| Game_boy said: Remember, a graphics card refresh is coming quite soon. Q1 2008 will bring R680 and D8E, while H1 2008 will have D9E and R700. The technology you would buy now has been available for nearly a year. Also, any (non-ATI) card you buy now will not be DirectX 10.1 compliant. |
DX10.1 is not that superb though, the mandatory 32-bit floating point filtering, and the imposing 4x AA minimums and the like are some of the major highlights for DX10.1.
These things will all be good down the road when we can pack a few more transistors in the cards but until then these features are more hinderance than help.
Realistically speaking right now even DX10 hasn't shown itself to be worthy of the extra fuss and in general I think DX9 is still the consumer preferred standard. Until DX10 as a base API can be considered worthwhile I don't see why 10.1 would be any different. Honestly I am starting to get tired of this view from the "graphics whore" world of DX10 that its ok to sacrifice performance if things look just a tiny bit better. Sacrificing performance for eye candy is only a good idea up to the point that the performance hit is noticeable to the user...and then you need to back up a bit and leave it there.
This is of course one of the problems a lot of folks have with games like Crysis and legitimately so. While most are woefully uninformed about how good a PC needs to be to run the game they are correct in saying that if their PC can't run it at a somewhat reasonable frame rate then it is nothing more than a very pretty slide show, one not worth much more than a few "oooh"s and perhaps one or two "aaah"s.
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| To Each Man, Responsibility |
