Nvidia 560M vs. Nvidia 485M

I know I've seen the benchmarks and everything and I've hard crunched the numbers so now I'm looking for opinions. In your guys opinion is it worth the extra 400$ I've found in most cases to go to the 485M. (The laptop I want is really cheap with a 560M) ANd my second question do you think a 560M will be able to survive for 4 years on highesh settings for most games?

 

4 years? No. But neither will the 485m, so it's kind of a moot point. You'll be able to play on medium/low in 4 years maybe with that card.

Remember the top card available 4 years ago was the 8600m GT. Then the 8800m GTX became actually available in the spring of 2008. Neither of those cards can play anything new on "high" anymore.

 

8800M GTX still can run on Medium-High. The 8600M GT? Assuming it didn't self-immolate itself, then yeah... It is kind of weak sauce now...

 

and its only 3 years old now, in another 12 months who knows.
and yes this is a bad atempt at 1:00 am humor

 

For me, the 485m just isn't worth the price tag.

I await the GTX 570m. I am hoping it will bring performance alongside reasonable price. It won't out-perform the 485, but it will significantly outperform anything other than 6970/485/future6990/580.

The GTX 560m isn't a bad card... (make sure the model you are getting has 192-bit memory.)

 

^ That's true, but considering the price of a 470m at release (about $750), I think it's gonna be a quite expensive card, heck the 470m is still $560.

 

That price is likely due to rarity though.

485m's aren't even that bad at this point.
If the 570m is more expensive than the 485m, its a dead stick.

Nvidia seems to think the 570m is aimed at the 6970m... lets hope their pricing reflects that. Its not gonna outperform a 6970m, so it should have a lower price. Since AMD will likely lower the price of the 6970 with the release of the 6990, the 570m might just get affordable.

More interesting will be how many laptops feature/support the 570m.

 

Buying a high-end processing unit and hoping it'll be good in four years is stupid. Upgrading key components every couple of years is the best price/performance ratio at any level of power.

Please, your wallet begs you to use your brain!

 

To my knowledge, the high-end gpu's ARE in fact capable of running games at relatively high settings 4 years after initial purchase.

Though, granted, that depends on several factors (what kind of games you play, the optimization level/requirements of the said games, resolution, settings, etc.).

Most high-end gpu's haven't really changed THAT much though on Nvidia's side from 3 years ago.
Performance increases were witnessed of course, but then again, maximum resolution of 15" laptops back then was for the most part 1600xsomething was it not?

If 1920x... remains more or less a constant over the upcoming several years, I see no reason as to why a high-end gpu such as the 480M or 6990 (the latter being a better option in terms of price/performance) would not be capable of running games under relatively high settings in 4 years (provided the graphics tech doesn't experience a vast leap in development... and since that hasn't happened for now - remember, most of what we are witnessing are in fact revisions, I doubt it will anytime soon).

Besides, I see nothing wrong in purchasing a laptop with a high end gpu that will last longer and then simply upgrade the other components in 2 years time (such as the CPU, RAM and HDD).
As it stands now, mobile gpu's are extremely expensive for standalone purchase.
Hence money-wise, it's more sensible to upgrade the other components.

 

When consoles refresh, everything will probably speed up a bit. The main reason why nothing much is happenining at the moment with PC is because all games are being developed for consoles with PC added as an afterthought. Although console ports have a few improvements like highger resolutions and possibly high textures/polycounts, they never actually do anything drastic that will push technology forward. When consoles update and get back on par with PC's again then we should see some nice progress (that is untill PC's vastly outperform consoles once again).

Assuming the console refresh doesn't come within the next few years then you should be fine graphically. After that you can probable expect to do some major upgrading and then it'll repeat all over again in another 7 years or so. Blame mainstream gamers for the meh-ness of graphical progress.

 

2 years? Maybe. 4 years? There will be quite a few within 4 years that will force laptops with 560M to go to medium imo. Already we have Metro and Crysis 2 where you cannot play the highest setting. Battlefield 3 is right around the corner and should even be tough on the best GPUs.

Seems like money could be an issue to you. If that is the case then my best advice would be to buy the laptop with 560M and enjoy games with high settings for the next year or so. Then sell the laptop and buy the next 28nm GPUs from Nvidia and AMD in 2012/2013 and enjoy a cooler and much faster laptop.

 

Wasn't the 'refresh' for consoles scheduled for 2015?
I could be wrong though.

Either way, the consoles will probably NOT be equipped with state of the art gpu hardware in the first place.

 

While they probably won't be as powerful proportionally as the current generation simply due to the brick wall they've hit in terms of cooling, they'll be leaps and bounds ahead of what they currently are. I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to get something like 560ti performance out of it. Even the new wii is meant to be something like 1.5 times the power of a PS3 and that's coming out next year iirc and the wii was never a graphics focused unit anyway.

 

I'm done with console and their Jaggie HORROR. The only upcoming console I'm going to buy is a PS Vita because I can't play my games on my notebook on the bus so PS vita is going to be awesome!!!!

 

Next gen consoles are all gonna be 1080p 60Hz probably with enough power left over to spare a little for AA. I know I say these things like I actually know for certain that it's going to happen, and for that I may seem a little arrogant. The truth is that I don't know, I can only speculate, but the chances that they're gonna be 1080p at 60Hz is enourmously high given that even the new wii is meant to be able to handle 1080 (whether it's 1080p or 1080i I don't know).