the cards price is expensive to alot of non-serious gamers (and thieves
) ... but seriously i paid like £350 ($495usd) for my Radeon 9800pro and £380 ($530usd) for my GeForceFX 5900 ultra.
Really this card isn't much more that that, isn't nothing that a serious gamer isn't preparied to pay.
what truely got me was how fast shaders ran... it was like FSAA on my FX5900 - didn't phase the card no matter how intense they got.
Stuff like Field of Depth, didn't change the speed even slightly.
Looked at the technicals of it and its impressive because it has just as many shader instructions as the FX6000 (which is 2x as many as the FX5900 and 4x more than the Radeon 9800pro).
The structure of the chip is also a very impressive peice of kit, it has 4 shader level headers which then are cut into another 2 shader pipelines each.
you could theoretically run 4 shader FP at the same time, which compared to the QuadroFX is hardly anything impressive - but what is impressive is that it isn't specifically setup for Maya/Softimage/Max/trueSpace like the Quadro, Wildcat and FireGL are.
(not that any self respecting render farm would have a FireGL inside it
)
However what i've noticed on the site is that the Unreal2 Engine based games - America's Army Online, Unreal2, Unreal Tournament 2003/04 are capable of the Surround Gaming.
until i saw it at work though i just though Imperium Galatica would be pretty lame with it, but the way its setup ... atleast in WoW it certainly is very impressive
Command&Conquer Generals had support for it, pitty i never say that working at the time.
The only real thing that fails it, is the vertices & mtriangles per second. It's only around half of the other cards, as this'll only affect brand-brand new games with almost 1million triangles per scene - but then thats what SLi is for isn't it
hehee
