Radeon HD 5970 2GB - the world's fastest graphics card is reviewed

"William" wrote in message
ion...
Drives 3 monitors up to 2560x1600 each, (2-DVI, 1-Display Port)
....
The question I have is this: What would you want this type of power for.
Their are no games that can use this level of power.

Since AMD is pimping the Eyefinity feature, the card needs to be powerful
enough to drive such resolutions. 24" 1900x1200 LCDs can be bought for $250
each. Having three is within reach of mere mortals. Modern games at
5700x1200 can take a toll on lesser cards.

This stuff is going no where until the Gaming industry pulls its head out
of its butt and fixes things like DRM and returns to the "One Time Cost"
model verses the "Recurring Cost" of subscription service used lately.
What a waste of talent and money. And sales are down and we are in a
recession, and no one likes PC's for games and all that B.S.

The subscription model is mostly for MMOs. In fact, you are as likely to pay
"recurring cost" as a console user. How much does a year's subscription to
XBox Live cost again? $50?

PC games on a per-unit basis are more profitable for the publisher, because
no licensing fees are paid to Microsoft or Sony. And if the publisher uses
digital distribution via Steam, it takes the retailer margins, too. PC games
are not dying, though most of them are going to be ports of console games.
It's the only way for the business case to work given today's game
development budgets. Sometimes the porting is done well (Mass Effect),
sometimes not so well (Modern Warfare 2), sometimes poorly (Gears of War).

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

William wrote:

This reminds me of Hostess Twinkies - They don't sell very well anymore.

They don't sell well anymore because they are sickly sweet and
unhealthy. Most people want more healthy snacks now.

DerekBaker wrote:

You obviously haven't played Oblivion with a ton of mods active.

You got that right. I have 5870 1GB and Oblivion still has performance
issues.

William wrote:

I plan to upgrade my computer some time the first part of next year to an
i5/i7 system. It will include a new mobo, cpu, ram, video card, and OS. I
will purchase a 5870 just to have what's new after availability and prices
become more reasonable. Even though I don't expect to have anything that
will use its power any time soon.

William

I have 5870 an don C2D @3.4ghz with 4GB DDR2 it still had stuttering on
occasion. Today I just installed i5 750 and 4GB DDR3 and hope to achieve
a nice OC of about 4.2GHZ. I bet it will still stutter even on that.
It's not all about frame rates, stuttering as graphics load is a
performance issue too. Bethesda used Speedtree for all those trees in
Oblivion and that graphics tech is known to be a performance hog. Eagle
Dynamics considered using it for DCS-Blackshark but decided not to when
they saw it performed so poorly.

* William:

What about rendering and ray-tracing?

Are still mostly done by the CPU, and for the few programs that support
GPU acceleration (usually via NVIDIA CUDA) professional users use Quadro
or Tesla cards for that and not gamer cards.

Benjamin

* William:

I've got one word for you - "Slashdot". Here is another "Ars Technicia" .
They do not hold the opinion you express.

To be honest I don't give a **** what they say, as in the past most of
their "predictions" were crap anyways.

Nor do most of the
financial columns and pundits when discussing the future of console gaming
and PC gaming.

Yeah, right. The same "financial columns" that not long ago told us that
there is no credit crunch or any other economy problems.

Reading fish guts is probably much more reliable than reading what all
these "experts" that failed to see the the highly visible write.

Ben

Benjamin Gawert wrote:

Reading fish guts is probably much more reliable than reading what all
these "experts" that failed to see the the highly visible write.

I prefer tea leaves, less mess and far less smelly.

"Benjamin Gawert" wrote in message
...
* William:

I've got one word for you - "Slashdot". Here is another "Ars Technicia"
. They do not hold the opinion you express.

To be honest I don't give a **** what they say, as in the past most of
their "predictions" were crap anyways.

Nor do most of the financial columns and pundits when discussing the
future of console gaming and PC gaming.

Yeah, right. The same "financial columns" that not long ago told us that
there is no credit crunch or any other economy problems.

Reading fish guts is probably much more reliable than reading what all
these "experts" that failed to see the the highly visible write.

Ben

So you're tired of cleaning up your dog's ****, and you lost money in the
stock market. Got it.

William

In article isition,
William wrote:

Tom:

Didn't someone find a new prime number about six months ago? Don't they
have a 'cloud computer initiative' doing that sort of stuff?

There is GIMPS, at www.mersenne.org, which has about 32,000 users
devoting about 200,000 CPUs (about 45 teraflops) to looking for prime
numbers; there's a prime-number-searcher written for nvidia graphics
cards, which runs at the same speed as a quad-core i7 at the moment.

The prize for a ten-million-digit prime has been won, and to test a
single candidate for a hundred-million-digit prime would take about
fifteen months on a Core i7/965 running flat out and have about the
same odds of finding a prime as you would of winning the UK national
lottery, so this isn't a route to wealth.

What about simulating weather patterns, - seems Global Warming proponents
are having trouble with their models lately. They could use some help.

Climate modellers have no shortage of computers, and there are very
few people with the skills to write the models.

Tom

* William:

So you're tired of cleaning up your dog's ****, and you lost money in the
stock market.

I don't have a dog, and I don't invest in stocks.

Got it.

I really doubt that.

Benjamin