Should i buy new hardware now or in a few months?

[pdunham]

I am looking to buy a new video card and cpu soon, but it seems like we are at or near the next major hardware cycle. ati has released specs on the radeon 9700 and from what i've heard, it blows away the gf4(someone correct me if im wrong). i havent heard much about the firegl x1 but wouldnt it be safe to assume that th firegl x1 vs quadro 4 comparison would be analogous to the 9700 vs gf4 camparison? that said, based on ati's history i would not get one of their cards, and if ati's new cards are as good as they are said to be, isnt it almost certain that nvidia has something even better brewing with dx 9 and agp 8x support? does anyone know when to expect quadro's with dx 9 and agp 8x support?
-PCD

[mnhan32]

I am in a similar place right now and what I've decided is to wait for AGP 8x (3.0). Those cards are coming out post-October from what they were talking about at Siggy this year. The Motherboards are already coming out though. My personal belief is to always get the best in graphics hardware and so waiting a few months for the new AGP is worth it in my opinion. Also Parallel IDE is on most of those MBs which is sweet too.

[daanbanaan]

there will always be something new around the corner..................

[pdunham]

well i know there will be something new around the corner, but there are generally 16 month - 2 year major tenology cycles (i think thats moore's law). I would rather wait a few months and have a card that will be obsolete in 2 years or more than a card that will be obsolete in a year and a half or less.

[sangeet]

Moores Law is 18 months, and as for the video card, im lookin for a new one too since i got a GeForce2 MX400 this aint the best thing to deal with Maya4, the Radeon 9700 does in fact kick GeForce4s ass, HARD. I personally am gonna wait for some new motherboards cause im lookin for a new pc, with dual processor, with AGP 8x, integrated LAN, USB 2 and Firewire, so i dont need to use a lot of PCI slots.
By the way, there's a strong chance the GeForce5 will have AGP8x since nVidia revealed its new motherboard the nForce2 and it has support for AGP8x, DDR400, and a bunch of other goodies, i'd buy it if it had dual processor support. but, mark my words, ATI IS GOIN DOWN.

[1000101-]

the AGP 8x spec was designed in part by nvidia actually.
And yeah the ATi 9700 truly is a fantastic piece of hardware; but given the experiences of the previous radeon generations and maya; I might avoid that card.

[mnhan32]

In reply to:there will always be something new around the corner..................

Oh definately. You can never just keep waiting for the next thing or else you will never get anything. I personally find it beneficial to wait for such a major increase as 8x AGP. Granted no one knows what we are going to use it for yet but I have a 2x AGP MB that won't take 4x AGP cards so I'd liked to get the highest and AGP usually sticks around 3 years from what we have seen so far so that would still be wise.

[aaron_johnson]

some more cool toys that will be coming out in a few months: AMD's Opteron CPUs with 64bit extensions useful when [if ever] the 64bit Maya arrives I'm hoping PCI-X or its equivalent arcitecture will become more standard by the year's end... imagine having an Ultra320 SCSI drive as your OS disk... sweet

[bacon]

"And yeah the ATi 9700 truly is a fantastic piece of hardware"

did they work out the issues with this one? last i saw the specs looked great but performance was poo.

random
anyone having luck yet with softquadro on geforce4?
/random
bacon

[pdunham]

so, does anyone know whats in the works from nvidia in the quadro area?

[bishop00s]

In reply to:some more cool toys that will be coming out in a few months: AMD's Opteron CPUs with 64bit extensions useful when [if ever] the 64bit Maya arrives

Question. Maybe a stupid one, but... aren't SGI's processors 64 bit MIPS or something like that? How are the running Maya on those babies?

[aaron_johnson]

all i know about an upcoming nVidia product is the CineFX or something...? promising realtime cinematic CG - don't be fooled I'm sure its just another marketing term for a slightly more powerful graphics card, we won't be seeing the end of the software-renderer for quite some time i don't have the link any more sorry.

[aaron_johnson]

correct they are 64bit, but MIPS as u say - quite a different arcitecture. depending on the proc design 32bit apps will still run fast (as in the Opteron which continues x86 arcitecture). This is where Intel's 64bit CPU (the Itanium) sux - basically it has to emulate 32bit apps, they would take a massive performance hit. The Itanium is awesome for a custom 64bit server environment, the price tag is off the planet tho....

i really don't know about MIPS arcitecture but i guess they must have core support for 32bit apps like Maya.

[bishop00s]

In reply to:correct they are 64bit, but MIPS as u say - quite a different arcitecture. depending on the proc design 32bit apps will still run fast

Curious then... Why do the SGI machines perform so well (not comparing price/performance) when their 64 bit chip is running at much slower clock rate unless some how Maya is taking advantage of the 64 bitness persay of the chip? I know a lot more determines speed than clock speed, but how is this accounted for with the SGI chips at such low MHZ.

[aaron_johnson]

one of the most common misconceptions about CPU performance is that MHz is directly proportional to speed - ain't true. as stated i'm not too sure about the specific nature of MIPS CPUs but some aspect of their arcitecture results in better bang for the MHz - I'm really not sure if the 64bit aspect is related to that, doubt it. as an example AMD have a better floating point performance overall than Intel's P4, hence if a P4 and an Athlon at the same MHz had a contest the P4 would get its arse kicked (with the Maya renderer anyway).

[ruddy]

There is an article in MIT's Technology Mag about clockless chips that says clock speed increases beyond 2 GHZ actually result in no increase in performance. The clock has to propigate throughout the chip and the more tansistors the longer it takes. The speed is the speed of the slowest register(the longest wire). Clockless chips use handshaking to organize instructions and the speed is the average speed of register reporting. The gist of the acticle is that we are at the end of the line with clocked processors, higher clock speeds do not result in higher performance.

-j