Which Graphics Card is the best for FS9 and will be for FSX?

[Guest kjolsnes]

This is the card you want:Gainward GeForce 8800GTX 768MB GDDR3, PCI-Express, "BP8800GTX-768-TV-DD"It is a Directx10 card. It is shipping now.RegardsKjetil

[Guest N66FC Raptor]

GeForce 8800 is the first DirectX 10 GPU with full Shader Model 4.0 support! http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_tech_specs.html

[Guest D17S]

. . . and more. It seems this is the first generation of what they are calling the GP/GPU (General Purpose Graphics Processor Unit). For the 8800GTX, the basic GPU layout ( -essentially- ) is 128 little CPUs all running at 1.35 Ghz. These are NOT fancy "Core 2" CPUs. These are very simple, basic but identical processors. They call this system Unified Shaders. These little guys can be used (interchangably) for all the graphics processes and, get this . . . "We can potentially share game rendering with something like physics calculations on the same GPU. Or we could run a Folding@Home GPU client in the background while we play a game. On the extreme, multiple full screen 3d applications could be running concurrently" (Anandtech). Or just get rid of the CPU all together! Once these GPCPUs get rolling, that is probably where we're going. All this woop-de-doo about DX10 capability is just a side note. These 128 CPUs are fully available to be assigned tasks in C programming language. This capability will allow a dev to assign tasks to the GPU that might otherwise be assigned to the CPU. Just as a for instance, the PMDG airplane's modeling might be assignable to the GPU thereby unloading the main CPU to do more autogen processing and the like. Pie in the sky? Right now, for sure. But soon there's gonna be only one processor aboard a computer and it's probably going to be an AMD GPGPU! What?!You saw that AMD just bought ATI. See where AMD's going? They are driving hard toward a completely unified CPU/GPU design. I've been an Intel/Nvidia fan for years, but ya gotta respect AMD's vision and committiment to that vision. They put their money down, like 1.3 Billion? On the surface it may seem they just clobbered by a 1-2 punch (Core 2/8800), but like Arnold, The have locked on to the future and they'll be back.But even for now, so much processing power has just been laid on the table that it might take years for the programmers to get it fully utalized. The PMDG group really deserves patients and support. This is a lot to get around.Here the Anandtech article. I'm a bit overwhelmed by all this. There's SO much there. Anyone else get some more?http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2870&p=1

[Tabs 2,790]

Pretty sure Intel and Nvidia will end up merging at some point to counter the AMD/ATI thing you brought up though...The Unified Shader stuff is really cool though, you're right. Game developers can use it for practically anything they want now - the days of your GPU's extra power not being used to render the game because of lower resolution, low poly counts in the game etc are apparently coming to and end. As a consumer I really like that, if I'm gonna spend $650 on this card, it better be working in full every minute of the day lol! I wonder if Windows itself could be able to see the GPU as another CPU for processing tasks somehow... that would be kinda cool too - if you're not in a game it'd help out with OS processing tasks.