Fastest Graphics Ever, Asus ARES Rips Benchmarks 208
MojoKid writes "Over-the-top, killer graphics cards are always fun to play with, though they may not be all that practical. With a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs on a single PCB and 4GB of GDDR5 graphics memory on board, the recently released Asus ARES is one such card that can currently claim the title of being the fastest single gaming graphics card on the planet. This dual-GPU-infused beast rips through benchmarks, besting even the likes of a Radeon HD 5970 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480. You can even run a pair of them in CrossFire mode, if you're hell-bent on the fastest frame rates money can buy currently."
Re:OpenCL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Folding seems to indicate the same. nVidia's recent changes to their architecture boosted power consumption, but made double-precision floating point ops about 4x faster. Good for GPGPU, but not so good for games. (which don't really use double-precision floating point)
Re:Go Back in time with it (Score:3, Interesting)
Who knows, but that's not of the essence. Unfortunately, computer games have gone the way of Hollywood movies, all glitter and no substance.
My favorite game genres are adventure games and car simulations. Ten years ago i used to play the Need for Spped - Porshce [wikipedia.org] game and I still have to see a similar game that's as fun for the casual gamer.
Racing games today have much better graphics, the cars look almost like photographs, but they aren't fun to drive. Either they have no physics engine at all, they are arcade games meant to be played with a gamepad, like the Need for Speed games since "Underground", or they are like Richard Burns Rally, so hard to play it starts looking like work.
As for adventure games, the golden age of 1990s is gone. There were EGA or VGA games like Space Quest and Monkey Island that were so fun to play and have no modern successors.
It's a pity that the availability of so much visual power seems to have derailed the creativity from making fun games to enhanced visual effects.
what's the point of the briefcase? (Score:4, Interesting)
sure...it's cool..but at the same time...gimmicky..
once I install the card...it stays in the there and not in the briefcase.
And the "gaming mouse"....I'm sorry, I like my G5 (rev 2).
Plus the price makes it un-attractive.
Re:5890 Ultra (Score:3, Interesting)
This article also compares the ARES to a pair of HD 5870s and you are mostly correct:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=953 [pcper.com]
Keep in mind that with 2GB cards you are actually only saving about $200 by NOT using the ARES.
Re:limited edition (Score:3, Interesting)
Have other cards been offered as 'limited editions'?
From what I've seen there is often at least one for each generation of each major manufacturer's chip. Sometimes there is more than one, as two or more board builders compete with each other to see who can earn most nerd points by pushing a given generation of chip the furthest (by over-clocking everything, over-speccing other parts, including the require cooling system to keep the out-of-spec setup inside an acceptable thermal profile, and turning marketing up to 11).
I tend to ignore such limited editions though. More often than not the price/performance ratio of them is many times more ridiculous than the officially (by the chip maker) sanctioned top-of-the-range cards which them selves offer poor p/p compared to the next layer or two down.
This sort of card has two purposes. It is aimed at selling to the sort of people that want the best of the best no matter what the cost and even if they know something better will be along next month, and it raises the profile of the company a bit via coverage on hardware review sites and news agregators like ./.
Re:OpenCL? (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall that the double-precision performance of NVidia's latest graphics cards would've been truly impressive... if they hadn't intentionally crippled it on all of the gaming cards in order to force people to buy compute cards costing several times the price. Works out that double precision runs at 1/8th of the speed of single precision - the same ratio as the previous generation - as opposed to 1/5th on ATI Radeon hardware and 1/2 on NVidia's really expensive professional cards.