Viper1 said:
That won't kick Crysis in the butt. The GPU will bottleneck the hell out of it. What applications are you using that require an nVidia card? You say adding an HD4850 would be $170 more (which is insane since that alone is more than the price of the card). Can you buy that rig with an even weaker GPU and then use the saved money to buy a better GPU separately? |
Applications that require NVIDIA - NVIDIA 3D and several proprietary microscopic image capture systems I use.
Video cards for gaming are hard to pin down. If you take average FPS from all games (Tom's Hardware) it looks like this. Red is approximate price based on current Newegg pricing.
Probably a pretty good guide but it does show that price is not a true indicator of performance. In general though it does show that SLI and Crossfire configurations do not seem to deliver enough to justify their price. Single boards with doubled architecture and more memory seem to do more for less money and complexity. *9800GTX+ 1GB was not tested but has been placed where the 9800GTX SLI 512MB was because of seperate testing that showed similar performance. Note prices are for comparison only and are usually based on the current price in USD of the cheapest model at Newegg.
Even after that, this is just and average of all games. If you take a look at individual games and performances the result vary depending on game and graphic setting based on how the specific card architecture handles the component, (texture, no. of figures etc). Although of the cards discussed, the HD4870x2 ($425) most often did the best, that was by no means always the case. Sometime the 9800GTX+ 1GB had a better frame rate and on rare occasions the 9800GTX+ 512 beat it (??). The GTX280 1GB ($315) quite often outperformed the more expensive HD4870 x2. The GTX260 never beat its bigger brother the GTX280 but sometimes can so close, in one case .8 frames, to defy the $90 price difference.
