I've always used nVidia cards, not out of any fanboyish loyalty, but because my upgrades always seem to come at times when nVidia's cards were getting the best performance. Until now, anyway.
nVidia hasn't put out a new chip in a while. AMD's DX11 hardware is just around the corner, whereas nVidia is doing their renaming thing again and new hardware could be a long time coming.
I have an 8800GTX right now (as shown in my sig below). The Batman demo and Resident Evil 5 benchmark are showing me that I can still crank the settings at 1080p, but the framerate is starting to take a more significant hit with these new games. I want to upgrade soon, but for the first time I'm not sure what to get.
The HD5870 looks promising. I haven't seen any detailed specs, but new DX11 hardware at $299 is certainly tempting. I probably wouldn't hesistate to go with AMD, except for the loss of PhysX hardware support. I liked the effects in Mirror's Edge and the stuff in Batman (volumetric, physics reactive fog, tiles that break realistically, cool large-scale cloth simulation, etc) is pretty awesome. I imagine all of this runs like a crippled dog without the GPU acceleration though.
So here are the options I'm considering:
nVidia hasn't put out a new chip in a while. AMD's DX11 hardware is just around the corner, whereas nVidia is doing their renaming thing again and new hardware could be a long time coming.
I have an 8800GTX right now (as shown in my sig below). The Batman demo and Resident Evil 5 benchmark are showing me that I can still crank the settings at 1080p, but the framerate is starting to take a more significant hit with these new games. I want to upgrade soon, but for the first time I'm not sure what to get.
The HD5870 looks promising. I haven't seen any detailed specs, but new DX11 hardware at $299 is certainly tempting. I probably wouldn't hesistate to go with AMD, except for the loss of PhysX hardware support. I liked the effects in Mirror's Edge and the stuff in Batman (volumetric, physics reactive fog, tiles that break realistically, cool large-scale cloth simulation, etc) is pretty awesome. I imagine all of this runs like a crippled dog without the GPU acceleration though.
So here are the options I'm considering:
- Ignore the DX11 features and upgrade to a GTX 285 now
- Ignore PhysX features and upgrade to a HD5870 when available
- Ignore performance and DX11 for now and wait for nVidia's DX11 hardware
Last edited: