Next upcoming generation of video cards, and backwards compatability
Marshall
take much): I'm looking at buying a higher-end gaming PC system soon
with dual GeForce 285 video cards in SLI, and was just wondering about
potential upgradability to the next gen of video cards from
nVidia/ATI, when they come along. Are there going to be any known
changes in the next gen video hardware's formfactor or other
requirements, that would make them incompatible with the current
standard gaming systems being made?
I'm guessing not, as they usually try for maximum backwards
compatability from a sales volume standpoint, but thought I'd ask,
just in case. Thanks in advance.
Yousuf Khan
There shouldn't be any problems from a hardware standpoint, they'll be
all working through PCIe for the foreseeable future. Even with upgrades
to the PCIe standards, they seem to maintain backward compatibility very
well so far, much better than the previous AGP standard kept backward
compatibility.
From a software standpoint, you might want to hold off on getting those
Geforce cards, as the next generation games will be DirectX 11. The GTX
285 is not DirectX 11 compatible, it's not even DirectX 10.1 compatible,
just DirectX 10. DirectX 11 was introduced with Windows 7, while DirectX
10 was introduced with Windows Vista; just like with the comparison
between Windows 7 and Vista, DirectX 11 vs. 10 seems to be that the
later version is what the earlier version should've been all along. That
is, Windows Vista should've been Windows 7, while DirectX 10 should've
been 11. Not many people found a compelling enough performance gain or
visual gain between DirectX 9 and 10, but both seem to be true with
DirectX 11.
Currently the only DirectX 11 compatible cards come from AMD & ATI, i.e.
their HD 5000-series video cards. The current lineup consists of the HD
5750 at the low-end to the HD 5970 dual-GPU at the highest end. ATI has
a few quarters lead against Nvidia in this market now.
As for SLI & Crossfire, you have to be careful about it, as it's not
always the case that a motherboard that supports one, will support the
other type. Nvidia is very finicky about SLI, in some cases it will only
work if the motherboard also has an Nvidia chipset onboard. It may have
eased the restrictions on Intel motherboards now, but it still enforces
the restrictions on AMD motherboards. ATI is very open about Crossfire,
and will allow it to work on all motherboards for all CPUs.
Yousuf Khan
Marshall
Thank you very much for your reply, good info.