The economic model the graphics card companies appear to be using is to release new cards with as small an incremental improvement as possible. That way, later on they can release newer cards that take a bit more advantage of the underlying system and therefore give themselves an easy selling point. ATI & Nvidia don't have to collaborate in this, it just comes naturally from greed, and they are big companies so the G word is everything. They may approach it differently, but both have and will continue to develop in this way because it maximises profits. e.g., Nvidia will not include unified shaders in its first offering (even though that is possible from the start) because later on it can release a new card with all singing and dancing unified shaders, and people will buy it because of that.Therefore, when DX10 is possible, I will be investing in the cheapest DX10 card I can get and waiting for a year or so until they get through this bit-by-bit process and a fully functioning DX10 card is available.

And what does that tell us?Nothing. Its somebodies guess on how things will look. Nobody knows how good the new DX10 hardware will realy perform. So the end result could look beter or it could look worse. You could get smooth framerates with that picture quality or you could get a slideshow.The only thing that has a unified shaders now is the X-Box 360. I don't think there is anyone here thats willing to trade their top of the line DX9 hardware for X-Box 360 quality graphics. (nice effects but low resolution and not so good AA in my opinion)

Here's a few articles regarding Xenos/RSX/DirectX 10/ATI/Nvidia:http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/dx10/http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2005/06/10/ri...uddy_ati/1.htmlhttp://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2005/07/11/nv...nterview/1.html

>Do you see that in today's DX9 code? Are games optimised for>the limited memory and number of shaders in Geforce 6200 TC or>ATI X1300 cards?>>Of course not! When we have the DX10 hardware there will be>budget cards that have less unified shaders. It makes sense.>There is a market for budget cards. The only thing unified>shaders change is the efficiency with which the availableIn DX9 there are "hardware caps" (capabilities) which can be read by the application, and code execution path varied by the content of these caps. I don't know to what extent this is done, but considering how much bragging DX designers are doing on "no more cap bits" I assume it was a major emphasis for game developers.Naturally, more / more efficient shaders can compensate for lack of "unified" shares.scott s..

I was speaking somewhat facetiously there. And, admittedly as a sys- builder-on-the-side my experience with Antec p/s is several years back. In all seriousness, I feel Antec p/s are quite good for most users, and I have built solid rigs with them before. Antec p/s are readily available at our local large retailer, too, so that also makes them attractive. I admit I do have a bit of disdain for Antec power supplies (though not for their cases, which I find to be very good) because Antec tends to overstate their wattages. I don't like that. You probably already know this, but many power supply makers tend to overstate the real-world output of their p/s's. An Antec 550, for example, will not put out 550 watts in a normal (hot) computer operating environment. It will put out 550 at a much lower temperature...so yes, technically it is a 550 watt power supply, but good luck getting that out of it once it's in your case. Many p/s makers rate their p/s's at 60 degF, or at a temp that is quite lower than you would see in the real world, inside a hot computer case.Rhett

"The only thing that has a unified shaders now is the X-Box 360. I don't think there is anyone here thats willing to trade their top of the line DX9 hardware for X-Box 360 quality graphics. (nice effects but low resolution and not so good AA in my opinion)"Well for starters the xbox 360 only has to output to max 720p (maybe 1080i ?) resolution so of course it's lower....it's supposed to be for HD tv's.Of course your top DX9 card at 1600x1200 (or insert resolution here) will look a far sight better.......

>I was speaking somewhat facetiously there. And, admittedly>as a sys- builder-on-the-side my experience with Antec p/s is>several years back. >>In all seriousness, I feel Antec p/s are quite good for most>users, and I have built solid rigs with them before. Antec>p/s are readily available at our local large retailer, too, so>that also makes them attractive. I admit I do have a bit of>disdain for Antec power supplies (though not for their cases,>which I find to be very good) because Antec tends to overstate>their wattages. I don't like that. >>You probably already know this, but many power supply makers>tend to overstate the real-world output of their p/s's. An>Antec 550, for example, will not put out 550 watts in a normal>(hot) computer operating environment. It will put out 550 at>a much lower temperature...so yes, technically it is a 550>watt power supply, but good luck getting that out of it once>it's in your case. Many p/s makers rate their p/s's at 60>degF, or at a temp that is quite lower than you would see in>the real world, inside a hot computer case.>>RhettOk, that makes sense.I had read nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, but glowingly positive reviews of the Truepower 550 until I read your post, which I happened upon about a full hour after I had completed my order with NewEgg for, you guessed it, an Antec Truepower 550. :(So I was just a bit frightened, thinking, what have I missed here?

But it has unified shaders so it has to be goood (my point was that unified shaders in hardware are not that big a deal (YET))The X-Box unified shaders are oalso grouped together and you can only switch groups of shaders.The X-box supports 1080i which translates to resolution of 1920x1080 (be it interlaced) I guess they can't use AA at that resolution...

All well and good and it all sounds wonderfully impressive but the biggest question that I keep coming up with has nothing to do with the graphics card. Sure, water will look better because it deals with a very limited amount of texture information. You quickly scoop up the info from your hard disk or cache, dump it to the graphics engine, and produce the eye candy. But, what about graphics that requires gigabytes of texture information that must be retrieved as fast as you can fly such as huge photoreal areas? Flight simulation presents a unique problem to the programmers that standard gaming doesn't. The world in a game is controlled. Users have to stay within the boundaries you set up and go the directions you allow them to. Exotic textures can be retrieved quickly for a very large area in a standard game because it's all you're going to experience for awhile. Generally you're on foot moving a few miles an hour. Your hard drives and processor can easily keep up with your options.In FS however, you can get in a plane that goes 800 mph, go any direction and cover immense areas very quickly. Your graphics card, even if it's got DX-33 architecture doesn't help you one bit in figuring out which information to retrieve immediately from your hard disk. MS is even making that tougher as they're allowing higher scenery resolutions which relates to much larger file sizes to load. Once they're loaded, I'm certain the new graphics technology will display them faster and with more bells and whistles but it seems the bottleneck of drive access and processor utilization is just getting hit harder and doesn't seem to be being addressed. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing DX-10 in all its glory. Our worlds will become much more lifelike in some areas like water, shadows, and possibly ray traced lighting. I just don't foresee these cards making huge dents in the formidable problems sims face with accessing huge amounts of stored data in reasonable amounts of time. I'm holding my breath instead for 30,000 rpm drives.Art