About these new exotic video specs

Post #326,292 by Ashton 5/15/10 9:40:07 PM Reply	About these new exotic video specs To wit, in my Newegg flyer du jour: http://www.newegg.co...m=N82E16814125320 I understand the numbers game and the mega-transistors/mm-boardspace carrot for gaining the $$/ (gaming the wallets?) Got a chuckle out of This one being named for (Enrico) Fermi! -- who might revolve in grave over the triviality of his physics being here cited, er orthogonally. But, what with over-clocking, water-cooling and 17 speed-controlled fans dispersing the Heat/KW-hours of energy expended in the lifetime of one of these Gamer boxes(n) -- can anyone 'rate' this particular mere-$350 specimen, in relation to oh, any comprehensible sort of spec -- via which The Next Model, in 2 months or so: shall eventually (eat-it-for-lunch?) I mean, if it's about frames/sec @ resolution-X -- is that All ye need to note, in these abstruse matters? (Just curious; far as I'm concerned, my Spring '08 20: iMac is Magic-enough. Still. And of course, this card likely wouldn't surf in a Mac Pro, if I comprehend the Mac/Beast bus differences -- and iMacs don't do either bus,at all; not to mention limits of X-res in that non-replaceable display.)
Post #326,295 by Another Scott 5/15/10 10:15:45 PM Reply	I believe the latest buzzwords are related to "physics". The games are trying to incorporate things like realistic bounces, ray-tracing for reflections, depth of focus in viewpoints, by incorporating F=ma and so forth in the underlying engine. Hence "Fermi" for nVidia's latest. http://en.wikipedia....ki/Physics_engine The graphics hardware is continuing to get more complicated, so they're starting to hit a wall. Fermi was late and heat can be a problem with them, apparently. Of course, MS's DirectX drivers continue become more and more complicated and to be late as well, so there's the usual issue of the software and hardware rarely being in sync. Unfortunately, one can't simply take the winner as being the card with the most RAM, most transistors, highest clock rate. It's complicated and depends on what you want to do with the card. E.g. http://www.maximumpc..._and_power_hungry - a 250W graphics chip... I think it's nuts to spend more on a graphics card than on a CPU, but I'm not a gamer. :-) HTH. Cheers, Scott.
Post #326,298 by Ashton 5/16/10 1:02:31 AM Reply	Thanks, most illuminating So the Fermi connection has a basis, in Fact. 800 WATTS !?!!?!1111!!!!!!7-11 A pair overclocked [!!] off a KILOWATT main PS. ... I buy an efficient reefer; this guy cancels out about 8 of them. Shades of the Veyron 250 (mph not watts) road test, wherein, "tires are good for 15 minutes; that's OK though because the fuel runs out in 12." Unusually informative -pedia article re the high-precision designs and the game Real-time purposes. Love. It. One expects such cognitive dissonance in Times like these (as have never Been, before. Planetary Peril being generally only One-per-Planet, I wot.) And a commenter at Newegg got it right too: Cons: These cards run at higher temperatures, especially when they're under load. But....Wait for it! They were designed that way, and therefore tolerate higher temps. Also, manually increasing the fan speed helps to keep the GPU cooler. Answer: Electronics never Likes 'hi-temp' and those items that tolerate [mil-spec] a bit more of that.. do so at reduced MTBF, for all reasons Sig. Fermi could elucidate, while peering at the Periodic Chart and the 2p/2s electron shells ... and how far they can oscillate before they forget their Momma -- OK, that's a too-technical answer. But fun. Thanks, as so often, you pointed to exactly what I wanted to grok about this sport, including the usual clash twixt real-time CPU, software with a few buffer overflows and: voracious Gamers, lusting for an Authentic Vicarious <sic> experience of causing The Big Crunch; jes watchin the Universe, femtosec by femtosec: heading for Everything ÂÂÂ···> Nothingness. Bloody Power freaks!

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