This is a rendering of Doug Jones, the actor who has played Abe Sapien in Hellboy and Pan in Pan’s Labyrinth.

Here’s some info on the video card. It may be a tad pricey now, but in a few years when it’s in the discount bin, with PC graphics getting this good, will there still be a reason to buy standalone consoles?

‘World’s fastest PC graphics card’ planned

Manufacturer NVIDIA has released details of a new graphics card it describes as ‘the world’s fastest’.

The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra is far from cheap, costing a bank-breaking £476, but should help gamers with a ‘money is no object’ attitude enjoy state-of-the-art PC games at their best.

A spokesman for NVIDIA said, “The card performs an average of between 10 and 15% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU, previously considered the fastest GPU on the planet, across a wide range of top games and applications.”

NVIDIA’s new card will support video playback for Blu-ray and HD DVD content and the firm claims it will enable PC gamers to own the ‘definitive gaming platform’.
[…]
The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra will be released May 15.



  1. Les says:

    Wow!

  2. Daniel says:

    I think the console will still be around for a good while, because they translate better to the normal consumer. The idea of if i buy a console i can play that game is alot less frustating than, if i buy that game, can i run it

  3. huh? says:

    rendering a head is one thing; let’s see a complete game environment.

  4. hhopper says:

    This video does not display in Firefox!!! I had to open IE to see it.

  5. Jason says:

    #6: Doesn’t open in IE6 either, al least for me…

  6. Steve says:

    I’m sure I saw that guy laughing to himself.

  7. Eideard says:

    Does show in Safari. Didn’t show in my well-updated Firefox, either.

    Turned off AdBlockPlus and it shows in Firefox, now.

  8. hhopper says:

    If you go into Adblock Plus and disable the filter for “Adbrite,” you can see the vid in Firefox.

  9. malren says:

    with PC graphics getting this good, will there still be a reason to buy standalone consoles?

    PC gaming is on the decline. Reason #1, 2, 3 and 4 – cost. This card will be what, $800+ at launch? Another $800 to $1000 for a rig that supports it – you need a heavy CPU, loads of quality RAM, a gaming-optimized motherboard and a somewhat fast drive or there’s no point in a card this intense, you’d just be wasting money.

    A system that was comparable to the card (and included it) could run $2000 just in parts from Newegg. Go to a custom PC builder and expect to pay $3000 easily. Meanwhile, the actual fun part of gaming, the playing and the social aspect, can be had on the Wii for $300, the XBox 360 for $300 to $500 and the PS3 for $600. I can buy a 360 Elite, a 42″ widescreeen LCD or Plasma HDTV and a fist full of games for what a good gaming computer has cost me. I wish I never bought my last rig. $2500 and all I ever do with it is Firefox and BitTorrent. 🙂

    It’s not even a contest. Consoles will always win in the marketplace. The entry cost is lower by a couple of orders of magnitude. That having been said, nothing looks as good on the Xbox as it does on my PC…but I can live with that. Eight games, two wireless controllers, a headset and a hard drive and I spent less on my Xbox than I did on my two video cards by themselves, forget the rest of the rig.

  10. malren says:

    I should add – consoles rule me for everything but FPS. I can’t play shooters on the Xbox anywhere nearly as well as my PC. Sure, Halo2 is great, but let’s face it, it would rock 15 times harder on a PC. Nothing beats a perfect mouse/keyboard setup for a first-person shooter. Or hell, third person shooters too, like Gears. I wish that was ported.

  11. Jägermeister says:

    10 – I can buy a 360 Elite, a 42″ widescreeen LCD or Plasma HDTV and a fist full of games for what a good gaming computer has cost me.

    But you can’t do much productive with it. 😉

  12. Jägermeister says:

    #9

    Or go to YouTube and watch it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=LIGWAYS5uRw

  13. malren says:

    But you can’t do much productive with it.

    You have a very good point there. 😉

  14. John Ehrlichman says:

    This rendering looks amazing, but notice it doesn’t move. Animating human motion, especially a human face, is extremely hard to do convincingly. (Can they do motion capture to record facial expressions?)

    But of course this is applicable to other sorts of realistic rendering.

  15. GigG says:

    To those that couldn’t see the video. It’s your adblock software that is doing it.

  16. BubbaRay says:

    I’m still waiting for realistic hair and clothes blown by the wind, like some of the great Pixar films – Shrek comes to mind. Bet that’s a few years away. Wouldn’t it be cool to have your own in-home motion capture studio so you could build yourself as an avatar in any game?

    I know, this link was posted earlier, but I want ILM in my den. Skip ahead to time 5:30 to see some great ILM tech. Or just waste 8 minutes on a Sunday and watch the whole thing. 🙂

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmZkIoAJeEM

  17. KVolk says:

    consoles are one off gaming machines. PC are multiple use machines that makes them much better platforms for just about anything.

  18. Proud Alien says:

    Does it bother anyone that the girl who does the soundtrack speaks with an Indian accent?

  19. Uncle Dave says:

    For those having problems, I’ve replaced the vid with the copy on YouTube. Thanks, Jägermeister, for finding it.

  20. sdf says:

    Demos have always been years ahead of anything you’ll see in-game. And console and pc gaming have each had decades to kill the other – they’re different and neither is going away.

  21. Jägermeister says:

    #20

    No problem.

    #21

    The biggest problem with the PC market isn’t the constant upgrade of video cards, but the OS requirements. Why do we need to pay MS tax in form of XP or Vista in order to play something that could run on Windows 2000? I guess the answer is that MS have now locked in games developers with their DirectX technology. 😛

  22. davydany says:

    idk what she said but WOW

  23. Gwendle says:

    I have the nVidia 8800 GTS and am blown away by it. The problem is if this video card doesn’t last me longer than 2-3 years, then I guess I will keep any gaming to the console.

  24. Jordan says:

    #19 Why would that bother anyone?

  25. OmarThe Alien says:

    The gaming aside, I wonder if a card like that would cut render times for animation? I’m just getting into 3d modeling and render times were a bit of a shock. My little home built screamer is just getting by on a large render job. I can see a 64 bit, twenty GB’s of RAM project coming on strong.

  26. Little Jon says:

    #18: PCs may be multi-purpose machines, but you don’t need an $800 graphics card (or even a $200 one) for any of the non-gaming applications (with the one possible exception of scientific computing on a GPU).

    If you want to play games it’s cheaper to stick with a PC with a modest graphics card and buy an Xbox 360. Sure, it doesn’t compare to a serious gaming rig, but there are still enough enjoyable games on it to destroy your social life!

  27. BubbaRay says:

    #21, Dr. Memory — “Systat – Gypsy, Doctor” [ Just to see if it’s the real Dr. Memory ]

  28. Angel H. Wong says:

    #21

    One acronym will answer that: MMORPG.

  29. Froggmann says:

    I was just waiting to be creeped out when that V Head opened it’s eyes…


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