How long is the GeForce Go7700 going to last?

With DX10 compatible notebooks currently exploding the market, what is there left for us guys with good DX9 cards?

How long will they last?
How long will they be able to run games at a considerable fps?

 

thats impossible for anyone to tell. its not like the newest games wont run and not like games in the near future will be so amazing they wont run in the 7700. it all depends on the game really, some games dont need as much and some require more. i would gather it will be fine for at least another 2 years then it will start becoming less of a performer. by that time you will have already reached the lowest resolution and lowest settings possible to play and still not get 20-30fps

 

DX9 cards should last a long time, as DX10 technology is new, and developers would not want to exclude DX9 users, which is most of the market currently.

 

that is correct.. most users still cannot even afford for high-end dx9 gpus,...

 

Yep the majority of the market is in dx9, and it will stay that way for atleast a year, if not more.
It would be crazy for a developer to completely exclude that market.

 

Yeah true game developers wont leave out all the DX9 GPU owners
What I mean to ask was that, when DX10 becomes common, how would the DX9 cards fare and how long will they last then?

 

The Go 7700 is quite powerful. A DX9 laptop COULD support you for 2-3 years, depending on how advanced of a game/how much eyecandy you want in a game. I can see a Geforce Go 7700 lasting for 2-3 years, running a more advanced game in 2009-2010 on low to medium settings.

Some games will be better looking if you run it in DX10 (i.e., Crysis and Unreal Tournament 2007), but they will be compatible with DX9. So, you could run Crysis with a DX9 card, but you just wouldn't be able to unlock the special DX10 shadow or physics effects, for example.

 

Are physics effects dependent on DX10 or the GPU? PhysX cards never really took off and GPU based physics are visual only and don't actually change the way you interact with objects and I believe require a 2nd or 3rd dedicated GPU anyways. I believe improved physics will be CPU based, requiring a fast dual core or preferably a quad core.

 

I believe the physics effects come from DX10 AND the graphics card. If you've seen some of Nvidia's DX10 demos, the graphics cards use new tech like unified shaders to take advantage of all of DX10's features. Specifically look at "Microsoft DirectX 10 Geometry Shaders:"

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_tech_showcase.html

 

I don't think geometry shaders are really involved in physics in the sense that it won't help determine how particles are supposed to flow as you push through a smokescreen. From what I understand, geometry shaders create additional primitives on the GPU so that models have higher detail (less blocky). It really doesn't provide anything new since normally you could just have it precreated and load it from memory or if you don't want to precreate you could just create it on the fly in the CPU and load it over to the GPU. The idea of geometry shaders is to increase performance by doing it on chip to limit interface bottlenecks, which is really the idea behind shaders in general. So it really doesn't bring new effects to the table, just that the increase in performance should allow more effects. I do wonder though how much of a performance increase geometry shaders do provide considering upcoming 1GB VRAM graphics cards and Gen2 PCIe with quad cores may mean the old methods aren't so bad afterall. Still geometry shaders are still in their infancy and developers are still learning how to extract their benefits so things can only improve with time. I believe DX10.1 will also fix, simplify, and add to the original geometry shader implementation.