Hi Guys,
This is my reasoning:
1. Any graphical improvements from now on will mostly be based on the amount of shader capabilities of the graphics engines of ANY forth-coming games, so the vid card(s) that have more numerical & more powerful shader cores will be able to handle the increasing loads & are the cards to get for future additions of AHII. HTC has already demonstrated this by their work w/ the latest updates. Most of these "modern" vid cards were built to handle the modern RPG games that extensively are using shader technology to achieve the graphics levels that they are reaching-thus why the # of cores & large amounts of VRAM but NOT necessarily the increases in core clock speeds. In short, the Nvidia's & AMD/ATI's have learned from Intel's development thru it's C2D successes & are following suit.
A GTX295 should hold you w/ AHII for a fairly long time due to the # of & strength of the shader cores, the LARGE amount of onboard memory (which IMHO makes up for the mem being DDR3) & the easily OC'ability of the GTX295's cores, shader & mem speeds. When Nvidia wised up & revamped this setup on a single PCB instead of the dual PCB & used the cooling arraingement that they had used w/ the 7900 GTX series (which I thought was the best setup--I own this card also & am sure that it'll run this vers of AHII loaded out--never even got hot. I also own the 9800 GTX 55nm card-darn good card but when it comes to running games w/ shader technologies it just can't hang w/ this GTX260) they had me then. That is, except for the price (the last time I paid $500+ for a vid card was for the 7900GTX-the economy was more favorable then
).
I hope that AMD does come thru-this will LOWER the price of the GTX295's to my price range.
I have a Nvidia-based mobo that I ain't gonna replace no time soon so it's the GTX 295 for me.
Thx TD for that endorsement.
