Dev wrote on Aug 24, 2010, 14:57:eRe4s3r wrote on Aug 24, 2010, 12:08:
The 8800gts and 8800gt is even today still a pretty amazing card. Thanks to the G92 chip - which was fairly unique and far superior to many gpu's that came after it.
I also use a 8800gt and am still amazed at how well it plays everything. So far i have not had a reason to upgrade...
There are at least 2 big reasons for that.
1) Graphics cards aren't taking the huge leaps they did back in the day. Nowadays you buy a graphics card and its probably not twice as fast as the previous generation same category card.
2) Consoles. Yeah, they are in large part to blame for holding graphical developement back. Consoles have crap for graphics capabilities (compared to latest PC cards), so when they port it over, most of the stuff runs just fine on 8800 cards (which are what, 3 or 4 generations behind now? ). And in games like Starcraft 2, blizzard isn't trying blow everyone away with graphics, plus they want it to run on a large range of machines to have the largest market to sell too.
So, as a result, you can play near max details at pretty decent resolutions of many games at a playable framerate with stuff as lowly as a nforce 240 (they go on sale for around $50, and one was on sale for $35 AR this week on amazon).
Back in the day, you had to have near $1000 for a gaming machine. Nowadays you can do it for just a few hundred, and thats with getting an intel.