I read on inquirer.com that the 9series that nvidia will release around the holidays(ya I hope) will have over one teraflops. I have NO idea what that means. I am in the process of building my first pc(waiting for my mobo- had to RMA it becuase it caught on fire) and I have a 640mb evga 8800gts. I was hoping that I could play games like Bioshock and Crysis with reletavely high settings on my 22'' lcd. am I going to have to buy a newone only 5 months after I got this one? I just paid $380 for this card and dont want to have to spend more for this new card. any advice or suggestions would be greately apreciated. thank you in advance.

Are you talking about the 8900 series? That might be released late this year, but I highly doubt the 9xxx card will.

They likely wont release the 9800 series until ATI performance catches up a bit. You'll be able to tell when the next model is coming out because the GTX and Ultra prcies will come way down!!!

I can tell you for a fact that Crysis will run at exactly 49FPS with your computer, even though I have no idea what your computer has in it.

I can tell you for a fact that Crysis will run at exactly 2.5FPS with your computer, even though I have no idea what your computer has in it.

No, wait, I can't tell you how Crysis will run on anything, and neither can anyone else. There are no benchmarks, no one has any idea how well an 8800 will run it. If I had to guess, it will run well, but not maxed. No self respecting game is capable of running at all max settings when it's released. Gotta give us something to drool over when the new cards come out. Expect 16x12 mostly max settings at around 30FPS. That's pretty standard. Crytek wouldn't want to release a game NO ONE could play. It wouldn't be well reviewed...

Also, the 9xxx series won't be out this year, but an 8900 likely will.

I cant find the exact article but i did find this one on wikipidiea. it says the same thing about the article i found on (http://www.theinquirer.net). I trust the inquirer to be accurate. although they said that it was only a "rumor" ithought i might ask around

Inq is fun to read and discuss here but "trust". Here is my list of who I trust:

1.Mom
2.If my wife asks tell her she was on the list.

Actually the Devs know, and they've given hints.

From their own statements, they said it will run at low settings on a top of the line system from 3+ years ago (they said 3 years at Xmas time), and current hardware will not be able to play it at max settings, thngs will need to be turned down, but current high end systems (dual core support currently, quad doesn't add much, but even they don't know, saying it may add for some, but they haven't coded specifically for support above dual core CPUs) will be playable a mid-resolutions at high settings, but under max settings.
They keep saying that they made the game to scale well, but it will be extremely stressful on the DX10 path as you raise settings.

IMO, nothing you can buy before Crysis launches will allow you to play at max settings at anything approaching what we're useed to seeing for resolutions and settings (like no more 19x12+ resolution with 4X+AA).

Thee main thing is to find the place that works best for you, whether that's reducing foliage to increase particle effects, or vice versa, or reduce resolution to increase both or something.

In any case I think the OP shouldn't worry about future cards, enjoy the GTS-640 and once it's not playable to your expectations anymore then buy something new. That the way things go in this market especially, refreshes every 6-12 months and new stuff every 12-24 months.

I agree with the large purple monkey man. I saw Crysis running in real time last October at the G80 editor's day. Granted it was not the full version of the game nor did it have coding for things like AA enabled, but it WAS RUNNING on two 8800 GTX cards in SLI and a buggy Vista RTM build. I feel that most people will be second guessing their 8600 and 2600 and below purchases when games like Crysis and BioShock hit the market. These things have a lot of shaders in the order of Oblivion and beyond as well as adding complex particle systems and other toys that will kill the computationally weak. Of course people will be able to play these games on their cards... but at what price? Something has to give.

Yeah, can you imagine the DX10 version of Crysis and how that will run?

TGGA:
Any speculation on how well the next-gen cards will do? I don't think there's any big speculation because it's already July-07, Crysis is around the corner, and the holidays is within 6 months away. My guess is the next-gen cards will be more "true" DX10 cards, meaning they will be more specialized to better handle advanced particles, foliage, physics, generated landscapes, shader effects. etc. So, you won't need 4 GTX video cards since insane texture fill-rates won't be as important in removing bottlenecks. The manufacturing process will also be a lot better, so the cards won't need 2x6-pin PCIe power cables. I don't know what I'm talking about, but it makes sense.

I know what is on the horrizon. From the green team there will be a refresh of G80 later this year and the boys in red have something new. Without gettting in trouble that is all I can really say. I think the latter has some cool prospects.

I think that one thing needs to be said about DX10 titles, everything for the next year is some form of DX9 port. That being said, Crysis and BioShock will be much more DX10 than Lost Planet which the developer itself stated was ported to make the game run faster... not for image or gameplay changes. Moving forward the games will become more and more DX10; just like games in the pipeline have always done.

You also need to remember that DX10.1 is around the corner too... that means a dedicated tesselator is required as well as other items. G80 does not have one and if a game developer wishes to hit the largest install base... they won't code for one. If there is a need to be different and include hardware like a tesselator, Nvidia will have a hard time passing things over and over through its already weak GS throughput.

You bring up texture throughput... Nvidia cannot sustain enough bandwidth to fill its maximum texture fill rate. Even if the chip was ONLY doing texturing... it never could fill unfiltered/uncompressed requests. Granted this is a corner case, it is important to see what the chip can and can't do.

Cards will keep consuming high power needs. ATI/AMD already stated that moving to 45 nm from 65 nm should not yield major power improvements from a graphics perspective. Leakage will decrease due to a better process, but heat is only one side of the problem. Switching will increase due to high clock speeds. So if they don't raise the clock frequencies much and keep power the same, leakage should go down. The question this raises is what the next round of graphics chip will look like. From what I hear from both sides... Nv will be a refresh and ATI will be new and is ahead of schedule. Take the last as a rumor but the sources are credible... time can screw that up... most product launches are never on time.

Wish I could say more but my hands are tied due to disclosures and gentlemen's agreements.

I heard it was going to have 1.21 jigawatts. If so I'll be able to come back in time when they are out and I buy one and tell you.

Until it is released, nobody can tell you unequivocally to wait or buy.

Well I guess it depends on what you consider next-gen. for me the G100 and R700 are truely the next gen since the intention all along was for there to be a G90 against and R600 refresh. Now I don't think of the G9x or R670/680/etc as being next just but as refreshes along the lines of the GF7900 and X1900. Which both had quite interesting changes to their design with the GF7900 achieving the same performance/better from less transistors, and the X1900 adding 3X the sahders in a change to PS balance. So I suspect the G9x and R6xx refreshes will add things to improve their situations, but I also expect the R700 and G100 designs to once again change their architecture in a radical way (cause IMO making the current designs modular like is expected of the R700 is very inefficient).

Well I agree with some of that, but thinking about the texture side of the equation and keeping in mind BJC's comments, texture fill rates may still be an issue, and for different reasons. I wil wait for the UT3 side of equation to come into focus as Epic has specifically targeted Texture Fill rate as a future focus for them, and then the whole Megatexture concept may create different barriers which deal with very large compression, but the fill rate side of the eequation would still deal with the uncompressed textures. So that's still a bit of an unknown in a real gameplay situation until at least Quake Wars gets dissected more.

The manufacturing process may improve, but we may find that the IHVs take that as an opportunity to OC even more. So while we have a more efficient process, much of that may be replaced by high clock speeds and more transistors. I think we'll likely lose one of those PCIe power plugs, but through the addition of PCIe2.0 support more than efficiency. Maybe they could cut back to 1 6 pin on efficiency alone, but to me it's unlikely.