Catalyst 10.8 Brings SC2 AA; Hints at Future GPUs

This will be a crushing blow to Nvidia unless they do something drastic with their line of GPUs.

Hopefully this means that new cards will come out and toss the 480 off its crown.

Quite impressed with the fact that they can still squeeze out performance gains on 4xxx series cards. Although i'm sure NVidia fan's will claim its cause the drivers are bad at first and they only get better in time. Oh well, an improvement is an improvement

Go ATI, the little GPU that could.

I'm just waiting for a cheaper 5870 after the new series comes out. Picked up dual 4870s for $129 a pop after the 5870 was released

They will just rebrand like always, lol.

Yeah, the 480 will turn into the 565 gtx, which will turn into the 650 GTS, and then maybe the 740 GT

Now maybe I can play the mafia 2 demo without it hanging my computer? And how many 5800 series crossfire configurations need improvement on the source engine?

Source engine? The old HL2 engine? You must have a weak GPU to actually want improvement.....even my useless HD3200 can max it out.....my 4870 doesnt even show an increase in temperature

http://vr-zone.com/articles/-rumou [...] /9688.html

I am not sure what you are saying dude :scratching head: I don't understand why a 5800 series crossfire configuration needs any performance improvement on L4D2 as I am sure, even at 2560x1600 that 5800 x-fire would already toast that game. And actually, I have dual 4850's and 1920x1080 with everything maxed and my system doesn't flinch at all and the 5800 series are much stronger cards. I just want more stability and I hope these drivers deliver on that.

He wasn't saying he needed an increase. He was commenting on the Left 4 Dead 2 crossfire speed increase mentioned in the article.

OH man i can't wait!!! its gonna mean Cheap GPU's (for the 5xxx) Or some reason really awesome ones at a cheap price!

honestly when old gpu's get phased out they dont drop that much in price. you can still get gts 250's for almost the same price as a 5750 where I live. And the gtx465 and HD5830 are more expensive than a gtx460, even though it offers better performance. In fact the newer gtx460 has dropped in price recently where I live, and is the newest card. Ill most likely be up for a 6xxx series over the 5xxx, but i'll wait for the reviews....

I dont really know why anyone would mention speed increases on FC2 and L4D2. The AA on SC2 seems noteworthy but I agree with the above poster that stability improvements would be better received. Mine seem stable, but the forums are full of people with issues. Now maybe its the people that have issues - but I cant help with that

They could be throwing that in, just because it just happens to improve performance with those games. Not that they necessarily spent a lot of time working on them specifically.

They already announced 6000 series products in November. http://www.techpowerup.com/128546/ [...] ember.html I guess I'm not surprised to see them getting drivers together for the launch, being that it's three months away.

I was sooo confused until I read the article. All those names and iterations make sense now. Hopefully the cards will have a 30% - 50% increase in performance. Aything less than 30% performance increase is spelling Nvidia like fail.

the 4xxx series and all ati are long to me maxed out at a driver level, since at best the games uses 1/5*1,5 of the number of the sp on board... the ati are heavy recompiler dependent , because they have an high number of heavily specialized unit, so it'up to the compiler to find and exploit the resources, all at runtime, so it can't be heavy on the cpu.. but we will see improvements at each release because even if the performance increase on the 58xx are more substantial due to di architecture(cache, distribution etc etc) they have the same basic compiler...

Interesting codenames... Blackcomb and Whistler are a couple of ski resorts

Maybe a stupid question, but what do Whistler and Blackcomb, two linked (and very awesome, I must say) ski areas outside Vancouver have to do with islands? In the Caribbean? Maybe they name these things after the place where the project team goes to celebrate after launch.

does it still leak memory? 10.7 leaked memory like nobody's business in scII.

Download Crossfire App 10.8 too, if you are using a CFX system
http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08 [...] erformance

Heh... if the Bulldozer release gives 30-50% more power and then the HD6000 series gives another 30-60%, AMD's going to have one helluva platform on their hand. That's all I can say...

I would like to pick up another 5870 when the price drops. But I need to upgrade my PSU too.

Can't wait for next year. I'll be upgrading my aging Core 2 Duo (2.4Ghz) + 8800GT video card. Lets see the goods AMD/ATI!

I see they have supposedly fixed the hanging of ATI cards with Borderlands. I'll have to try this tonight to make sure.

Cross country race here slow and steady wins the race since ATI 3xxx and now they outpacin NVIDIA

Same plan. Older hardware, but same plan. Intel's socket shenanigans already burned me once, I don't plan on having that happen again. AM3+ for me when it comes out with Zambezi. I don't expect massive gains with the HD 6 series, as the core isn't changing much (the HD 7 series on the other hand. . .), but I've got no reason to pick up a 5770 right now, my Pentium D will bottleneck anything modern hard. Bulldozer + Southern Islands should be a pretty nice platform though.

what crown ?

AMD is definitely great at making a socket last as long as possible, but just don't be too shocked if there's finally a socket change once you upgrade. AMD's milked pretty much everything they can out of the AM2/2+/3/3+ socket, it's been several years and it looks like you'll be coming in just as the AM3 party is winding down.