Does Dual Graphics Cards spells the end to PC gaming???

BadAss

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The way things look at the moment, unless you have two GPUs, games like F.E.A.R or Lost Cost are going to struggle with all the settings maxed out. Now some may say this is the price you pay for cutting edge technology/but in my eyes its just a ploy to rape the average PC gamer of cash.

It seems the PC gamer is being forced down a road which just might see him/her say enough is enough, why pay £600+ on GCs alone when I can buy two whole consoles for the same price.

Why dont they just put out one card out for £600 with the same performance as two for £300 each? Intel are doing it with dual cpus.

Its because the wool is being pulled over our eyes and ATI and Nvidia can say look its your money and your choice to run SLI. But there is no choice when games demand it.

Card Manufacturers and Game Publishers are slowly becoming as one. They are working so closely together they now have the power to dictate what we pay, and what we play.

Back in the days of 3dfx the top cards use to cost £150, now you have to pay double that for one, then double that again to play a £25 game as its meant to be seen! Yet consoles have remained around the same price.

Now call me cynical or is there a deeper meaning to all this? Correct me if I'm wrong but consoles like PS3 and 360 will be sold at a loss on release right? It's only in year 2 or 3 when Sony and Microsoft will start to make their money back, or so they say. In the mean time the PC gamer forks out over the odds for the same technology from day one. It seems to me the PC gamer is funding the black whole in the R&D department at ATI and Nvidia, while the Console gamer reaps the benifits and gets a bargin.

Lets look at it this way, the only thing that stopped a PC gamer going 100% console was the fact we had better resolutions on the PC monitors and internet access. But now the consoles will have thses too. The only other thing was the fact the PC gamer was more impatient and couldn't wait five years for the next jump in graphics, but the price of new GPU hardware is killing this idioligy off too.

The gulf between PC gaming and console gaming is about to widen IMO and will never close again. Once people stop upgrading their PC due to cost like its happening now people will jump ship and never look back.

No one apart from the hardcore gamer will feel the need to upgrade anymore. PC sales are slowing. PC games are more GPU dependant than CPU and nobody want to pay £1000 every two years just to play the latest games.

So my prediction for the next 10 years.

1/ The price of GPUs will kill off the PC games market and leave just a bunch of nerdo elitists with big wallets salivating over 3d marks 2015.

2/ The fact consoles are internet ready, stable, cheap and get all the latest games first means wheres the advantage of a PC.

3/ Consoles will suddenly become SLIable, which means plug in two consoles together and get twice the performance!

Beleive me I don't think we've seen anything yet.
 
What you say does not amaze me at all - because it's basically all true. I am finding that games are and always have been a bit ahead of the average or even some good graphics cards. It is all one huge industry based on selling - be it games, CPU's, mb's, CPU's or whatever. These guys all hold hands under the table and the only true loser is us, the end user, struggling to keep up...
I am about to play the last level in the game F.E.A.R and I have N.E.V.E.R had a game that has given me so much trouble especially with the audio. I have a XP3000 with MSI mb, 1Gb PC3200 RAM, 6600GT 128mb graphics card, and SB Live sound and I am finding the going tough with this game. It can only just cope with 1024x768 on medium settings. We have to face a fact => We will never keep pace with games... Games companies are not interested in putting out games for average cards. They would rather let loose games which give troubles and then put out update patches to try to fix them.. Problems usually rise from the miracle new developments used in the games... My nephew has been playing games with his Play Station for about 18 months now and I have never seen it faulter once. Why don't PC games behave like this...??? I'm not searching for answers, I merely quote the obvious...

I buy most of my games and with games like F.E.A.R, I feel like they have stolen my money. Over here, you don't get your money back. What kind of crap industry is this...???
 
I do agree, but to be fair, this is the only game. From what I've seen people with x800xl's up/6800GT's up can play Loast Coast at an acceptable level. I think the true purpose for SLi/Xfire is to get one card now then another 6 months+ down the line for a *cheaper* upgrade.

The flip side for the games companies is that people are shelling out money for SLi/Xfire now and want to see games that take advantage of the setup. So they have to put settings that are insane or ppl will not buy the things in the first place....but then that's the gfx card companies back handing the games companires, no doubt, to get people on board with the new solutions.

But when you see the specs for 360 and ps3, thats an insane amount of power for £200 :eek: The only thing that concerns me are the boasts that Sony were trumpeting about the ps2, we all know that was a crock of *****.

Bit of a grey area methinks...
 
I agree with most of what badass says here. Being a PC gamer is way, way too expensive.
What apps, other than games need 2 graphics cards?

None, thats how many. This is all a marketing ploy to get people to shell out for 2 cards.
Why do we need 2 cards when ive seen single cards running 2 gpus?
Why arent these cards already available? Because they want to milk us for SLI and XFire first.

I bet once theyve done that it will be dual GPU/Dual Card set ups for quadruple the performance.

Thats just silly. Even the latest games shouldnt need that sort of power.
Why dont game makers just try to optimise their games a little more?
Im sure newer and better drivers from Nvidia and ATi would work wonders too.

Its all just an excuse to steal our money.
 
i only read the first couple of lines of the first post so if i'm repeating someone 'my bad', i'm running F.E.A.R/lost coast max settings on everything and i haven't had so much of a glitch, stutter or a foot poking through the floor, body through the wall etc.... Haven't reinstalled far cry yet so i'm not sure how thats gonna hold up
 
Great post BadAss. I agree with most of what your saying, but the thing is that you would only need to upgrade your graphics cards if you want the best possible performance from FEAR; HL2 etc. For most people, their PC's can run these games adequately (even if resolution suffers).

My PC is over 2 years old and therefore I can only run games at low res' to make them playable. While it would be nice to have all the special effects, it doesn't detract from the gameplay. It seems that as with most things, it is the hardcore faithful that are funding nvidia/ATi's R&D departments. If you don't fall into that category then there is nothing to worry about! ;)
 
If modern games require more GPU horsepower than cutting edge graphics cards have to offer, then all I can say is "about bloody time". I'm sick and tired of the games lagging the hardware by two years or more. I want something that looks as good as present-generation hardware can make something look, not something that only stretches a PC that's 3 years old.

It is precisely the fact that games haven't ever done this before that gives consoles the edge. On a console, you know exactly what hardware you're developing for, so you can push it to the limit. Historically PC games have always chickened out and designed for three-year-old hardware, thus lagging behind console equivalents for much of the cycle. This is a very positive step.
 
This is consumer driven industry and people want better graphics, if you don't want to pay for it then you can't have it, harsh but not exactly untrue. I like pc games, console games can't hold my attention, they are too much like twitch gaming. There are some that require thought and are absorbing but they are few.

If you were a game maker now and you had to think of the easiest way to make a game that people will buy, they see the box read the previews and get excited about. The easiest thing to do that requires less thought and effort in the long run, quite simply make you game have the best graphics so far.

'The best graphics sells games even if they are crap' philosphy is as true now as it has ever been. Take a big selling game or genre and bolt on better graphics you have an instant winner. The same is true with the film industry, take the current fad or if your lucky enough (as a film company) previous best selling film, put a bigger named cast and better special effects and put more money in the marketing budget, everyone will go to see it even if its crap.

Fortunitly it looks like the film industry is starting to take note, but its gonna be a long while until the games industry does, we are no longer in the 'we makes games we want to play and beacuse we enjoy making them', were in the 'lets make as much money as possible and let accounting or marketing make all the desisions'.

I can't really believe you want a card that has less than 1/8 of the performance of the current hi-spec (7800GTX) and complain that it can't keep up, its like buying a fiesta and complaining that a f1 car overtakes you and then laps you.

I agree that games aren't optimised (pretty much at all) on the pc compaired to the console, but if they did they would miss there window for best grahics ever and would sell hardly as many games as the actual gameplay is usualy poor. If you look at most games the dfference between the highest settings and lowest are hardly any compaired to the old day with quake 2, when i got a voodoo 2 my eyes were open the difference between hardware and software engine was stagering much than the low and high setting of games today.

If you buy a card that can play most games at high res with most details on when it comes out, then in over a years time your (when it came out midrange card) can't do the same, complaining that nothing should ever change ect... I think your just being selfish. No game to date requires more than a 7800GTX to play with top setting at reasonable resolutions (i.e. 1600x1200 and below) even with anti aliasing, plus the previous gen cards even when sli'ed/crossfired can only equal at best a 7800GTX.

The simple truth is that if you want the best gaphics buy a better graphics card otherwise don't complain and run your games on lower but still acceptable resolution and details levels, but buy games with game play not eyecandy, thats the only way the industry will change.
 
AML said:
I bet once theyve done that it will be dual GPU/Dual Card set ups for quadruple the performance.

Already happened/happening, the 7800 GT and GTX will be coming with 2 cores on 1 board in the new year which supposedly can SLi meaning four gpu core's.

Then there is this insane amount of power....

http://www.hkepc.com/hwdb/nf4slix16-5.htm

:eek:
 
Thats the thing, PCI-E has opened the pandoras box. With AGP there was one slot, one peak of performance at any given time and one target for game developers to aim at. Now its every man for himself.

I think its selfish for some one to say, well I can afford two £300+ GCs, therefore game developers should cater for me first, bugger everyone else. All that mentality will do is push people to consoles, that market will grow and suddenly games like Halo are released on the PS2 before what should of been the PC.

ATI and Nvidia could of kept the AGP slot and made AGP2, a format with the advantages of PCI-E but backwards compatible with AGP1, but no.

They could of done away with SLI and released dual core GPUs from the off, but no.

It's lets give everyone the need to start from scratch, don't support AGP anymore and promise game developers theyll have enough power there to run that insane game they were dreaming about. That way when the punters see the demo they'll realise they have no choice but to upgrade.

This is where it all comes undone. People aren't stupid, they still need their PC's for the internet, PhotoShop, MS Office, Video Editing, etc. So what do they do? They see the PS3 that will play games with amazing HD graphics and HD movies at the fraction of the price of upgrading their PC's and say what the hell, I'll have both, one for work and one for play.

This is going to kill all those grass roots PC gamers, who can't afford to keep up anymore and PC game sales will plumet even futher into the abyss.

I think people are sucked in by thinking, well I'll buy one card now and another card in six months when prices drop and run SLI. If the demand for SLI is high which it will allways be now, do you think the cards are suddenly going to drop in price? ATI and Nvidia are going to milk this situation for as long as they can. Cards only drop in price when sales drop. Sales drop because they don't run the latest games anymore. It's all snow balling out of controle.

PC game developers, now have no limits. Its a fragmenting market.

Console game developers, know the limits and code games to break them.

Happy gaming.
 
Not all game are like this though, only the ones that really try to push the envelope, take for example WOW it'll run supprisingly well on most hardware, the gaphics scale down very well too, i would be happy playing it on medium settings and medium resolution. If you want something you have to pay for it, simple as. Further advances will mean that the high end graphics engines will be made better looking and also more efficent, look at the quake 2 engine it was used to power everything from the forementioned game, to something like soldier of fortune with its limb dissassembly and king ping with its very pretty skinning as well as jedi knight (1) and to hl (1). The graphics got better using the very same engine while they also ran better on lower spec machines.

UT series is a good example of a game that has always had cutting edge graphics but has run very well on older hardware, just because you can't run fear on the highest setting with a last gen mid range card does mean that every game that comes out from now on is gonna do this. Even if it did, you would have a choice of buying a low midrange card for arround £100 every year, a high mid range card every other year or flagship £300-400 card every 3 years. The former may be the better option as it means that you get the latest (although watered down) technology, but you lose your investment alot quicker or you buy the best card arround and see new pretty rendering techniques that you can't have but atleast your frame rates are pretty high.

The life cycle for each card has always been arround the same, although the price has increased for each sector. For example a low mid range card used to be a GF mx which could be had for about £60 then the GF ti 200 was about £150 and a ti 500 was like £250.

If you really believe that game developers are only gonna make games for the tiny tiny percentge of people with 4xsli'ed 7800GTX's your not all there i'm afraid, they are a company who try to make money and the best way is to appeal to as many people as possible. If anything games are somewhat stranged with any card below the 6600GT, where the performance drops off so much that if a developer trys to make a modern 3d that would work on those, the graphics whould have to be so cut down no one would buy it when they see what hl2/farcry and doom3/quake 4 can do. Unfortunitly if you buy a pc from any large manufacturer the video hardware is uaualy some crappy x300, 6200 or even an antiquated fx series chip, meaning you have to upgrade your graphics card to play pretty much anything. Maybe we should have just keep the old way with software rendering where your cpu dictated the fps. As there is not muh difference between cpu's these days it would be a whole lot fairer, and with dual cores we could finaly have a use, where one is used purely for graphics, oh but then we have those with supper dooper (shall we call them SLI for the sake of it) cpus were one is very supperior to the other and oh we've fragmented the market.

It is very true that console makers have a brick wall which they can't go behond, but more importantly that have a closed system where they can cheat and steal in programming terms to grab an extra ounce of performance. With a pc system you have to go through an api, most likely direct x meaning you have so little control over the direct hardware anyway.

Personaly I'm far more concerned about the lack of game play (and any shread of origionality) in most modern games, fortunitly the likes have HL2 and farcry could deliver on this level but others like jedi academy and unreal 2 were sorly lacking (especialy considering there origions). Pretty graphics are nice but i want an involving story, as well as the instant gratification frag.

PCI-E was and still is unnessessary but its for the future, when agp came out people said why do we need a new slot PCI delivers enough bandwidth (and until fairly recently it did). Its called progress, and yes while people buy games for graphics alone we may have a fragmented market between the haves and have nots, and the havbe nots will be supplied with the better games because they the ones who will buy the games in droves. Remember a game costs circa £30 irrespective of your hardware.


[Quote BadAss] I think its selfish for some one to say, well I can afford two £300+ GCs, therefore game developers should cater for me first, bugger everyone else [/Quote]

Indeed it would be, but to pay £600 for some graphics cards and ask for a game which has some extreme setting that can push the cards is not, as long as the game plays well and looks better than the previous gen game on your card I don't see how anyone can complain. Remember when doom3 came out which its ultra setting, and id pretty much said no current graphics card will be able to play with this setting (although they were somewhat wrong about that, but the sentiment was there, we want a graphics engine that will test cards to come)
 
There are actually single cards that have 2 GPUs on them. Why arent we seeing them?
Simply coz it would mean the end of SLI and XFire even before they have matured.
If we can buy a single card with the same performance of 2 cards why would anyone pay double for 2 sepparate cards as well as a special SLI/XFire Mobo?

Its this kind of greed from Nvidia and ATi thats driving people away.

What?, selling the GPUs for the PS3 and XBox 360 wasnt enough for them?
Now they need to ripp PC gamers off?

How far do these people think they can go?
 
AML said:
There are actually single cards that have 2 GPUs on them. Why arent we seeing them?
Simply coz it would mean the end of SLI and XFire even before they have matured.
If we can buy a single card with the same performance of 2 cards why would anyone pay double for 2 sepparate cards as well as a special SLI/XFire Mobo?

You can get dual chip cards, i.e. sli on one card. Gigabyte brought out the dual 6600GT card which has been quite a sucess, more due to hype than performance though.

Gigabyte and others were working on dual chip 6800GTs but they only had engineering samples out by the time the 7800 series appeared and the card was more expensive and not as good, plus you missed out on sli (i.e. potential future upgrade).
Mean while Asus have brought out a limited edition (2000 units) dual 7800GT card that has an external power supply so as not to tax an existing PSU (quite thoughtful really, although it does mean a power cube which some people can't stand for some reason), the limited availibly is probably to test the water and also make some money and free PR to make up for the cost of producing a small run . I beleive that they may have an SLI ability with these or a motherboard that had 2x sli chips onbaord, thus 4x sli is possible if a physical way to link the cards and drivers are sorted out, which is roumered. SLI motherboards are not much more than non SLI mobo, and often there are feature changes other than SLI.

No matter how good the graphics of the top end get the games companies will make games that appeal to the mass market yet still having graphics that beat the competion on the highest end systems (if just to save face).

As already said most games don't loose much in detail from top to mid and mid to bottom. The one thing that will be unplayable is this HDR lighting thing and other cutting edge tech, as it can tax even the best cards and if optimisiations can happen here, someone will do it as it will be a strong selling point.

The real difficulties i can see for game developers is to where they are going to engineer the cut off point, while still getting the biggest market possible but not sacrifising the overall look of the game to satisfy those with ancient technlogy.

The 360 and ps3 will be nothing but a disapointment for anyone that thinks that its gonna be the best thing in gameing to ever happen. Your gonna see just like the current gen console, the same game repackaged in prettier (much prettier this time) graphics without the soul of the game thats really needed. Games will be getting ever shorter as the graphics take more precidence, I can't believe people pay £30 and more for a 10hour game, I remember if it was less than 30 hours long you weren't getting your moneys worth.

Over time killer games will come out that define what the console is, what it has to offer and each one will have a few 'killer apps'. Of the first generation of the current consoles how many games can you remember or would want to, most likly non beacuse it took time to produce decent games, and of the hundreds of games produced for the ps2 how many are that good?probably 25 in 4-5 years.

Just beacuse there is new hardware its not gonna change how business is done, its gonna be the same old.
 
This is something ive been saying for a while, are we really going to see that much difference between the Xbox and the Xbox 360?
Arent the games just going to be graphical updates from their previous iterations?
If this is the case then I dont see the point to get a "next gen" system.

Revolutions is the only system that seems to have origianal ideas and concepts. Something MS and Sony really lack.

I guess for fan boys and teenagers the PS3 and 360 are irresistable, but for mature gamers that have seen and done it all before, it is passable.
Mind you, the PC isnt exactly revolutionary either. More of the same FPS, and RTS every year.
It seems that the PC is limited to games that work with a keyboard and mouse.

The only types of games that require all this power are FPS. Other PC games seem to do just fine on lower end systems.

Is it really worth spending all that money for ONE single type of game?

Remember all the hype surrounding Doom3. How many of us upgraded from perfectly good Radeon 9800's to Nvidia 6800's just to play that one game that ended up being crap?

Not 2 months after the release of the 6800 series we start seeing 7800's? Whats that all about?

At the end of the day, FPS games tend to be short and once we finish playing them we never go back to them. So why spend so much for a single game that doesnt have any real value at the end of the day?

I think developers need to optimise their games more the same way they do on consoles. Look at how the XBox with a 733mhz chip and Gforce 3 can run HL2!
 
There are a few points mentioned in the posts above. Re: cards dropping in prices. It happens, there is no point in saying it doesn't, otherwise we'd still be paying £350 for a voodoo banshee. You can get a 6800ultra for half the price it was 6 months ago, 2 x 6800ultras = 1 7800 gtx (roughly) So a 6800ultra owner can get near the power of 1 gtx from a relatively cheap upgrade. That in essence is SLi's point, IMO.

Re dual core cards. They will be out in the new year, in fact I have seen previews of the 7800GT version. It won't replace SLi, as some people physically can't use SLi (shuttles etc) and if they want the same power, need to go the dual core route.

Re xbox and HL2, it may run HL2 decently, but compared to even a radeon 9600pro it will look poor. And that card costs about £50.....

At the end of the day it's called innovation. If none of this happened and Quake 8 looked the same as Quake 2 the people would moan that nothing is happening.
 
Tigerblade said:
You can get a 6800ultra for half the price it was 6 months ago, 2 x 6800ultras = 1 7800 gtx (roughly) So a 6800ultra owner can get near the power of 1 gtx from a relatively cheap upgrade. That in essence is SLi's point, IMO.

I don't believe the SLI hype for a minute. It's not the first time this idea has appeared, then disappeared almost as quickly.

If you look at the price of RAM, the technology behind DDR has been around for how long yet the price is the same, why? Because the demand is there. Same goes for SLI. Once most people have upgraded to SLI boards the demand for a second card will remain high and whos going to drop there prices first, the manufacturer or the retailer? Most cards only drop in price when a new ones superceeded it but with SLI the second card is no longer a second hand item its still going to be a part of your system so the value of it is still high. Its a false economy to think your getting extra power just for keeping you old card running.

Its only at the very begining when you first upgrade to SLI you get the hit. Once games have maxed out on that, then where? You still only buy a new card at the same rate as you did before, so the power difference will allways be the same and SLI becomes redundant.

The games of today which demand SLI are stealing the power gains from next year. Its only the people who buy two of the same cards on their release day that see the benifit of SLI.

I'll explain it another way. If you owned a house 5 years ago at £50,000 and now house prices have doubled its worth twice that £100,000 you think to yourself wow now I can afford to buy an even better house but you then realise all the other houses have gone up in price at the same time and in reality your no better off than you were before. To get a better house you still have to fork out more money.

Yes SLI seems like double the power at the begining but when everyone has it, and the games have sucked all those FPS away you'll realise **** now I'm gonna have to upgrade again!

If you theoreticly rate the power of two 7800GTXs SLI @ 200 FPS. You upgrade 1 card worth 100 FPS to another which has a power increase of 50% giving you 150 FPS and put it back in your PC. You end up with 250 FPS. Thats an overall gain of 25%

So, you've just bought the latest greatest GC, paid top dollar which ATI and Nvidia want you to do and all you see is 25% more FPS! Value for money? I think not. Oh and by that time a new game has come out with all the latest eye candy and pow your 25FPS has vanished.
 
i agree with the orginal post thats why im selling my pc and buying a cheap pc for the internet an a xbox360.
 
PC games does not equal console games.

They are different from the market they are designed for, the control system they use to the people that play them.

You can't say that because the 360 and ps3 have the potenial for more hoursepower and the best graphics seen on that side of reality, that the games produced for a pc or console are in anyway comparable.

If you are so shallow as to consider better graphics = better games, then enjoy.

The thing I don't understand is why some of the better console games and genres are not released for the pc, games like the beat'em up have been sorley missed and the online cababilities only now being relised on consoles would have been great for these games.
Racing games are also missing except for the ocational simulation, i realy wouldn't mind Grand Torismo on the pc (its a sony game so never gonna happen though).
The less hardcore RPG is a console only preserve too, the games that are inbetween diablo and neverwinter, really a story driven game with charecter growth even if they are almost entirely linear.
 
consoles and pc are better for different types of games. If i'm playing final fantasy (roll on 12!), gran turismo, GTA for instance I want a nice controller with all the buttons in the right place, not stearing with wasd or left right up and down. Same goes if i wanna play hl2, call of duty, F.E.A.R, AOE (forgot for a moment most of them are pc only games) i dont want to use a controller and have to use the right analogue stick to move the crosshair i want a mouse and a keybaord and the ability to get my udates easily and play online with friends, yes u can do that with an xbox/ps2 and i'm sure theres a keyboard and mouse out but its not the same as going on msn and saying wanna play some cs and going off to find a server
 
Yes PC's are better than consoles for certain types of games and vice versa. BUT WHY?
Can the PC not handle a beat em up? Not true.
Can a console not handle an RTS? Again, not true.

We can get a keyboard/mouse for any console if they would produce it. Same for a PC using a controller.

What is the deal here?
 
I've read posts on different forums of ppl playing cod2 on 360 booths in the states, and by all accounts they have come away thinking wtf!? No anti aliasing, gfx barely better than xbox..... the 360 and the ps3 are not going to be the pc slayers that everyone seems to think they are.....

As regards to SLi, I understand you point, but don't agree ;) Obviously for the power user it is a must, but you have to admit that in the long run, for the less 'enthuisiastic' SLi is a good upgrade....Yes Once you have 2 cards and want the next gen you need to sell both cards, but I guess the obvious answer is 2 of that gen cards is worth at least 1 of the next gen cards, therefore starting the cycle again, albeit 1 generation behind. (If that makes sense lol....it is early ;) )
 
wormvortex1337 said:
consoles and pc are better for different types of games. If i'm playing final fantasy (roll on 12!), gran turismo, GTA for instance I want a nice controller with all the buttons in the right place, not stearing with wasd or left right up and down. Same goes if i wanna play hl2, call of duty, F.E.A.R, AOE (forgot for a moment most of them are pc only games) i dont want to use a controller and have to use the right analogue stick to move the crosshair i want a mouse and a keybaord and the ability to get my udates easily and play online with friends, yes u can do that with an xbox/ps2 and i'm sure theres a keyboard and mouse out but its not the same as going on msn and saying wanna play some cs and going off to find a server

I use a PS2 controller on the PC for racing games with a USB adaptor from play.com
 
Tigerblade said:
Yes Once you have 2 cards and want the next gen you need to sell both cards, but I guess the obvious answer is 2 of that gen cards is worth at least 1 of the next gen cards, therefore starting the cycle again, albeit 1 generation behind. (If that makes sense lol....it is early ;) )

But who are you going to sell them to? If everyone you know thinks like you, wont they be upgrading at the same time? If you were being honest with a potential buyer, wouldn't you be telling them your old cards just doesn't cut it anymore?

Besides there will be no second hand market because everyone with SLi will already have their old card. So they will have a brand new card if they buy one on release day, a second card from the year before which they use SLi and a third card probably 18-24 months old which with todays games is useless. Nobody will sell their second card if it still has any value.
 
Tigerblade said:
I've read posts on different forums of ppl playing cod2 on 360 booths in the states, and by all accounts they have come away thinking wtf!? No anti aliasing, gfx barely better than xbox..... the 360 and the ps3 are not going to be the pc slayers that everyone seems to think they are.....

Hold on, I tried COD2 at the Tokyo Game Show and it was being shown on a propper HDTV. The graphics looked pretty damn good to me. I would say it looked better than what ive seen on the PC. (COD2 that is)

How can you be sure that these "360Pods" are showing the games as they should.

I also felt the game had sufficient AA to make it playable.

Also remember that this is just the first gen of games for this new console. Wait a year or so and im sure they will make some pretty amazing stuff.
 
BadAss said:
Besides there will be no second hand market because everyone with SLi will already have their old card. So they will have a brand new card if they buy one on release day, a second card from the year before which they use SLi and a third card probably 18-24 months old which with todays games is useless. Nobody will sell their second card if it still has any value.

There will always be people who buy the newest cards only thus selling their old sli'able card, meaning there is a second hard market for both the seller and buyer.

ATI provides a more difficly arrangement, with using a master card and slave, although for people who buy one and then upgrade there will always be a market for the other, probably more so for the master cards.

If you buy a lower mid range card graphicaly intensive games will gradualy slip away with regard to using all highest settings this is only natural, were as a high end top end card will be useable for many years to come, a top end card will slip to lower medium settings over a period of 3 years, good value for money or not? this is a forum were people spend thousands of pounds on high end audio equipment where there difference is when upgrading are alot less impressive, and people often do this frequently.

PC games has always without exception been more expensive than console gaming, to get the highest settings has cost a premium ever since the origional voodoo. Things have never changed, and to be honest i can't see where your coming from.

SLI will not make games unplayable for those without, simply not gonna happen as those games would probably sell about 20-30 k world wide, certainly not a good return for the multimillion investment required.
Graphics don't make good games, graphics have only slowly made games more realistic, if you compair games over 2 year intivals the difference as usualy not been that great from each period.

Sound and physics aswell as AI also provide alot to games and their realism, thus should be considered as much as any other quality of a game. These are without mentioning a challenging and interesting enviroment plus a invoilving story, which i would take over mediocore graphics every day and so will most people (GTA, SIMS, HL anyone?) and this is allwithout mentioning the holly grail, GAMEPLAY and FUN.

To repeat games are not gonna suffer because of SLI, I know there were simialr doom mongers came out when the voodoo came out and though that games would be ruined with a two tear game industry, ad it didn't happen.
What about creative and EAX, where only the latest and best version is availible on a creative card, isn't that simialrly unfair on those without a creative card?
What about the AI and physics cards that are to be availible fairly soon, another unfair advantage ...
 

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