Looking Past the
Present
Undoubtedly, gamers are the primary market for 3D
graphics consumer cards. As with any other product, the
faster the performance, the higher the price you must pay.
Look at high end graphics cards such as ATI's Radeon
X1900XTX and NVIDIA's GeForce 7900GTX - these cards are
selling at about USD 450 to 600. If you're not satisfied
with the performance of these cards, the very fortunate of
you can use a pair of them for either a Crossfire or SLI
setup. If so, be prepared to spend around USD 1.000 to
1450.With that kind of serious money, gamers want the best. But that's true for any users, even those buying a motherboard with an integrated graphics card want to get their money's worth. That's why there are so many media (ourselves included) offering product reviews - we want to know if these products are worth the money we're paying for. Although performance and quality is king, there's usually another factor that most reviews can't capture - longevity. After all, if you just recently spent up to USD 1000 on new hardware, you don't want your new rig running to be too slow 3 / 6 months down the road. Now, some of you might be lucky enough to upgrade your graphics cards, processor and memory every 6 months, but not everyone is that lucky. Even with a buyback / trade in program, you typically have to fork the difference in price between your old card and the new one.
From experience, mainstream cards are typically good / fast enough for one year of games. High end cards usually fare better, offering some additional headroom so you can use it for about a year or at most a year and a half. In the graphics card business, that's the time it takes for the next generation to arrive (usually). In this case, choosing the right graphics card is even more important. However, the past six months is somewhat an anomaly in this regard. With ATI, the delay with R520 (Radeon X1800) have pushed the card's time to market very near its successor, the R580 (Radeon X1900). In fact, the Radeon X1800 may well be the only high end card to have a 3 months old life span. With NVIDIA, we basically saw small variations of the same design over the past year: the GeForce 7800GTX, 7800GTX 512 MB and 7900GTX. The most glaring differences between them are clock speeds and amount of memory.
We recently finished our review for both ATI's Radeon X1900XTX and NVIDIA's GeForce 7900GTX (which you can read here and here). Both cards are very fast, offering high enough frame rates for games available today. They're perform equally as well, with the Radeon X1900XTX having an edge for better image quality with anti aliasing and HDR plus AA support. On the other hand, the GeForce 7900GTX is faster when running without AA and AF and provide a much more effective transparency antialiasing. Although it's available with the GeForce 7800GTX, transparency antialiasing is only usable with the GeForce 7900GTX (at 4x). However, as we noted above, there's no way of knowing how these cards handle the new batch of games coming this year (or the year after). Other review websites and media usually rely on synthetic benchmarks for this purpose, however we don't really value the results from such benchmarks. For one, they are, by nature, synthetic benchmarks and not games - they 'simulate' what we may be seeing in games so they should never be used as the only metric in reviewing performance. Two, time and time again, vendors usually optimize their hardware and software to run benchmark well but these optimizations don't necessarily translate to real world performance.
Having finished the reviews of both cards, we find ourselves asking the question: how will these cards cope with newer games. NVIDIA seems more than happy to 'fix' everything with a driver update (Battlefield 2, Oblivion, Tomb Raider: Legend), much to the anguish of users. Users with ATI cards is somewhat better off - new games usually work right of the bat without any major (graphical) issues. New drivers may offer performance increases, but we believe there are no dubious optimizations at work here - ATI's developer team is still exploring the new architecture. So, we're more concerned with the GeForce 7900GTX than the Radeon X1900XTX in this regard.
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