Hello, I want to purchase a new Video card, but i am very confused. I have $300-$350 US dollars to spend for a card. I am interesed in GeForce 7900GT, but now its old. The card ATI X1800 XT also suits me. And the main problem is DirectX 10. Both are cards cannot support DirectX 10. Kindly guide me that is it good to spend such an amount to buy these DirectX9 card, where as direct X 10 card will be coming soon. Can i purchase it or not??? If i wait for DirectX 10 card, then how much i can wait????6month, 9 months, 12 months etc???? Can i got the excellent DirectX10 Card like 7900Gt or X1800 XT in the start of the DriectX 10 release at reasonable cost of US$ 300-350 ?? Please guide me. i am very confused
DirectX10 will be released along with Windows Vista early next year. Along with this API will come DX10 graphics cards (Probably around the end of this year), and substantially more support in games for multicore CPU's. In addition, physics processing is very much in the limelight at the moment as 'the next big thing', and don't be surprised if in a year or two you will need to have a separate physics processor card sitting in your tower to play the latest games. Games about to be released which, if you are going to enjoy them as the creators wanted, are going to REQUIRE serious upgrades to your entire platforms are; - Microsoft Flight Simulator X (I downloaded a beta-demo recently, and although obviously at this stage only playing in DX9, it looks amazing. Check out screenshots of the full DX10 version on the net) - Crysis (Follow up to 'Far Cry', and looking absolutely unbelievable. Again, check out some screenshots and movies) - Neverwinter Nights 2 (No doubt some fans on these boards for this game!) These games (In particular the first two) will need new processors, new graphics cards, most likely more Ram, in the case of Flight Sim possibly a bigger Hard Drive (Can anyone say '14GB install size'?) and a new operating system. Problem is that both the operating system and graphics cards haven't even been released yet.
I will be buying a card soon. I will stick to a budget of $150. You can get some really good deals on ebay. So i would say yes, buy a card because when the DX10 cards release, they will be damn expensive. The next card i buy will be dx9, but the card after that will definately be dx10. Although i will only buy when they reach the $250 or less. So i say yes, buy!
I'd say get what you want now, a decent DX 9 card with some good future potential, maybe the X1800/X1900 series or a 7900GS or so and let that tide you over for a while. But next summer I'd look into purchasing a DX 10 card. Vista will be out (let's bloody well hope so), DX 10 cards will have become upgraded, widespread, and cheaper so you'll have a lot to choose from. And games will start to take advantage of it. If you buy a DX 10 card this November/December you probably won't even have Vista let alone any games to use with it so I wouldn't bother then, wait for the next summer when it's really adopted. EDIT: And by the way, initially there probably won't even be a midrange line of DX 10 cards. Generally speaking ATI and nVidia release they're top of the line models and try and see who wins that round. The loser then often trys to take the crown in midrange or lowend departments but that often takes a bit of time, months even. However I don't think they'll be going for $300-350, at first they might fetch close to $300 for a better midrange model but to remain competitive they'd need to lower the price. By next summer they'll probably end up at around the range we see todays midrange series in.
