How long before the GeForce 7950 GTX is obsolete

With Directx 10 on the horizon, how long will the 7950 GTX actually be useful?

 

ok well if you mean obsolete as in "fastest video card"- you probably have something in the order of weeks / maybe months, but not very long.

as far as playing games newly released games well, you probably have a pretty long time. its not like a year from today it won't be viable for new games. in fact, two years down the road it will still be viable for gaming. at some point you will have to start dropping resolution and then dropping quality settings to get the games to run, but two years from now it should still be running newly released games smoothly at above 30 frames per second. no word on resolution. after two generations of cards have gone by, it might not be viable anymore. so, after the 10 series has penetrated the market, its possible the dev's will start dropping support for the 7 series. hard to say though.

for example, if you have a midrange 6 series card, you still get dev support today. 5 series is pretty much done though. granted, it was horrible. normally, the high end 5 series / midrange 6 series should still have support. the 8 series is available across the board now. so when the 9 series has penetrated, midrange 7 series cards should have support. when the 10 series comes out, maybe only high end 7 series cards will be supported. possibly only midrange 8 series cards at that point. hard to say.

 

How long do you think 8600GT will last? 3 years?

 

It'll be useful for a very long time, as it's a powerful card. Or as long as Dx9 still supported. Which is for a very long time.

 

well the 7950gtx is much better then the 8600m gt, by far.

i think both cards, especially the 7950gtx will run games just fine for the next 3-4 years.

like said above, brand new games may need to have a lower rez, but most games don't use all the power of the 7950 or 8600 and may in the future, but will still run smooth on lower settings

 

7950 will last about 2 year with pretty good settings. after that like said above you will need to drop screen res.

8600 <1.5yearish more of a guess... depends on your standards of game play

 

It will last at least for the next 2 years. Games are going to be dx9 compatible for quite a while because not everyone has a dx10 graphics card with them. It would alienate a lot of gamers. If you get the 7950 GTX, you will be the envy of all your friends who claim they have a better card because it has dx10 but tell them that unless they have an 8800m in their notebook, they got squat.

Not dissing anyone with an 8600 or lower, btw.

 

also - you get the occasional game that scales really well across a lot of hardware.

its possible that when the dx10 only games start hitting shelves, other developers will choose to make games that run back to directx 8.1 or so.

you might just have to start being picky about which games to play. thats not necessarily a bad thing. imagine the future "half life 2's" that scale back to dx7. in the future there will be those games that scale really well back to dx9. long story short, don't worry about it. you will be just fine.

 

I still use a Geforce 2 MX 400 in one of my older desktops. Another old desktop has a Geforce 4600Ti, which I very recently upgraded to a Geforce 7950GT (WOO, that RIGHT I'm running it on an AGP 4X motherboard!!). I can't tell if my old dell uses an integrated or dedicated chip or not (see Dell in sig), but it still functions in games like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and eats up games like Starcraft. My newest laptop (till MBP) uses an old ATI X800m.

So, the Geforce 2 is really starting to show its age (heh), but being tied to a 400mhz Pentium 2 slot processor you can't expect much. Running in Ubuntu though, I can get some pretty neat graphics out of Open GL games. The Geforce 4 I was using until recently ran World of Warcraft at Max settings 1280x1024 at like 15-20FPS. I already mentioned that my ancient laptop can take on Starcraft and HoMM 3. And my Alienware, which has a 2 generations behind X800 (now that HD2000 and Geforce 8000 series are out) still runs games like FEAR and HL2 at VERY nice settings. I'm talking HIGH (with 2x AA or less) at 1680x1050 with just a bit of tweaking. It plays C&C3 at medium very well. That Alienware is over 2 years old.

So, I can safely say that a Geforce 7950GTX will probably run games 2-3 years from now at medium or medium-high levels. This legacy stuff almost gets better as it matures!

And for the record, Nvidia is still supporting my Geforce 2 (not updating, but still offering drivers), for Ubuntu no less!