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New graphics card

Uhhh… i couldn’t resist tonight. I just ordered a new graphics card ( EN7950GX2 ). I currently have a ATI 850XT and so far it is fine hardware-wise besides producing some artifacts after a certain high-usage (i think it is heat actually). The drawback with ATI definitely is the drivers. They are simply broken by design… Which other manufacturer boasts that his drivers feature automatic restart in case the driver crashes? And with rendermonkey (a tool by ATi to create shaders) that happened to me a LOT.

The new beast is actually two since it is one card fitting in one slot featuring 2 gpus each with 512MB ddr3 ram. Maaan… finally i will be able to really explore all the SM3 codelines in shaders. The thing with ATI is that they still do not really support it ( tried to find the link again to the story - will do that as soon as i find it found it ).

From all the reviews i read i will be in for a major performance boost - about 4 to 6 times from where i am coming from :)

Finally the price - don’t ask. In fact i cannot tell since my girlfriend would probably impale me…

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 5:49 am and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “New graphics card”

  1. sonic Says:
    August 1st, 2006 at 11:12 am

    Could you please search for the link regarding ATI’s SM3 support? I’m interested in that, too. I only know that nVidia shaders can have enormous length since quite some time, and that ATI can emulate that with multipassing. The performance of such shaders is another topic, I guess…

  2. monolar Says:
    August 1st, 2006 at 11:20 am

    i think i found it. The link to ATI not really supporting SM3

  3. monolar Says:
    August 1st, 2006 at 11:23 am

    Btw: the link targets Steve Streeings Blog who is also known as sinbad - the author of the Ogre 3d ( http://www.ogre3d.org/ ) engine so he probably knows what he is talking about

  4. sonic Says:
    August 1st, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Thanks for the link! I think I heard something about this…

  5. sonic Says:
    March 23rd, 2007 at 11:27 pm

    > Which other manufacturer boasts that his drivers feature automatic restart in case the driver crashes?

    actually, that happened to me yesterday with my brand new GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB under Vista with a DirectX 10 SDK example. But otherwise the pixels are flying around me here like never before - had a Radeon 9700 XT before 8-D

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