lol wut? No it's not. And that card alone is no longer twice the cost of an Xbox 360 either. I haven't seen any benchmarks that put the X1950XTX up against a 9600GT, but I'm willing to bet that little $150 wonder is faster than the X1950 as well.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3140...

Notice specifically how the 8800GT performance in Oblivion blows ATI's last generation card away. Oblivion is playable @ 1920x1200 on the 8800GT, probably with a better framerate than the 360 version and much nicer visuals. This isn't surprising at all, considering that it's faster than ATI's new products....and no it's not. The 360's development costs have dropped significantly over the last few years. Lets try to keep in mind that the hardware is moving into its third year of production.

The newer 8800GTS (G92) is actually a bit faster than the 8800GT but it's also a bit more expensive. So far as bang for your buck goes, it's still hard to beat the 8800GT. The 9600GT is a great bargain though for a sub-$200 video card, it's pretty damn fast.

It's also worth mentioning that just because they used an X6800 in those benchmarks, you certainly don't need one to get that kind of performance out of an 8800GT. You would probably see simular numbers even with that overclocked E6600, but the E8400 has taken its place as the best bargain on the market imo. The 3GHz E8400 will push that kind of performance stock, and can easily be overclocked to 3.6GHz with standard cooling (and 1:1 with your system memory). Many people have pushed the chip to 4GHz with air cooling.

You don't need an X6800 (or any extreme edition CPU) to build a killer gaming rig. Naturally, a complete gaming rig will still be more expensive than a 2+ year old console.. but you can build an affordable gaming PC and lets not forget about the many other applications that such a computer has.

Personally I don't get too hung up on graphics. PC games are designed to scale for a reason. The pace that hardware moves forward is faster than most software can even keep up with. You can pretty much max out COD4 for example with that X1950XTX, despite it being a "last generation" GPU. Performance always takes priority over eye candy for me.. but it's not that difficult to obtain system specs that go beyond what the current consoles offer you at this point.

It will still cost you.. but some people enjoy PC gaming. I got three years+ gaming out of an AMD 3200+ and a 6800GT. Does that rig blow anything out of the water? Hardly, but it plays everything up to COD4 pretty competently. I wouldn't play Crysis on it, but that's pushing the boundaries of most current hardware. On the other hand, Crysis on medium settings still looks better than most other games on the market, and while I still wouldn't play it on this rig, it's not like you need a super computer to pull that off.

I've actually run COD4 on that same card on a friends rig (granted, he has two dual core 3GHz Xeon's backing it up) at much greater than 720p and it can easily maintain ~60fps. It's no perfect lock, but it's plenty stable @ 1280x1024 with AA.. and @ 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 you don't need AA to make the game look quite a bit better than it does running at 600p on the PS360 with a drop of AA applied.

If you actually ran the game @ 1280x720 w/ 2XAA, I imagine the game would begin to approach the console versions performance. Of course, with COD4 the truth is it's 125fps or bust. You're much better off sacrificing additional detail if needed to reach 125fps (most likely candidate = lighting/shadows) in COD4 because of the way the engine works. 60fps isn't enough to perform many jumps in COD4. The higher your framerate, the higher and longer you jump. It's a bit of a flaw in Quake's physics, I suppose.

Then again, a casual player would never notice the difference between playing at 60fps (85fps being the default cap) or 125fps, and most FPS jumps are illegal in competition play for Call of Duty 4.. so maybe it doesn't matter that much in the end. For many autoclimb spots that only trigger at 125+fps you can just raise the cap to 125 and look straight up or straight down to hit max fps anyway.

Phew, talk about a tangent.

Crysis on medium does indeed hold up @ 720p against most 360 shooters imo.. this is very much what I expect the console version to wind up looking like:




^^ medium, 720p on an HD set. "Better than most" may be an exaggeration, but it still holds its own.

1) True, I didn't consider the difference between mp performance and sp. Last generation GPU's are still capable of pushing the game to a visual level that exceeds the PS360 version. 8800's and 3850's etc kick that games ass.

2) It won't, but I'm sure loads of people will try to claim it does. Crytek said their goal was "medium-high"-- people will just drop the medium from that statement and claim their Xbox 360 is pushing high end PC graphics.

Did you try running the game @ 600p below maximum settings?

30fps probably doesn't describe your average framerate BTW--Crysis has an especially nasty habbit of running @ its max framerate when things are relatively calm and then dropping quite a bit (below half) at other times. But whatever.. I get it.. consoles rule and they're obviously more powerful than PC's. ;)

Bioware would have to seriously muck this up for it not to perform extremely well.

Sweet, he mentions Dragon Age. I wonder when we'll see the next true epic from Bioware!

Looks better on your HDTV / looks better in motion / etc.

;)

I think I got one of those in a burger king kids meal once.