Will the newer GeForce6 cards have a longer stay? ........

[CorCentral]

Video cards seem to get outdated within' a year or less. I mean outdated as in being able to play the current games & games of the future at the higher resolutions.

Is the same thing going to happen with the GeForce6 cards such as the 6800 Ultra & GT? Or will they have longer staying power than cards of the past?

I know most of you may say that you have a 1-2 year old card playing Doom3 or HalfLife2, but not at high resolutions such as 1280x1024 "+" with the Quality cranked up.......... but more likely at 800x600 or 1024x768 at med quality.

 

[Schadenfroh]

considering a 9700 pro still runs everything out there at acceptable frame rates, i would say that the geforce 6 has a good year or two left in it. DX10 is a long ways off

 

[Avalon]

Yeah, my 9700 was able to run Doom 3 at 10x7 with some AF at playable framerates, and HL2 at 10x7 with light AA/AF the same. I honestly didn't need to upgrade my video card, but I wanted an excuse to buy a nice new 19" monitor, so now I've got my eVGA 6800. I have a hunch it'll last me 2 years and play all the games that come out fairly well, but I'll probably upgrade in a year again.

 

[Creig]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
considering a 9700 pro still runs everything out there at acceptable frame rates, i would say that the geforce 6 has a good year or two left in it. DX10 is a long ways off

Ditto. I'm running HL2 at 10x7, 4xAA/8xAF with full eyecandy on a 2.5GHz Barton/softmod 9500 and don't notice any framerate dropdowns. And since it seems that most of the new major FPS game engines were released this year (Far Cry, Doom III & Half Life 2) I would say the 6800 has a nice long lifespan ahead of it. A lot of new games will be based on these engines in the months/years to come.

 

[SynthDude2001]

I'd imagine that the 6800's will be "fast" for a good while....at least until any Unreal Engine 3 games come out, and that's a year and a half away at the earliest. Not too bad when you consider that these cards have supposedly been around already for eight or nine months (I say "supposedly" because this was the first generation of paper launches with video cards to be in short or no supply for months to come...)

And I also agree with what's been said above; consider that the 9700 Pro has had a remarkable useful life (well over 2 years now and counting); and that the "big three" new engines that everyone was waiting for, are now out.

 

[dug777]

mmm look at those GF4Ti owners on the nvidia front who would be very happy happy with their kards hl2 performance atm (albeit dx8..but i've played on both my 9800 pro and a ti4200 and 2b honest the difference wasnt worth shouting about (apart from the water )), and as mentioned repeatedly above, the 9700 pro on the ATI front- how old r those kards now...?

I'd say u can xpect a similar lifespan 4 the gf6 series 2 the 9700 pro, and the x8xx series 2 the gf4ti series

 

[gwag]

dug777 is correct

 

[Cerb]

If you will want to upgrade, they will be outdated.

As Shadenfroh said, a 9700 Pro--or in my case, a 5900XT--can handle anything right now if you don't run high res.

 

[Spike]

Originally posted by: Cerb
If you will want to upgrade, they will be outdated.

As Shadenfroh said, a 9700 Pro--or in my case, a 5900XT--can handle anything right now if you don't run high res.

Good call there, it is all about your perception and wants. Personally I plan to use my 6800GT until this next Christmas when I build a whole new machine. I will probably give it along with my current system to my brother so we can still play the latest lan games. I figure it's useful life (1024x768+ high details) will be at least another year and a half.

-spike

 

[fsstrike]

The 6800 is going to be a solid card for a long time. In a year or so it wont be the best, but I can guarentee that it will still be able to play every game very well (much like the 9800pro today). However, the 6800 will start to show its time significatly in about 2.5-3 years.

 

[KillaKilla]

Even so, I doubt it will have the staying power that the R3X0(9500/9700/9800 series did. After all, they were released in 2002.. and even underclocked (like mine) they can still handle all modern games quite easily on higher settings.

 

[CorCentral]

I plan on going a bit longer before my next upgrade, so let's hope all of you are correct Going to try & hold out 'till mid 2006. (look at rig for current sys info)

I usually upgrade every year but this time it went in phases over the year instead of one lump upgrade........ Video Card, Cpu & then Ram. I held onto the MB.

 

[uOpt]

Actually if it is anything like processors, which have hit a wall right now, then they might last longer than expected.

Processors have hit a speed wall where they are right now, and Intel and AMD are forced to force software makers into being more SMP (multiprocessor) friendly and apparently Video card vendors move into the same direction with SLI, multiple chips on one card and assorted other parallelism.

Since all of that will take logs of BWCing (bitching, whining, complaining), and electric power, and cooling it seems like a highend 6800 is a good place to be in while you see other people pioneer the parallel paths.

 

[Cerb]

CPUs haven't hit a wall...just Intel's manufacturing process for the P4 .

MC, you don't get it...video card processors are far beyond CPUs when it comes to this stuff.
SLI is just marketting (could be useful to professionals, though). Multiple chips in parallel should be possible w/o SLI (they just need to use a way that connects the chips as two chips, not two cards on one PCB), but also, have you not seen specs?
8-16 pixel pipelines, several shader units, etc., is done in superior ways to the current high-end CPU trend of going multicore (I'm not saying they should do it differently with CPUs, as there's a lot more at stake for even the most minor of mistakes, where video cards can be patched w/ firmware and drivers pretty well).

The only things bottlenecking GPUs are manufacturing cost (150m+ transistors on the 6600 part, 200+ on the 6800 parts...~100m or so for a current CPU) and end product cost (XDR would end up as fast or faster, and cheaper, but finding it at high speed in high enough quantity would be impossible).
Economics are far more limiting than technology when it comes to video cards. You can add pipelines all day, and get perfect scaling right up until you hit the limits of the RAM.

 

[BentValve]

The 6800 is definately going to stay awhile, its Nvidia's first decent card since the Geforce 4 series. Its been , what? about 4 years since the Geforce 4 first came out?

A 6800GT or Ultra should be good for a solid 2 years IMO.