This generation of nVidia's GTX 680/670 is a pass.

[JAG87]

Sadly, because popular PC games are gimped by their focus on the console versions which likely make publishers far more money.

I just want the next generation of consoles to come along, as my 6950 feels underutilized. I'm never going to game on more than one monitor or insane 2560x1600 resolutions...

It's not only the console's fault.

PC games that can run on more modest hardware generate WAY more revenue than games that require upgrades. Just look at Valve and Blizzard as an example.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Look at EA's revenue from last year. They posted quarterly earnings for PC games that beat both PS3 and Xbox360 sales.

PC gaming revenue grew 19% last year as well and made over 16Billion dollars. More revenue in consoles? Not really...PC gamers generally are of a higher income bracket and have more disposable income. The average console gamer buys fewer titles and might actually rent more than he buys.

 

[ShintaiDK]

What is the purpose of this thread?

No clue. Maybe he needs confirmation.

 

[dennilfloss]

I think the 670 would make a nice upgrade to my Radeon 4870.

 

[chimaxi83]

At 1080p? Huge upgrade :thumbup:

 

[Rifter]

I feel the exact same way OP, since i also have SLI 460's. I decided i wasnt going to upgrade till i could get twice the performance i have now in a single GPU(which i didnt think would take this long since im SLI'ing 4xx series midrange cards, i figured the top end 5xx card would give me what i wanted).

I was hopeing with 28nm and the major changes both ATI and Nvidia were making this generation that this would be the time to upgrade, i was hopeing for a 7800GTX to 8800GTX type of performance increase from this gen and was very dissapointed by both ATI and Nvidia. Guess ill be waiting for the 8xxx series and the 7xx series till i upgrade.

 

[blastingcap]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su504HbsX8c

Intel photorealistic ray tracing demo

 

[Rifter]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su504HbsX8c

Intel photorealistic ray tracing demo

oh yeah baby thats what we need!

 

[SickBeast]

Don't you guys with GTX 460 SLI feel vram limited in a lot of games? And don't you find that your framerates fluctuate a lot? And don't you get a fair bit of heat and noise from that setup?

I had GTX 460 SLI and really there's no comparison WRT to those points with a 7850. It's a much more refined solution.

 

[RussianSensation]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su504HbsX8c

Intel photorealistic ray tracing demo

:thumbsup: I hope in 15 years we get there on GPUs!

 

[blastingcap]

:thumbsup: I hope in 15 years we get there on GPUs!

I posted that in response to your earlier post in this thread, because I think ray tracing is the future. The far future, sure, but the future. Until we jump to ray tracing instead of rasterized graphics, Crysis will probably be pretty close to as good as it gets, even if consoles didn't hold us back.

P.S. Nvidia has ray tracing demos as well, e.g., this demo from yesterday (May 15, 2012): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9SH8xlgzoI <-- the first time I've heard Nvidia refer to its "new logo" as a "claw." I still see a fish head, though.

Note that even JHH is saying that ray tracing is the future. He says so at the 3:00 mark. So it's not just John Carmack and game devs saying it.

For article: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/15/3022837/nvidia-kepler-gpu-video-demo

 

[FalseChristian]

Ray tracing? I thought tesselation was the end-all be-all.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Yeah, the GTX 460 is a good card, and I'm glad I got my model more than a year ago for a measly $160 and it came with a 850MHz clock on stock voltage.

But the GTX 670 is great. All it needs for me to buy it is to come down to $350, which hopefully it will this year. Otherwise, an HD 7950 for under $300 wouldn't be bad.

If neither of those happen at about the end of Q3 then I'll just wait until the GeForce 600 series and the Radeon HD 8000 series.

 

[RussianSensation]

I posted that in response to your earlier post in this thread, because I think ray tracing is the future. The far future, sure, but the future. Until we jump to ray tracing instead of rasterized graphics, Crysis will probably be pretty close to as good as it gets, even if consoles didn't hold us back.

I think we can have better looking games than Crysis without ray tracing. It should happen in 2-3 years when next generation of consoles launch and developers will make DX11 games from scratch.

I think Project Cars that I linked for you already looks better than Crysis and Unreal Samaritan demo is even better.

http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/047.png
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/0451.jpg
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/0262.jpg
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/0032.jpg
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/0021.jpg
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/004.png
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/0051.jpg
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/020.png
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/019.jpg
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/022.png

 

[RussianSensation]

http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/043.png
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/0102.jpg

If most games looked like this right now, people wouldn't need to justify GPU upgrades. The games themselves would justify the upgrades. :wub:

 

[blastingcap]

Hey RS, point taken, but I'm glad I'm not on my mobile because else this page would have eaten up all of the bandwidth I had left for the month. You may want to replace the screenshots with links to the screenshots, instead....

 

[RussianSensation]

KK, fixed. Left 3 pics.

 

[Rifter]

Don't you guys with GTX 460 SLI feel vram limited in a lot of games? And don't you find that your framerates fluctuate a lot? And don't you get a fair bit of heat and noise from that setup?

I had GTX 460 SLI and really there's no comparison WRT to those points with a 7850. It's a much more refined solution.

I game at 1080P so have not run into any Vram issues yet, im sure they are coming with some of the newer games thats why im itching to upgrade.

I find framerates dont fluctuate alot unless the game has SLI issues which is rare, only ran into that in a few games and tweaking settings and making a profile for that game has always solved the issue for me, it just takes some time to figure out which settings are causing your issues.

460's do not run hot so i dont have any cooling issues, im also running a EATX case with one card in the top slot and one in the bottom slot so there is 6 open spaces between cards. I also lapped both the heatsinks and GPU heatspreaders on both card which lowered my temps 5-10c.

My next card is going to be a single GPU though that i have decided, i dont have as much time to game anymore and want to spend more of it gaming and less troubleshooting issues brought up by dual card issues, even though there have been very few issues a few is more than zero.

 

[ZimZum]

Look at EA's revenue from last year. They posted quarterly earnings for PC games that beat both PS3 and Xbox360 sales.

PC gaming revenue grew 19% last year as well and made over 16Billion dollars. More revenue in consoles? Not really...PC gamers generally are of a higher income bracket and have more disposable income. The average console gamer buys fewer titles and might actually rent more than he buys.

Only if you're looking at the non-Gaap revenue figures. The Gaap revenue figures are different (and dont allow for book cooking ).

Going by the Gaap numbers EA's revenue in 2011

360 - 345 million
PS3 - 308 million
PC - 205 million

But even looking at your non-Gaap numbers the consoles as a whole still dwarf the revenue that the PC brings in.

 

[tigersty1e]

power consumption is the name of the game.

i'm upgrading my lga 1366 system for an ivy bridge system for the huge power savings. core 920 is perfectly fine today, but the power savings alone makes it worth it.

same with graphics. you get equal or better performance for much less power hogging.

 

[2is]

The purpose of this thread appears to be that a computer that was hugely overpowered when it was new is still sufficient to run current games two years later at an outdated resolution. As far as I'm concerned, the OP is 100% incorrect. I've been using a 1920x1200 monitor for over 5 years, and my last video card (an HD5870) was insufficient to run Skyrim at ultra settings with mods installed because of VRAM limitations (which neither crossfire nor SLI would address). I upgraded to a GTX 680 and now I can run everything (Skyrim, BF3, Batman, Crysis, Alan Wake, etc.) at ultra settings at 1920x1200 with a combination of AF and AA at playable FPS levels.

For mid-level gaming, of course you don't need the latest or greatest graphics card; you never have. But if you're interested in running multi-monitor or super-high-resolution monitors with all the eye candy turned up to get the absolute maximum IQ out of today's games, an SLI GTX 460 rig simply will not cut it. At the enthusiast level, there's nothing available that counts as overkill, which is why you see people flaunting their 6 GHz overclocks and quadfire 7970 setups feeding 6 monitors in eyefinity.

We are in much the same boat. My screen is 19x12, I had a 5870 (great card, got it on release day) and upgraded to a 680. No regrets. I love playing BF3 with Ambient Occlusion and still maintaining >60 fps

 

[2is]

http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/043.png
http://www.wmdportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/0102.jpg

If most games looked like this right now, people wouldn't need to justify GPU upgrades. The games themselves would justify the upgrades. :wub:

How does a bad looking racing game justify a GPU upgrade? Sorry, those don't look good. Car models are nice and the added reflection gives them a nice look, but textures are complete shit (especially the 2nd pic) as is the dull lighting in both pics.

 

[3DVagabond]

Two words: Ray Tracing.

Ray tracing is just one aspect of photo-realistic rendering. That nVidia demo, while very cool seeing reflections, refraction, fluid dynamics in real time was no where near photo-realistic. There was no GI or AO, volumetric lighting, or depth of field effects that I noticed (might have missed it?). Until they can do all of that together we aren't really any closer.

Kepler (and GCN) are more powerful than past gens, but prior to this, with all rendering effects on, GPU's were about 40% faster than a comparably priced CPU rendering setup. The claims are "up to 10x faster" but that's with cherry picked effects on. Then add to it that GPU's haven't offered the same quality as CPU's and that's why we don't see GPU rendering where quality really matters.

 

[3DVagabond]

How can a small developer with limited funds make something like this:
Project Cars

But developers with billions of dollars make this and sell millions of copies:
Black Ops II

:'(

The small dev wants to make "billions" and is willing to make the best game they can to do it. The "billion" dollar dev wants to make as much as possible for as little investment as possible.

 

[ViviTheMage]

a pass? I had two 6950's oc'd/unlocked in xfire ... this 6580 gtx runs better then the both of them....it was also a wash when I sold them, cost wise.