Which is better?

[TmGolfx360]

My, friend is building a computer and when it comes down to the video card I can not convince him to get the new Evga 8800gts 320mb (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130038) over the old BFG 7950GT 512mb. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814143071) My argument is that the new one will support Dx10 and you will be able to play Crisis and other exclusive games to Dx10 cards. All he sees is the amount of RAM in the cards which I know is foolish. So if I could get some support here maybe we can change his mind. He is mostly making his computer to play WoW and I know that both cards will max WoW out. Thx.

[saphalline]

Relative to the GPU's on both vid cards, the 8800 GTS with only 320MB of RAM is stupid! I can't imagine D3D 10 games intelligently using such a small amount of RAM for such a powerful GPU. Yes it's more than what most people have now, but it's almost like a new Ferrari with only one seat inside. :rolleyes: If you look at the ratios for the execution units, the 7900's have 48 pixel shaders and 8 vertex shaders, while the 8800 GTS has 96 unified shaders. So you've got a vid card with 512MB of RAM for 56 shaders vs a vid card with 320MB for 96 shaders.

I know it doesn't quite work like that, but the benchmarks don't lie. The 8800 with only 320MB of RAM can't keep itself afloat. It fails at basic tasks that lower end vid cards can do with only 256MB of RAM. I have no idea why NVidia decided to release such a crippled monstrosity when they already have the market cornered on D3D 10 hardware! Sorry to burst the upgrade bubble here, but if your friend can't afford the 8800 GTS with 640MB of RAM, then he might as well not buy one at all. The 7950 GT's are a great buy right now and a heck of a lot cheaper than an 8800!

Besides, 8800's still have power and space requirements that most PC's are unable to handle. I've seen people get sucked into a money pit with those vid cards. Get a new vid card - won't fit in the case. Get a new case - system won't POST. Get a new PSU - spend the next day doing BIOS and driver updates. Benchmarks not good enough - upgrade to a dual-core CPU. Games still stuttering - upgrade to 2GB of RAM. Etc...