A few people I know seem to keep asking me similar things (guess thats due to xmas being around the corner) and I've been telling them that it's only worth upgrading to the expensive hardware if you don't have any plans on upgrading to/for WinVista on it's release.

By that I mean that it's pointless to shell out $500/£300 for some hardware that you're gonna throw away as soon as some shiny new D3D10/Vista part comes out. You might as well buy a cheap(er) 6600 or 6200 and save that extra cash for something late 2006 or 2007.

If you're happy with WinXP and aren't likely to be in a hurry to upgrade to Vista (or make use of D3D10) then that big investment now might well be more worthwhile as you'll get more use out of it.

I'm trying to avoid upgrading my hardware until Vista/D3D10 - I can't justify spending £xxx now on some hardware that I'll have to replace inside of a year. My current box is ~2 years old now, I think it can run to 3 [smile]

hth
Jack

Quote:Original post by rollo
I wouldn't say they are completely impractical: Terrain rendering using GPU-based geometry clipmaps. They managed to speed up their algorithm quite a bit using vertex texture fetches, although they found them to be the bottleneck in their implementation.

Yeah, I've messed around it a lot on my NVIDIA cards at home. Not only is it way faster than it has a reputation for being, there are just some things that weren't really possible (or practical) without it. (I posted my experiment on high-density random grass rendering a while back here)

Really sorry to hear it doesn't work the same way on ATI cards. Blech.