On the Subject of Video Cards

Gemma Atkinson

Because I'm not poor, I have an 8800GTX in my PC. In fact it has been there, give or take an RMA, since November 2006. That's right, two thousand and six (and to anyone who pipes up with "uh, my 8800GT/GTS512 is pretty much as fast, and much cheaper", fuck off. Where was your poor man's GTX back in 2006 when I was already running the genuine article? Oh, that's right, it didn't exist).
The point is, with the exception of the overpriced Ultra, the GTX is still essentially top of the nvidia product line, and what's even more amazing is there's nothing lined up to take it's place in the foreseeable future. No, I don't count gimmicky shit like triple SLI, or some pretend next-gen card which is just two underclocked current-gen gpus strapped together.
ATI/AMD is/are to blame really. They're on the second or third generation of cards which still can't compete with nvidia's top of the line, so nvidia is sat back getting fat and lazy from lack of competition. I was on a 6 month video card upgrade cycle prior to the 8800, but now I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting for something new to appear on the horizon. Even giant-slayer amongst games Crysis hasn't managed to inspire any serious speed improvements.
Some cockwits pretend we don't need anything faster. That a GTX can run all current games at max res and max detail so why demand more? To a certain extent that makes sense - the fact is a lot of PC games are developed as half-hearted ports of console games these days, so they're not going to push the limits of a top-drawer PC which could shit all over a "next gen" console. And many games that aren't ports, for example WoW, are developed to work on as wide a range of PCs as possible to maximise their potential market (and that obviously worked for WoW). Still, you can't ignore Crysis, nor the likes of Far Cry 2 and Alan Wake which look like they might also draw and quarter your monster rig.
2006, for fuck's sake.