GTX260 SLi vs DX11

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GTX260 sp216 vs ATI 5x00 vs NvidiaGT300

  • Get the GTX260 SLi now!

    Votes: 13 30.2%

  • Get the ATI 5x00 when it comes out in 2-3 months!

    Votes: 26 60.5%

  • Get the GT300 when it comes out late this year/early next year!

    Votes: 4 9.3%
  • Total voters
    43


The rumors have a 5870 competing with SLI'd GTX 260s. It is also a single card so the minimum FPS may be better on the 5870 which should make up for any performance advantage of SLI'd GTX 260s in benchmarks, if there are any. This way he can get the same, possibly more, performance for the same price, after he sells the GTX 260, with DX11 as a bonus. And if the 5000 series doesn't do that then the GTX 260 will undoubtedly be cheaper then and so he still wins. It is a no-brainer to wait because he can't lose anything, only gain.
 


ahh, well how much will a 5870 cost?

Im just going by what he will spend on that next-gen card vs. what he will spend on a 260, of course after the next-gen cards hit the stores the current cards should lower in price and it will be more of a bargain....

But yea your point makes perfect sense...... [:jaydeejohn:5]
 
I think I'll do a combination of both options.

I'll wait a month or two for the ATi 5000 cards to come out...if they're over hyped and over priced, then I'll buy another GTX260 which hopefully will be cheaper. If they're really 2x the latest gen, I'll go with ATI 5x00. 😀

Or maybe Nvidia will pull a fast one and release their cards sometime this year... only time will tell. 😉
 
If sold, the money made from the 260 can go towards the 5870, making it cost maybe slightly more than the sli option, but with possible better perf.
I agree, this round is about minimum fps at the very least
 
uhmm..

wait till the nvidia Dx11 cards come out..


maybe by then each company would have a better price for all of us

just maybe
 



Rumors of 8Tflops? Holy mother of slimy pigs in hell... Where did you get that one from?

If thats true the days of SLi/CF will be over, at least for the next five or six years until game developers have time to catch up... Though I think if that was accurate, ATi wouldn't be holding it a secret lol....

Separate shader clock domains would be the only way of making a card that powerful remotely efficient lol... Though they might want to start doing something like that anyway, playing counterstrike 1.6 on a 295 shouldn't make it run full power lol
 
OK, the x2 is expected to be 4 teraflops, if they did double the shader speeds, thatd be 8 TFops


PS Theres rumors the x2 will also actually be higher clocked as well, so make that 5 and possibly 10, but really, like a wish list, make it 5
 
I would like to remind everyone that the generations are quite unpredictable as far as performance increases are concerned.

I remember when the 8800 GTX came out and many people held out waiting for ATI/AMD to release their new card. Long story short the folks who decided to go ahead and get the 8800 GTX eairly had the strongest Video Card on the market and not only that it Blew everything else including the original 8800 GTS 640 mb board away. I think it was nearly 2 years before it was defeated by a stronger GPU. lets face it G92 all flavors were just a bastard G80. when the 9800GX2 came out it sucked. two 8800 gts 512 on a sandwich. but going from 7950 GX2 to 8800 GTX was a huge jump. Who remembers the crazy performance jump from Radeon 8500 to 9700 pro!!! that was huge! lets not forget some of the worst flops of all time. sadly most of the ones I recall are Nvidia. Worst lemon of all time is the NV1 aka Diamond edge 3d pro. I had one of these cards back in 1994-1995 time frame. nearly $500 came with 4 MB Vram was suposed to be hot ***. frame rates were absolutely horrible!!! buggy terrible card. oh wait Remember how awesome Geforce 4 TI 4600/4800 cards were! they were superb. anyone remember how bad the entire FX series was? And lets not forget Voodoo had a market leading product. Voodoo 2 was great as well. Voodoo 5 was the bigest waste of printed circuit board ever. Fact is everything is speculation and vaporware until it is a packaged product that can be tested. I recomend go with your gut. If you really want more frames now go for it the 216 core boards are cheap. if the new board is awersome you could sell both old boards. you could use them in a productivity build. you could give them to poor college student gamers who cant part with the beer money to upgrade their hardware! haha. i myself have a gtx 275 and i am happy enough waiting until the new card comes out in October. then decide between getting a set of amd cards or buying 2 more 275's and doing 3 way sli with an old g92 gts 512 pulling the dedicated physics . i personally hope we are blown away with 100 percent or at least 75% performance increase over the 4890. the last time we had a great board launch like that was 8800 gtx. only time will tell though. Make your own decision. your the one who has to live with it. just ask yourself one question. if i buy the 2nd card now and the 5x00 cards are as awesome as we hope will i hate myself? if yes wait if not go for it.
 

Stupid flaming I can ignore. Serious flaming I dont mind. It often leads to good discussions or even me learning something.

First, I have a policy of never buying (or recommending anyone else buy) the first of anything. I let somone else pay the high initial cost be the gunea pig on new products for at least a few months. That has saved me many headaches and never hurt me. Its the safest advice to give. There is a long track record of "next gen" graphics cards having driver or compatibility problems that always takes months to get resolved. Its not a guarantee, but its a safe bet the drivers 6 months after the card is released will be alot more reliable than what comes in the box with the card. With no DX 11 software ready for market during that 6 months anyway, why buy so soon unless you have an immediate need and have to buy something right away (which is why i prefaced with "if you are functional using your 260").

I did not say windows 7 is no good. It seems from all accounts its a good product and is going to be the next OS. Unless something really strange happens to the global economy, I just dont think enough money exists for win7 to replace XP in less than 2 years.

Even if every computer that can gets win7 the day it releases, how long will developers take to retool for DX11? Already we have seen how bad DX10 conversions from DX9 can go. Is there some reason that Win 7 is going to increase the speed and reliablity of all these game developers that are already often months late on content updates and bug fixes on their existing software?

My bet is it takes 3-4 years before both the hardware and software shift needed occurs for win7 and DX11 to be the assumed standard like XP is today. There will of course be some DX11 and much DX10/.1 stuff mislabelled as DX11 before then, but to assume its going to become the de-facto standard in less time than 2 years would be unprecedented.
 
dndhatcher, most of the people on this site aren't "wait until its mainstream before thinking about it" people

That said, waiting 6 months as you said is usually the smartest thing to do, but waiting until DX11 is mainstream? That doesn't make a lot of sense, in 3 years cards that are flagships now wont be able to play the newest games at decent settings then.
 

To me that means the current CPU will probably be replaced every couple years (ie - before DX11 becomes a significant factor). It makes even less sense to spend money on new,expensive graphics card for a system thats already working ok and will be replaced soon enough. He could be a Kennedy heir and money is no object ( in which case I say buy both a 260 now and then just buy a whole new cpu when the 5000 is released 😉). Lots of variables like that we dont know to be making this sort of decision.

That is going to be true even if he buys the new flagship 5000. I think it makes more sense to upgrade based on price/performance and always have a good rig as opposed to bankrupt yourself for a "best thing ever for 3 months gadget" that will still be a paperweight in a few years anyway.

I figure (on a site like this in particular) someone needs to present a case against the "pre-order the latest tech before anyone have even seen a review" crowd so people reading realize not everyone is like that. 😛


One advantage to being cynical is you are either right or pleased when you are wrong.
 
You have a good point there, most people reading this thread are probably assuming most of us are buying a 5870 as soon or soon after it's released.

There are times when you know the upcoming tech is going to be good enough to buy almost right away (Core i5 is a perfect example right now), but we know nothing concrete about the 5000 series. We're all just hoping we have a repeat of what happened when the 8800GTX was released 😀

I personally have a phenom 9500 and 4830 setup, so I'm a very mainstream (aka broke/cheap whatever). All I mean is there are people here blowing $2000 on machines in the homebuilt section all the time.
 
Actually I think the 5000 series will be more revolutionary than i5, which I think will BARELY beat the Phenom II and core 2 quad series. Even if we go with the lowest speculated specifications then it should still be able to hang with a 4870 X2 for a much better price and scale better in crossfire. I'm real excited about the 5000 series at this point, but it likely wont be a GTX 8800 though the 5870 X2 may come close to reaching that performance.
 
Ummm, good theorheticals on gpus there, and waiting like you say usually means youre almosr always 1 revision/release behind, to each his own.
As for W7 and DX10 and Vista?
OK, DX10 IS almost 3 years old, so time to buy I guess.
DX11? A superset of DX10, no problemo there
W7? More of the same, no driver problems at all, unlike Vista, which was chock full of them, not Vistas fault, as nVidia still holds the title for Vista failures, and had a lawsuit filed for not being DX10/Vista capable
This isnt new, this isnt Vista, and most importantly, this isnt nVidia.
You want safe? Save your money, and buy almost halfway thru before new release, oh, and the i5? what makes that safe?
Wouldnt it be better to wait on i5 as well? We all know mobos and bios are always perfect upon release right?
Nice try, but as was said earlier, this logic fails on an enthusiast site
 
JDJ is right, waiting a few weeks at this point wont cost you anything. Hell if the 5000 series comes out and it blows then you haven't lost anything because the older cards will still be there. DX11 and windows 7 is a non-issue, its just an added feature right now.
 



What makes it safe? wow..

We know the approximate performance, we know the approximate price, and since there are so many boards ready to go, I SERIOUSLY doubt that ever single one of them is going to have bios problems. Even if they do, it would likely be intel's fault, and they would probably fix it within a few weeks or the entire line wont sell.

You also realize that toms likely has the review on the i5 already done or close to done right? They're just waiting for the go ahead from intel to be able to release them. It's not like you're going to have to wait weeks until after release to get the benchmarks. The i5 is an evolutionary upgrade (or downgrade depending on your point of view) and that means its chances of being 100% supported right out the gate is very likely.

There's nothing wrong with that logic here. It's somewhat like when people were anticipating the HD 4770's performance. Obviously no one knew for sure how fast it was going to be, but it was a very safe bet it was going to be between 4670 and 4850 performance - those kind of assumptions are very logical.

Also, being one release behind is never a bad thing. One release behind right now would mean a GTX280 instead of 285 or a 4870 instead of 4890... Sure, you miss out on efficiency on both parts, but they're similar in performance.
 
Or, you could say, they will just fix the drivers for any new gfx card as well right? Isnt that in itself contradictory, which I was subtly pointing out?
I have nothing against i5, prefer what Ive seen vs i7 actually, as its more a true DT chip.
No, my problem is the wait, and wait some more attitude, but not for a cpu/mobo? but for a gfx card, its ok to do so.
And on an enthusiast site as well
 
I really didn't understand the last two sentences, but what I assume you meant was: "My problem is people are saying to wait for gfx, but not to wait for CPU/Mobo" is that right?

If so, the reason is that we know the i5 wont be all that much faster than the phenom IIs and the C2Qs. So there isn't a whole lot of incentive to wait.
 
Yes, its what I meant, but, Im refering to dndhatchers comments about waiting, meaning its a driver issue. I wasnt explicitly refering to the i5, and what we know, in regards to perf, its the unknown, mobo/bios issues, that shouldnt put off a i5 sale, just like a supposed driver issue with a new gfz card
 
hmm... I consider Toms an information/education site as much as enthusiast. I found it while researching parts because of all the great reviews.

These forums are full of knowledgeable enthusiasts answering questions, but it also gets alot more casual traffic that a more eclectic enthusiast site would not get. Without knowing the OPs background, I wouldnt assume enthusiast.
 
Well, take the 260? Thats not usually an average Joes card.
And then, consider the question? New means cutting edge, and it also means new features etc etc.
Also, consider BSOD has nearly 1600 posts, and he was the OP.
I understand as I said, to each his own, but I dont think this thread was aimed at the nooby crowd, thus why all the replies concerning more in depth answers, mine included
 
Thanks, but I think if anything I should probably apologize for giving you a rough time not the other way around. It was a good discussion of perspective and reasoning. I learn alot by listening to people explain why they disagree with me.

 
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