NVIDIA "G80" GeForce 8800GTX Performance ExploredPretty much everything that we've seen here with our talking with Nvidia about the G80 stuff.
The ability to do *THREE* G80's in an SLI configuration is just mind boggling. But put into perspective, things are going to be as CPU bound as you think as we're quickly moving into the realm of quad-core CPU's.
Also, with a three G80 setup, you can utilize one for Nvidia's Quantum Physics Engine. Their take on the Aegia PhysX stuff and whatnot. So you could certainly have some pretty impressive headroom on current and future games.
The numbers that we're going to potentially see with the G80 is just potentially mind-boggling. It feels like the "power" output of CPU's and GPU's just keeps scaling almost geometrically. Without just throwing "bloat" at them you'd be hard pressed to find almost any engine (outside of the Crysis stuff) that could really even begin to push these cards at normal resolutions.
Sure, trying to run them at 2560x1900 with everything turned on and 16x AA will do it... but I'm talking more in the realms of 1280x1024 and 1024x768. Looking at Steam's hardware profiles you can see that 86% of the steam users still play at those resolutions. Heck a good percentage of people via the Steam information are still only running Nvidia 6xxx stuff. You can find that all here:
Valve Hardware SurveySo while I'm happy to drool at the latest numbers and newest hardware... I'm really glad that things are continuing at this rate as it does one things consistantly. It pushes down the cost of more "mainsteam" graphics cards more into the reach of the standard gamer. I'm all over that. =)
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.ungawa
-Spyke
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