I’m forced to upgrade my machine (gf4 ti 42k at the moment) to finaly get rid of the software fragment program emulation (ever waited 3 minutes für one frame?)
The fx5900 XT (NV35 with slower clock) looks
good to me but I wonder if it supports the same
set of extension the NV38 offers.
Ich don’t care that much about the speed (Doom3 should run though ), but missing a useful extension (GLSL, float textures etc) would get me mad (or sad, depends).
Since you can turn a fx5900 into
a 5950 via bios-flash, I hope that both chips are identical concerning the features.
Throwing 500 Euro out of the window for a 5950 only to see that its unsupported next year
(thx,PCI-Express) is a horrible scenario for somebody like me who dosn’t even earn money yet.
With geforce 6 performance and branching shaders in hardware on the way you might want to wait and get one of NVIDIA’s new beasties. This is going to be the biggest thing to hit graphics since programmable hardware arrived. (hidden ATI powerpoint notes aside
These cards will be launched in about a week so you may want to wait & see. Reports of unprecedented benchmark results at the high end are leaking out, but if it’s hardware functionality you’re after the feature support may be of more interest that the raw performance. With a likely MIMD implementation it’ll also probably mean instructions like the texture kill could actually act as a significant optimization etc. Other stuff like improved floating point support should be very interesting.
Some of this is rumour of course, we won’t have long to wait & see, but now is not the time to buy an NVIDIA, current cards will be cheaper in a week at the very least.
I don’t think the new fx will be an option to me.
How do you get your cards? Do you actually buy them, or do you get them for free through you work?
I mean this chip won’t start under 600 $ in the first month.
As times passes by a improved chip will
be released (see ge3->ge4, oder the first fx chips)
offering more features at a better price and
may be better card design (1 instead of 2 power connectors)
The only interesting effect the new fx will have
for me is the push on the “old” fx prices.
May be a 5950 will get affordable
Buy a $79 GeForce FX 5200, which has all the features of the 5900, but not the speed. Then buy a real card whenever the next batch (with pixel shader 3.0 level support) comes out.
Or, if the 5200 is too slow for your game play needs, try a Radeon 9600 XT, unless you’re going NVIDIA only for some reason. The idea is to go cheap now, and faster/better sometime later.
Buy a $79 GeForce FX 5200, which has all the features of the 5900, but not the speed. Then buy a real card whenever the next batch (with pixel shader 3.0 level support) comes out.
The 5900 does have one feature that the 5200/5600 cards don’t – the very nice GL_EXT_depth_bounds_test extension.
), but missing a useful extension (GLSL, float textures etc) would get me mad (or sad, depends).
