Ridiculous!

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

My video card I purchased at $319 now goes for $169 and it is a slight upgrade...This occured in 8 months time...wow

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

Where is a good video card benchmark comparison? I found this one:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Why is the GTX 295 not performing at the tippy top?

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

Ok take that back now - looks like it is $194...I bought an overclocked 9800 GTX with a 760mhz core clock and 2280mhz memory clock

They have an evga 9800 GTX+ with a 778mhz core and 2240mhz memory clock for $195

It also appears the 9800 GTX outperforms the GTX+ for some reason according to passmark.

[R3C]

The 295 is probably only using 1 GPU in that test, or it would be at the tippy top by some margin. Check out HardOCP reviews for proper benchmarking. They run through real-world play with FRAPS on to capture and time. Then compare highest playable settings for each card, and then toss in a bit of "apples to apples" testing at the end. They don't use benchmark utilities at all. Just real games.

The 295 is the best card I've ever owned. You know, you could grab a second 9800GTX and run SLI if you need more performance. It would have been ill-advised in the past, but SLI works great now. I haven't had a single problem with it, and every game I've played in recent times has scaled very well to two GPUs.

[enderzero]

Anyone have a now old but still better video card they want to send me?? I'm still running dual 7600GTs... but thats ok since I haven't played a PC game in years. But with a new video card I might be persuaded to play some L4D with yous guys...

Actually I really have been a jonesin to go back and actually finish Bioshock before Bioshock 2 comes out.

[R3C]

I may be able to arrange something. I'll let you know...

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

I don't know when I will upgrade mine - the 295 is like $500 so I was going to wait.

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

I checked out HardOCP reviews...pretty thorough and I like the real world tests. Interestingly enough the faster viedeo cards like the quad 295 SLI and the 4870 crossFire actually degrade the performance of GTAIV and a single 295 will outperform either of the other two card configurations. The reason they say is that GTAIV is a highly CPU intensive game and in order to be able to increase the frame rate in that game you need a powerful CPU...Sadly, GTAIV was one of the reasons that I wanted to get a faster video card.

"In the ONE game we really wanted to see a performance and visual quality improvement, Grand Theft Auto IV we found out that anything over two GPUs is useless. We really wanted to see Quad SLI and 4870 X2 CrossFireX blow GTA4 away and let us crank up all the settings, and we know you all wanted to see that as well. Unfortunately this game is so CPU limited that it has forced AMD to just shut off CrossFireX support altogether right now because one 4870 X2 is faster than two with CrossFireX enabled. The same was also true with Quad SLI."

"Well we said we had some interesting and unexpected results at the beginning, and we weren’t kidding. We expected Quad SLI to blow us away in games and prove why we needed to spend $1000 on it. What we were left with though was a feeling that it didn’t provide us with anything, nothing that would make us want to install it in our own system as a gaming platform right now. Even at 2560x1600 it seems most games are content with a single GTX 295 or equivalent."

"Overall Quad SLI is very fast, it can produce very high framerates. However, it doesn’t provide real-world gameplay improvements in today’s games over a single GTX 295. The same is true for 4870 X2 CrossFireX. These single video cards are able to play the latest games, like the recently released F.E.A.R. 2 at the highest possible settings at 2560x1600 already."