Anyone buy the new NVidia 8800GTX?

The new 8800GTX is out.  Has anyone got one, and have you tried Vista on it?  It has built-in DirectX 10 support.  Wondering if it makes any difference to Vista, maybe cooler effects in the desktop, etc.?

Desktop is rendered using DX9.

ZippyV wrote:

Desktop is rendered using DX9.

Actually DX10 cards do offer an advantage for desktop composition in Vista, but it won't look prettier.

The advantage is this: with the DWM, the GPU has to be shared between Windows and whatever applications are using it, so it must be scheduled just like the CPU. The new WDDM driver model facilitates this. However, with a DX9 card, a GPU "thread" cannot be interrupted while it is executing a shader; you have to wait until the shader is finished until you can do scheduling.

With a DX10 card, you can interrupt right in the middle of a shader, which should lead to better performance.

More details here.

Waiting for it to go into at least one revision and also drop in price, alone because I'll need to pay for a new PSU.

Im waiting for a huge price drop. I see no reason to buy it now. Vista is, for consumers, 2 months away. In 2 months, alot can happen.
Also, the huge power consumption is scary.
And the fact that theres no reason buying now, but having a pimp computer, makes me wana wait.

Also, the cool things, like crysis(Which is gonna be able to run on Dx9 too), arent out yet. And i dont think they are gonna ship, before January either.

Tom Servo wrote:

Waiting for it to go into at least one revision and also drop in price, alone because I'll need to pay for a new PSU.

I typically skip a GeForce generation when buying a new card: GeForce 2 -> GeForce 4 -> GeForce 6, but I'll be giving GeForce 8 a miss too, there's nothing overly compelling in it that I really need, my 6800GT is powerful enough as it is.

I'll probably need one for 9km view distance in Armed Assault. And to be ready for Crysis.

I agree with W3bbo.

I have a ATI 9600 XT and it's powerful enough. You can spend a small fortune on graphics cards; it only makes sense for hardcore gamers to do that IMHO.


Regards,
Vincent

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

I have a ATI 9600 XT and it's powerful enough. You can spend a small fortune on graphics cards; it only makes sense for hardcore gamers to do that IMHO.

I think it's because nVidia released the new chipsets differently this time. Before they used to come out around Febuary (the only exceptions being the original GeForce 256, GeForce FX, and of course, GeForce 8), this meant developers had time to develop games that took advantage of them for either a Summer or Christmas release, but with a November release date we'll be seeing higher-perf games come out earlier.

Yeah the power consumption thing is kind of nuts.  I believe ATI's DX10 card is supposed to come out early next year.

I read an interview with Tim Sweeney (yhr EPIC games / Unreal Engine guy) about DX10 where he was saying DX10 isn't so much revolutionary, but more an evolution of DX9, and you can do everything in DX9 that you can do in DX10, but DX10 is more efficient.

$650 is kind of steep for a graphics card.  In 1 year it'll probably be $199 when the next iteration comes out.

I have a 7800GT-OC right now but I think it is reaching the end of its life.  It seems to be overheating a lot, or at least that is my guess.  FSX will freeze the whole computer after playing for an hour or so, and I suspect it is the 7800.  If the 8800GTX showed anything particularly compelling in Vista I was going to consider shelling out for it, but it sounds like it might be better to hold off and just buy a 7900 or ATI 1900 series card or something with 512mb vid ram instead of 256mb for the large FSX textures.  Heck you can get a 7950GX2 with 1 GIGABYTE of video ram for less than the 8800.

I'm waiting for the lower priced versions of the 8800 to come out and I also want one that's quiet so the GTX probably won't be the one for me.
I'm currently using a Geforce 6800 with a big passive heatpipe cooler on it.

When I finally upgrade to a Core 2 Duo system running Vista I'm pretty sure I'm going to go for a Geforce 8000 series DX10 card of some sort.

There will probably be a good GTS model by then but at the moment even that one is quite expensive in $CAN.
http://www.greenlyph.com/new/product_info.php?products_id=382&osCsid=60bf83842301c2f05694d817b3f52e86

z33driver wrote:

The new 8800GTX is out.  Has anyone got one, and have you tried Vista on it?  It has built-in DirectX 10 support.  Wondering if it makes any difference to Vista, maybe cooler effects in the desktop, etc.?

Im waiting for the ATi product. But beyond that, it takes a DX10 card to properly develop a DX10 3D Engine, so i'll be one of those wierd early adopters.