Originally posted by: dreddfunk
how funny...we've heard this same argument about 2900xt vs 8800gtx a lot lately. People say "the 2900xt will be better, just give it a year or two". That's crap! These cards are designed for use NOW. The only benefit they might have if they work better in the future is that you might be able to have decent fps for 2 yrs instead of 1.5. That's no benefit at all to ati for 2900xt or nvidia for 8800gts. If the 2900 pro "scores" better or has better fps than 8800gts in most people's applications RIGHT NOW it will be a hit, if it doesn't then nobody will notice or care about it. Hopefully it will work great and 8800gts 320 will drop to $225...
Brian - I think you missed my point entirely. I never meant to imply anyone should buy a card for the possibility of future performance improvements from driver optimizations. I don't think--at all--that there is some hidden 2900xt performance to be unleashed, and I didn't see that implication in RS' post either. He seemed to merely say that we should bench these cards at higher resolutions to evaluate the cards better and that the 2900's lack of ROPs and texture units may hinder their performance in certain games.
I think the cards are a bit of a toss up in terms of performance right now, and it seems to me to afford us an opportunity to see the effect of memory size on performance at higher resolutions. I'm interested in seeing the impact of the three memory sizes (320, 512, and 640) on high-resolution performance in current games.
The last observation was a throw-away comment in the sense that I think Nvidia may have done a better job balancing their shader-to-ROP/texture ratios for games *right now*. I.e., that AMD, sometime in the past, made a bad guess as to the requirements of games *right now*, and ended up with cards that may have too few ROPs/texture units.
In neither case did I mean to refer in any way to the possibility of future improvements, nor did I mean to demean the 2900pro at all, in fact, quite the contrary. As I've recently purchased a 24" 1920x1200 panel, I'm leery of the GTS 320MB precisely because of the memory limits. The differences between the 320's & 640's performance has been documented. I just want to take that a step further and see if the step up from 320 to 512 makes an important difference.
Cheers.