A Few Questions About The 8800GTS!

[Vanchatron]

A) Is it worth the extra cash to buy the 640mb version as opposed to the 320mb version?

B) How far off is the 8800GTS from the 8800GTX? I want to purchase a new graphics card in a couple of days that will enable me to play new/upcoming games such as Crysis, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3, Oblivion etc on fairly high settings with none to minimal lag, so was just wondering whether the 8800GTS will do the job.

C) If I purchased an 8800GTS, how long into the future would it last me before I needed to upgrade once again? I only ask as it's a lot of money to spend on a graphics card, only to have to upgrade again in 6 months.

D) Will I see A LOT of difference when upgrading from a 256mb Nvidia Geforce 7600GT?

E) Will it really make a difference is I was to purchase the cheaper out of these two? They're both the same graphics cards but from different companies & as you can see, the price difference is quite substantial. I just don't want to purchase the cheaper one and find out it doesn't run as well as the more expensive version etc.

Cheaper - http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/119850
More Expensive - http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/119644


Thanks a lot.

[Spearball]

If your planning on playing all the upcoming DX10 games maxed out i would definatly go with the 8800GTX. Still you would find a down side. The tests they did so far with that card weren't as good as they expected with DX10. But they are soon coming out with another card which is supposed to be a lot better, but the price will once again be soaring high. Conclusion is basically if you are going to play dx 9 games get the 8800. As for dx10 i would wait till the next card comes out as it will be more stable and have more support for dx10. The future is dx10 so i would just wait :)

320mb or 540?.... Upcoming games with benafit ftom the extra memory so id get the 640.

Will the 7600gt make a difference? If your going to play the latest games, yes it will.

[Vanchatron]

Thanks for the help. I'm gonna go ahead and buy the 640mb 8800GTS. If I feel the need to upgrade further when the 9800 comes out I'll just sell the 8800GTS on eBay.

[saphalline]

A) - In many ways it is, despite the cost. The big draw IMO for the 640MB version is that it can do anything that a 512MB vid card can do, such as super-high 4K res textures. The 320MB version is powerful, but not uber in that sense.

B) - The 8800 GTX/Ultra ends up being roughly 33% more powerful, in-line with its more powerful specs. 128 SP's vs 96, 384-bit RAM bus width vs 320-bit, 768MB of RAM vs 640/320MB, etc. However, the extra performance (impressive though it is) comes at a price premium and with higher power requirements. It represents the next step up in gaming power, marking the line between $1200 gaming systems and $2000 gaming systems. In short, it separates the "big boys" from the "budget gamers". ;)

C) - Nothing is going to trump the 8800 GTS on a price/performance ratio for quite some time. While vid cards will become more powerful over time, the drastic generation changes we've historically seen between GPU's is going to be less dramatic now that the latest rendering API's are based on unified shader architectures. However, for DX10 performance, the 8800 GTS represents the baseline index. It is the lowest you can go for DX10-compliant vid cards and still get great performance. A year from now, games like Alan Wake and UT3 and Fallout 3 will make all the 8600's and HD 2600's cry in pain! But they'll actually be playable on an 8800 GTS. We don't really have any games yet that show us what DX10 is truly capable of aside from little snapshots here and there. That will change over the next year. Lines will be drawn and anyone with a vid card less than an 8800 or HD 2900 will be on the losing front.

D) - In May, I upgraded from two GeForce 6600 GT's in SLI (roughly equivalent to your single 7600 GT) to one GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. At that time, I also made an OS change on my system from WinXP Pro to WinXP Pro & Vista Ultimate 64-bit in a dual-boot. I can tell you without a doubt that it made a huge difference! I used to play Oblivion at 800 x 600 with medium-low settings. Now I play at 1280 x 1024 with maxed-out settings and a modified ini!! :eek: There is no doubt that you WILL notice a difference!!

E) - Point of View is an unknown manufacturer. Perhaps it is re-branded? I'll have to look into that more tonight...