Future graphics card?

Anyone know what kind of notebook graphics card we can look forward to by the end of 2007?

anyone know what kind of gpus ati and nvidia are cooking up?

i want to see if there will be any advancement in the next year for lower power gpus with the same processing power as x1600 next year for notebooks and if i should hold off on buying one till then.

thanks

 

ATI is supposed to come out with the 80nm GPUs (smaller fabrication process) - ATI Radeon X1350, X1450, nothing concrete about the X1600 or what will happen to it. Minor boosts in perfomance.

There are rumors about an Nvidia Go7700. That's about all I have been able to find right now.

I don't think any of them are worth delaying your purchase for if you need the notebook right now.

 

It's the standard reply, but I'm going to say it. If you need a computer now, buy it. If you don't, then wait. But there's always something in development. You're never gonna stay ahead of the technology curve for more than a year at best.

That being said, DX10 will be seeing its debut next year, and I'm sure DX10 cards will be on their way into laptops at some point, but their power (both usage and performance) is yet to be known.

 

I read some articles in spanish about directX 10 and the new standards.
I put the links, I hope that you could understand spanish.

Part 1: http://www.noticias3d.com/noticia.asp?idnoticia=15652
Part 2: http://www.noticias3d.com/noticia.asp?idnoticia=15653

 

basically, if your willing to WAIT for awhile, the DX10 cards will blow everything out of the water.

 

GPUs tend to have a 6 month product cycle, so by the end of 2007 we'll be on the third inarnation of DX10 GPUS, but God only knows what sort of specs we'll be looking at.

They'll always be something faster that uses less power on the horizon, so you can either play the waiting game, where you'll never actually upgrade because they'll always be something better coming. Or just jump in now.

 

The current x1600 and go 7600 are great GPUs already. For more power, go with a 17" gaming beast with a go 7900 GS, x1800, or go 7900 GTX.

Although DX 10 is on the horizon, it may be a while before the mobile version is worked out. It looks like it will take a lot of power and probably need a great cooling system as well. I could see it not being ready for laptops by the end of next year.

 

dont wait for dx10. They may not be around for a while, and they also may not be as great as they are hyped to be. Merom was hyped ALOT and the real world difference is minimal at best. But then again I may get proved wrong. Either way you slice it waiting is not a way to beat the tech curve.

 

And it takes a long time for new DX tech to take hold anyway. Microsoft are trying to push it by making some games DX10/Vista only (Alan Wake and Halo 2) but that is only two titles. Look back to DX9 launch, which was December 2002. We didn't start getting games released en masse so to speak that took advantage for nearly two years, Doom 3 August 2004, HL2 November 2004.

If you get a DX10 card straight away you'll have a handful of titles that can take advantage of it, and a few tech demos. By the time more developers jump onboard, the card you bought will be a couple of generations old anyway. Never jump on the bandwagon straight away, unless you have mega bucks to splash about.

 

Don't forget that to make the most out of a DirectX 10 card you need both Vista and DirectX 10 games. The only interesting upcoming Direct X 10 games that I know of are a port Halo 2, Crysis and Alan Wake but Crysis will run just fine under DirectX 9 with less effects. Is it really worth all the extra time, financial investment and the task of putting up with a brand new buggy and insecire OS just to get a few extra effects in Crysis and access to two console ports?

Once there's a steady stream of quality DirectX 10 games your card will be probably be too old to keep up anyway so is it really worth it? I say buy when you have the cash and want a new laptop because keeping up with technology is fruitless task, especially when graphics cards are concerned.

 

That and the fact that dx10 isnt going to be backward compatible directly. That alone would make me not go for dx10

 

You'll still be able to play DX 9/8/7 games on Vista, the program will run shader effects through a software layer API. People who are using Vista are reporting that it has minimal effect on performance (despite the online 'tabloid' tech sites initially reporting that performance would be awful)

 

I know youll be able to play dx9 and earlier on vista. But if you have a dx10 card it requires something etra to play dx9 and older games at the expense of system reasources. I saw the article somewhere around here, wish I had bookmarked it...

 

DX10 contains complete instruction sets for DX9 as well, Microsoft will not abandon DX9 yet as they know developers code for the mainstream market, which will still be DX9 for the forseeable future.

Read here, pretty recent article too

There were a lot of horror stories about a year ago that claimed that said DX10 cards would run older games poorly because of DX9/8/7 etc only being supported through a software layer, but those stories turned out to be mostly bogus (and probably from The Inquirer!)