News - NVIDIA gives us a rundown of GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi) features

[Barkotron]

Agreed with everyone that the hair is really fantastic - for me that's one of those moments you get every few years when you see a new piece of graphics trickery and it just makes you go "wow". The last time for me was when we first saw the Unreal engine 3 stuff that turned out to be Gears of War.

So - when's the hair stuff going to be in games please?

£450 is just a bit more than I'm willing to pay at the moment, probably. Unless prelim reviews show that I'll never need another graphics card or something. Any guess on GTX 470 pricing from anyone? Once they're all out I'll have a look and make up my mind whether it's red or green this time. For no good reason I've swapped back and forth for the last 8 years (GF3, 9800 Pro, 6800GT, X1900 XT, 8800Ultra) - will I swap back again? First single-chip card to play Crysis with everything maxed at 19x12 gets some money .

[sammorris]

Depends what you mean by max. 1920x1200 Warhead Enthusiast the HD5870 can already pull off a minimum of about 20fps and an average of over 30. Depends if that's enough. Of course, it isn't if you want AA. To be honest, whether you'd use the graphics card needed in any other game is only half the issue, I'm not sure it's worth having to buy 8GB of RAM to play Crysis. Very few games need over 4, Warhead will barely get by at 8, ideally you want 12, or 16 for dual channel systems, in order to be able to max it out with stuff running in the background. Other than the Crysis games and GTA4 I can't think of any other games that are like this.

[Barkotron]

Interesting, I didn't know that about the memory requirements. Seriously 8GB is only just enough? I haven't really been keeping up much recently. Still, I need the RAM for work anyway, so that's no worries.

To be honest, apart from Crysis my 8800Ultra handles pretty much everything still anyway. I reckon I need at least a 5850 level card for any upgrade to be worth it - so it's just time to wait for Fermi and decide which of the options around then makes the most sense...

[sammorris]

Indeed, Crysis uses so much RAM that with 4GB, if I play on max settings, after a few minutes my PC will freeze for 10-15 minutes while it tries to find a combination of the right bits in memory that are enough to render the next frame. Checking my attempted page file usage it's approaching 5 gig beyond RAM.