BAS' January video card guide

[BAS]

Nvidia's GTX 260 and above are becoming increasingly scarce as production has ceased and the "fermi" cards coming in a few months.

ATI has released the lower-end 5 series card, the 5650, which while the chart would imply it is less powerful than the 3 year old 9800GT, it does use less power and has DX11 support.

[fasbot]

Looks like crossfire is making a come back. don't care about dx11, they also made cards that supported dx10.1 and nothing ever came of it, so it was a waste of money. I'm still waiting to see what nvidia answers the 5000 series with, whatever the 300 series brings, its going to be outragously expensive.

[Inveramsay]

dx11 actually brings stuff that makes a difference, not like the dx10 which brought basically nothing.

[Beistet]

So this chart shows the total sum of FPS, not the performance on average? 180 fps would be about average, then?

There is the unigine engine test out there. When tessellation is on, the test drops the card's performance by 30+ %. Which makes me wonder how useful the lower end 56xx cards are.

Spoiler:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/..._tessellation/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F6zSgtRnkE

[Vulpes Foxnik]

The new cards are just ridiculous. The mid card I selected for Noircer, the Radeon HD 5770, is able to preform ~ 1TFLOPS, while his Phenom II 955 am3 preforms 6-8 GFLOPS. To put this all in perspective, the first super computer to Achieve 1TFLOPS was in 1997, the Intel ASCI Red/9152. The Radeon HD 5870 obtains ~2TFLOPS, which is a super computer from 1999, Intel ASCI Red/9632.

A super computer... for $150. I have a feeling these cards, once openCL takes hold, will be far more than anyone needs for a gaming machine. Really we should now focus on FPS/W.