Has anyone heard if Nvidia are coming out with any new video cards? I'm on the verge of upgrading and right now I'm dying for the X1900 XTX.

The reason I'm upgrading is because I've come into some good cash and with Oblivion's system specs out, I realize that my 6800 GT might not just cut it for what I want. (Me being a graphics whore and all).

I'm getting 200$ back for my 6800GT.

The reason the X1900 XTX is looking better to me than the higher up 7800 GTX is because it supports AA with SM 3.0.

What are your opinons (and also if you've heard if nVidia are coming out with anything else)

Don't upgrade now, wait for DX10 cards.

You have a 6800GT and want to upgrade already?

I am behind the times.

Those are a year away mate. DX10 is still about 8 months away. By that time I'll have played through oblivion and gothic 3 and whatnot a dozen times at medium settings XD

Hey, it's your money being wasted.

Yeah, Nvidia is supposed to come out with a 7900 in 2 months or so. I recommend you to wait it out to see whats happening.

Wait 8 months as mentioned. By then 512 MB DX10 cards will be available, and that should handle next-gen art assets as well as the Vista composition engine.

You'll always waste money. Something better's always on the horizon.

Waiting 8 months to upgrade is ridiculous. Wait until March, if nothing's announced as far as new cards go (even rumors), get the X1900. If something is announced, wait until April. Then compare/contrast. Your best bet.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]You'll always waste money. Something better's always on the horizon.

Waiting 8 months to upgrade is ridiculous. Wait until March, if nothing's announced as far as new cards go (even rumors), get the X1900. If something is announced, wait until April. Then compare/contrast. Your best bet.[/QUOTE]
Normally I would agree, if it were just another speed increase.

I'd wait to see what's top of the line when the game actually comes out.
Heh, I'm doing the same thing for Gothic 3.

Well its all sound advice. I will indeed at least wait until the game is out, and of course I'll see how it runs with my current set-up. Maybe I'll be blown away even with my 6800GT. One sad part is how Antialiasing does not work with SM 3.0. And to me, thats a bad step back.

Is it true though that Antialiasing works with SM3.0 on the X1900?

yep and it works pretty well too, at least in Serious Sam, can't seem to find many other tests that try games out with HDR and AA...most review sites don't do it because Nvidia doesn't support it.

Only place so far is [H]OCP's X1900 review (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTUz)

9800pro > 7800GT, while extremely helpful, wasn't exactly a night and day difference for me. The whole "must upgrade video card every two weeks" thing is, IMHO, hype.

I went from a R9800Pro to a 128mb x800 - quite a difference. The entire system was different, though..I'm sure that helped a lot too. :p

Heh... Just buy a new one. I get a new graphics card every 9 months or so.

Well there is supposedly an upcoming 7900 series coming, but its looking like it still wont support AA with HDR. It will, though, have killer speed.

Still I think I might just get the X1900XTX

How are Catalyst drivers nowadays? Not as bad as they used to be a year ago I hope?

I haven't had any problems with my Catalyst drivers (Visiontek x800).

Hahaha. What games have you been playing, honestly?

Jep--Cat drivers have been better than nVidia drivers since their inception. Seriously. And I wouldn't count the 7900 out just yet.

Yoshi, then would you suggest I grab myself a X1900XTX (I'm getting 200 back for my current card) and the X1900XTX is about 800$ (this is all canadian of course)

600$. Should I get it and then sit back and wait out the SM 4.0 and DX10 technology?

Well, I think that you could easily get it, then trade it for close to its current value 6-10 mo. down the line. Maybe lose a hundred or two CA, but it'd definitley be a good investment. That is, if you NEED to trade it.

If you aren't planning on upgrading your card when Vista comes out at least make sure it has 512 MB on it. That memory is really going to help, even for ordinary desktop use. We'll probably even see 1 GB video cards soon after Vista's release date.

That's because you must be playing Quake 3 at 1024x768 without any AA or AF. There is a difference, like 300% difference. Play a game like F.E.A.R. and say that a 9800 is just as good a a 7800.

Who says you can't buy them both? Just get the card you want now, and start putting money away. 8 Months later you'll have enough. Then you could sell your X1900XTX and help pay for a DX10 card.

I have, but I think it's a .NET problem

I don't have FEAR. I mean, it's a heck of a lot smoother, and I can turn the eye candy a bit more, but really I could have waited if I didn't have to run @ 1680 x 1050. I'm playing Source Games, and Far Cry, and Pacific Fighters. It's a clear improvement, but it doesn't have the wow factor that going from my Geforce 2 MX 400 to my 9800 pro did. And I really didn't expect it to either. I hope to see it shine on games like Oblivion and UTk7 though.

Aye thats what I mean to do.

I'm used to doing a video card/major upgrade maybe every two years or longer. I don't see how spending over $200 every 8 months makes a lot of sense.

Right now I have the money to do it. Tis' all

So save the money, do something with it. Then upgrade once the price drops a bit.

Thing is, I don't care what comes out in a year. Right now, there are no games that interest me in a year.

The only reason I upgraded my computer was for Oblivion, Gothic 3, and Neverwinter nights 2, which I'm pretty convinced the x1900 will be able to run at max.

After those game, it might take another while for my next upgrade, no matter what comes out anyways. I care for fantasy rpgs, not FPS.

The best thing to do is to wait till the game is released. Its true that the x1900xtx has 48 shader units that will benefit Oblivion greatly, but you still wouldnt know how it will exactly perform. Not to mention, its only about 2 months until the 7900gtx comes out.

The card you have now can still play games at a relatively high speed, so it should let you wait comfortably to see whats happening.

Except he does--the X1900XT is more powerful than a 7800GTX. Oblivion has been running on that card and the 6800 series for a while now (what they base performance off of). So he knows it'll rape that game.

Also, nobody knows when the "7900GTX" (if that's even the name of the next gen card) will come out. There's speculation, rumors, and watching of the market, but it could come out tomorrow for all we know (hell, look at the 7800GTX release--nobody knew about it until it appeared on newegg, really).

Well, thus far, it seems that nVidia's once again decided to move some of the steam away from the "flagship" card, and is working more on the "sane" cards for the time being... Since the release of the 7800GTX 512, they've gone on with the 6800GS, 7300GS, and 7800GS for AGP... A lot of "GS" cards, definitely not "BS" cards.

Thus far, as Dj Yoshi commented, the 7900GTX is, in effect, largely a rumor. The difficult thing about seeing down the road of PC graphics is that there is a shocking large number of fanboys (and fangirls) out there, and they stop at nothing, even making it hard to tell what's fact and what's pure rumor. However, what I've seen suggests that it might come out sometime around late March, possibly in April; May isn't out of the question either. Of course, that would put it dangerously close to the estimated release of the 8800 series, which will likely come mid-summer. The real trouble is, numbers such as G71, NV50, 24/32 pixel pipelines, 700MHz clock speeds, and the like are all floating around with no clear indication of what is what.

Regardless, it looks like comparing these cards will get to be rather interesting. nVidia's clearly going back to their old path, insisting that the TMUs (texture-mapping-units) are the most important part of a video card, while ATi's forcusing more on the PSUs. (pixel-shader-units) Now, from what I can tell, comparing the last of ATi's cards for this generation, in this case being the X1900XTX in question, to what appears to be the 8800GTX, we get the following comparison in specs: Interestingly enough, while the 8800GTX would, in theory, be outright superior, here we see a divergence on different games; more texture-heavy games like Quake 4 would perform better on the GeForce, while intensely shader-heavy games like F.E.A.R. and Oblivion would still, oddly enough, perform better on the Radeon. (note that in F.E.A.R., the performance gap between the X1900XTX and 7800GTX 512 approaches a bizzare 80%) The GeForce would presumably win out in more "balanced" games, such as Gothic 3.

Of course, this is still going off of a lot of information that's incomplete at the moment; as it's been said, no one's actually certain of what nVidia's next cards are even actually NAMED, let alone what they contain.

i might have gotten a x1900, but then i'd have to get a crossfire mobo and i just don't want to. :p

Who needs CrossFire anyway, when a single X1900XT is MORE than enough?

Bah, I'm still using my X800XT. Of course, a little of that does happen to have to do with the fact that I've got an old AGP motherboard... (it's also socket 754 to boot! Huzzah for early-adopting the Athlon64!)

Well I personally believe SLI and Crossfire is a rich man's luxury. At least in this day and age.

Why do you say? Because it costs an arm and a leg to buy two high-end cards at release, and even if you tell yourself, I'll buy an extra one when new more powerful cards come out and prices drop, it wont do the trick then.

Simply because there are too many technology upgrades as new cards come out. SM 2.0, SM 3.0, DX 9, HDR, RAM, soon DX10, SM 4, HDR FP48 AND 64 (or so I heard). So even if you stick yourself in SLI then, you'll be powerful yes, but you wont run the newer technologies.

Computers are a pain. :p

Not to mention the fact that the advantages of SLi and CrossFire are best seen at higher resolutions; they can vanish at lower resolutions, which you may wind up being relegated to if you, say, try to use a woefuly insufficient card for an intensive game. (such as a pair of 6600s for F.E.A.R.) At that point, you're little better off with a pair of cards than a single one, and you're out the price of the second card, even if it was cheap.