, it is not. And that is why the 2 consoles are overpriced, as well.
I bought my PC for 11 500DKK an xbox 360 60GB costs 4000DKK :P but the price of the 360 has just lowered, but not here, yet... So can't say exactly :P
It's just that both PC's I've got have had problems -.-
The 8600GT is okay, assuming it's the GDDR3 version (the DDR2 version is quite a bit slower).
It all depends on how much money you are willing to spend, I guess.
There are many good cheap cards out there these days (8800 GT, 9600 GT, etc). They can be had for $80-$90 if you look hard enough. With my 9600 GT I am able to max out all settings on all the games I play except crysis, at 1280x1024, with >40 fps, so I am extremely happy with the upgrade (had a 8600 GT, there is certainly a huge difference).
As for DX11, the cards will probably be in the $500 range when they first come out (like how much they asked for the 8800 when it first came out as the first DX10 cards). I am assuming you are among "the rest of us" if you are using a 8600 GT...
It will at least be a few months after DX11 release will there be reasonably priced DX11 cards, so I'd say just grab one now :).
Yeah, I've got the GDDR3 version. I've always had *600 cards, 5600, 6600TDH (Turbo Force Edition haha), 7600GT and now a 8600GT. So I guess you could call me a poor man :-).
I'll probably hold on to this until it doesn't do what I want. Do you think DX11 will be a requirement of Windows 7?
Otherwise, if it doesn't do what I want, I'll get a 9800GTX2 -- only because they look cool.
It would be pretty stupid if it were. They would probably get into trouble again, so me guess is no.Quote:
Originally Posted by zacs7
Why doesn't someone make a DirectX thing that's multi-platform >.< and I mean fully, as in, not emulated or anything :P
I've never seen any good stuff made using OpenGL :P DirectX is the only reason I still keep my windows :P
Quake?Quote:
I've never seen any good stuff made using OpenGL
> I've never seen any good stuff made using OpenGL :P DirectX is the only reason I still keep my windows :P
That's because it has large commercial backing and was really pushed when it came out. There are lots of OpenGL games.
Recently Quake 4 and Doom 3
And id's new game, whatever that's called. The Unreal Engine also used to (or still does) have a OpenGL renderer.
Everything you can do with D3D, you can do in OpenGL. However, most games are written for Windows only, and telling gamers that your next big title has a DX10 renderer makes for better marketing (attributed to the commercial baking zacs mentioned).
And personally, though I don't know a great deal about DX10, I would say many of the effects appearing on DX10 cards/games, could be acheived with a DX9 renderer on the same hardware. Although perhaps with a little more effort on the programmers part.
Not only do I use mid-end cards, I upgrade every second generation. GF4 Ti4200, 6600, 8600. 9600 is the first exception :). I only spent $35 on my 8600GT, so I could justify another $90 for a 9600 a year later.Quote:
Yeah, I've got the GDDR3 version. I've always had *600 cards, 5600, 6600TDH (Turbo Force Edition haha), 7600GT and now a 8600GT. So I guess you could call me a poor man :-).
The Crysis "very high" setting hoax :) (they claimed that "very high" is only doable in DX10, then someone found a way to enable it on XP, and it looked exactly like "very high" in Vista with DX10)Quote:
And personally, though I don't know a great deal about DX10, I would say many of the effects appearing on DX10 cards/games, could be acheived with a DX9 renderer on the same hardware. Although perhaps with a little more effort on the programmers part.
The problem is that hardware doesn't seem to increase in a linear fashion :'(. I spent $186 AUD on this card, because I got it when they came out -- but couldn't afford / didn't need a 8800GTQuote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
I tend to avoid ATi because it's so darn hard to count with their card names / versions
That is true. The 8600 was a disappointment, especially when compared with the success of the 7600. The 9600 is great, though, roughly on the same level as 8800 GT (faster than GS, slower than GTS and GTX). If you can wait for a few years, I will try out GTX 260 and report back :).
The only thing you cannot do in DX9 that you can in DX10 is geometry shaders. You cannot generate vertices in DX9 shaders or on DX9 hardware.
DX10 was not widely accepted nor developed for mainly because it required Windows Vista. If Windows Vista had a better reception then you would have seen DX9 vanish overnight. However b/c Vista was plagued with issues many gamers simply did not move to it and thus did not have DX10 compatibility. Most game companies did not actively develop for DX10 b/c of this. If they did they risked alienating a good portion of their customer base. Now you do see DX10 games more often but most still support DX9 so they probably have some DX9 shaders in them.
I would expect that as Vista is adopted more and more you will see DX9 games start to dwindle. Windows 7 was supposed to be released in 2009 b/c Vista flopped so bad but who knows. Early previews are saying that Windows 7 feels and looks like Vista does. Perhaps the difference will be in the quality and speed of the kernel.
DirectX 11 introduces the new concept of compute shaders. Supposedly these allow collisions, physics, culling, and other software algos to be offloaded to the video card. All 9+ series NVidia cards now support PhysX natively so I'm sure we will see these compute shaders being used for just that.
I think most of the recent talk of max settings on this or that game is just pure hype. A game is only going to look so good and so long as your card supports VS/PS 3.0 you can get some very nice visuals. Most of the visual quality of games for now seems to be in shaders and not in the number of vertices. When they begin to up the vertex count and make more and more detailed fully deformable mesh models then the new cards will really shine.
However most of the current 'bloom' and post process effects in Crysis can be done just as well on DX9 hardware as it can on DX10. Floating point textures were introduced in PS 3.0 which really helps effects like bloom, shadow mapping, and real-time cubic environment mapping. Geometry instancing cannot be done on hardware in DX9 but I'm not sure if Crysis uses this or not. It would be smart to use it for trees and foliage but I just don't know enough about the game to know what they are doing. I've seen demos of DX10 where thousands of objects were drawn with very few calls due to geometry shaders.
I tend to avoid ATI because they don't make decent Linux drivers (or so last time I checked).Quote:
I tend to avoid ATi because it's so darn hard to count with their card names / versions
> I tend to avoid ATI because they don't make decent Linux drivers (or so last time I checked).
That also, the last ATI card I had was a 9250 Radeon or whatever they're called. That scared me away from ATI. Although it was better than my FX5200 -- which I think is the best card ever made (that or the MX440).
To cut a long story short, I broke my 9250 got a FX5200 then a 5600 :-)
I can't wait until 5 years from now when Crysis and alike are considered "crappy" and my mobile phone can run them.
Hmmm. I don't know about that, or at least not as efficient.Quote:
Originally Posted by psychopath
DirectX has been outpacing OpenGL for some time and the newest OpenGL standard was considered a failure by many. So unless the OpenGL group can get theirs wits together and fix the issues with OpenGL, it's not going anywhere, I would think.
They same it has the same look and feel, yes, but also more stability and performance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bubba
Basically, it will be a streamlined version of Vista--what Vista should have been--ie, Vista 2.0.
I tend to avoid ATI because they make crappy hardware. They cut corners on hardware development and then try to fix the problems in software.Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
> I don't know about that, or at least not as efficient.
It depends in which application it's applied. Recent tests show they're almost identical in speed. It is DX that used to lag behind.
Why bash OpenGL? What issues?! It's a specification!
Is this another bash-the-implementation-because-it's-not-C++ topics?
Perhaps. But I have heard quotes that OpenGL code is a mess right now. The newest spec was supposed to fix it, but did not.Quote:
Originally Posted by zacs7
It's a specification, and that specification lacks describing certain features that DirectX have.Quote:
Why bash OpenGL? What issues?! It's a specification!
Not exactly bashing it. OpenGL simply needs to pick up the pace and fix these "issues" or mess that developers are moaning about.
No.Quote:
Is this another bash-the-implementation-because-it's-not-C++ topics?
I have no allegiance to neither OpenGL nor Direct3D, because I never do graphics.
However, the API which evolves the quickest is the one I like most. Regardless if it's an open standard or closed.
In my experience, this applies to all of the Graphics HW vendors - these chips are so complex that if you where to test them THOROUGHLY before release, there will be no new chips on the market, because the time taken for this is too long - when I worked for one of the graphics hardware manufacturers, we'd get one frame of Quake 2, (I think) per day or so out of the full chip simulation - running the half a dozen most popular games for hundreds or thousands of frames would take years! Different vendors probably cut more or less corners depending on how they are doing versus their competition. But there certainly are cases where you have to fix a chip defect in software - because it would take another 12 weeks to get the chip fixed (from the point in time when the problem is identified and fixed in the hardware design).Quote:
Originally Posted by abachler
--
Mats
GL3 was supposed to eliminate (or at least begin to phase out) the fixed-function pipeline. Then it was delayed, with no communication from the Khronos group as to what was happening with the API. Then it was released as basically the same spec as GL2, plus some extensions promoted to core, and geometry shaders. That's what everyone is complaining about afaik. The API is fine (far from a "mess", unless I'm misunderstanding you), but it's not the API we were promised from GL3.0. Although I believe I read somewhere some of this would be cleared up with 3.1.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elysia
Wait, the GL3.0 API is not actually the object-based API we were promised just a few months before the spec release?
Wow. No wonder people complain.
Wait, the GL3.0 API is not actually the object-based API we were promised just a few months before the spec release?
Wow. No wonder people complain.
That would be your fault.Quote:
Originally Posted by Akkernight
No... Linux runs fine, but I got my money back for the PC anyways, so now I'm getting a new one ^^ 2xNvidia Geforce 9800 SLI, Core2Quad Q6600 ~2.6GHz, 4GB RAM and only 1000DKK to add ^^
Anyways, I havn't really looked that much at OpenGL :P Not API programming at all, so I guess my judgement came from the DirectX publicity and all that, so it's officially invalid ;)