NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 Benchmarks 51
An anonymous reader writes "On June 6, NVIDIA will launch what it calls 'the fastest single graphics card' on the planet, capable of running 40% faster than the current GeForce 7900GTX. Dailytech has benchmarks and specifications of the card already." From the Dailytech article: "GeForce 7950GX2 takes two GeForce 7900GTX boards, and joins them via 32 PCIe lanes. 16 additional lanes are routed to the motherboard out to the PCIe adaptor. The GeForce 7900GX2 was designed specifically for OEM system builds and as a result nothing was compromised for performance. However, GeForce 7950GX2 is designed to be the retail component, and as such a few things needed tweaking for retail sales."
Fastest single graphics card... (Score:5, Insightful)
o_O
Cost (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fastest single graphics card... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's also important to note that the SLI bridge is not present on the 7950GX2.
And further down:
Even though the card is designed for QUAD SLI, there will be no four-GPU support at the time of launch with the 7950GX2 due to driver constraints.
Thats one hell of a software driver which can fabricate missing hardware!
Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I go spending ridiculous amounts of money (more than my PC cost) just for some silly games, especially since it's like pulling teeth to get current higher-end GPUs supported under anything but MS operating systems?
It seems to be much more economical to simply play games on a console, especially since it seems that many media/game/other content providers insist on the newer cards simply for the DRM enforcement.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer gaming on a PC compared to a game console, but not anywhere near enough to sink that much cash into a GPU, nor add all the DRM that seems increasingly to be required to play current generation games on a PC.
Guess I'll stick to my old games and GPU that still work very well, thankyou. For the money saved alone, I could buy a nice guitar (or 2!).
Cheers!
Strat
Re:Bah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bah! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm happy driving my '94 Ford Probe!
It doesn't mean they should stop making Ferraris and Aston Martins.
nobody (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the nature of the beast, we live in a society where you need to "keep making money" in order to live, more or less, and that seems to have evolved around manufacturing, sales, throw the old away, lather rinse repeat.
Unfortunately, I don't know a way around this system until we come up with the universal anything-goes replicator that can take any input and output anything you want.
Re:Bah! (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never had any problems getting any NVidia GPU to work flawlessly under Linux.
Yeah, the closed-source aspect of NVidia's drivers may be annoying to some, but I don't mind closed-source drivers if they're high enough quality, and NVidia's drivers are one of the few examples of closed source software with high quality. (The associated closed-source games for Linux, specifically iD Software's products, comprise most of the other examples...)
Face it - due to patent issues out of the chipset manufacturers' control (classic example being S3 Texture Compression - S3TC was the beginning of ATI's transition from fully documented open source drivers to binary-only drivers with the open-source versions lacking critical features for 3D gaming), no chipset manufacturer can release open source drivers that support their card's full feature set, unless their card's feature set is massively crippled. (See Intel GMA-series integrated graphics as an example.)
Re:Bah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, clearly you're not part of the target market if your entire PC (just one?) cost less than $600, so the answer is doubtless "you shouldn't".
Sure, which is why there are plenty of cheaper cards. Isn't the market clever, covering a wide range of income and interest brackets?
Sorry? Do you mean the usual CD/DVD based protections that are generally easily bypassed and often patched out completely by official updates, or are Microsoft trying to solder a trusted computing chip onto your motherboard again?