The glorious XFX ATI RADEON 5870

the holy sacrement, the bless'ed birthright, the pinnacle manifested from the malformed murk of all other cards who dare claim to be "next-gen". People all over talking like she's the second coming of the 9700pro.

This is the real McCoy

With nvidia having *just released directx 10.1 cards a month ago, ATI is forging into a brave new world. A world where all of the amazing engineering marvels of the pixelated world that were promised to us with direct X 10 *twitch* 10.1 actually come true! You know things like tesselation mapping, which ati cards have had a dedicated hardware componant for since the HD2xxx series, but alas, the green goblin nvidia couldn't keep pace, and at last microsoft was strong-armed into leaving many truely revolutionary techs on the cutting room floor in the name of a harmonized, unified shader code that nvidia would have a chance to keep it's %60 market share in. That's right, all this these techs have been sitting dormant in ATI cards for years, without a directX protocol for games to use them. 

Now ATI is exacting revenge, they've had the past 4 generations to perfect these intricate dedicated hardware componants, while nvidia keeps slipping downhill, trying to impress people with obscure memory sized like the 295 with 1792MB of video ram, WOW! it must be the bee's knee's Sally! git me two of em while's you're out gettin your britches re-upholstered. yeee-haw! wing-ding diddly! ding ding doo!

fact is that in some benchmarks the 5870 beats nvidia's dual-GPU 295, a single chip beating 2? oh and did i mention that these were comparing ATI's beta drivers vs. Nvidia's fully grown up, year-old, tested and retested, certified, stamped, this is how the sucker get played, err i mean the way it's meant to be played drivers? 

yes yes, nividia cards can play some very few directx 9 games with 300 FPS instead of ati's paltry 280FPS, but when it comes to the serious next gen, it's all untested waters for them, a brave world indeed. 

tesselation alone has me transfixed, 

 

see what you're seeing there? that's one polygon. yup, just one. all the height mapping is baked into he texture. oh, and this can be translated to realtime displacement mapping (running over a hill, instead of running over a stately tetrahedron)

here's a stark contrast, ignore all the graphical dazzle and just look at the perceived polys in the canisters of the face mask:

check the reports filtering in from the frontlines, this looks like a monster card to be reckoned with

2.7 TERAflops

2.17 billion transistors

74 GIGApixels per second fill rate

can support 3 displays at 1920x1200 each without losing the phenominal framerate

Oh, and i own it

you know you're swimming above your league when for some reason crysis runs the same FPS at the lowest detail as it does at the highest (8x AA, 1920x1200, enthusiast) settings. that's right, the one thing bottlenecking the fuck out of this behemoth is my quad core q6600. piece of shit can't fetch stuff fast enough for my 5870  to even keep it's attention. she keeps accidentaly windowing fullscreen games to gently remind me that i have 2 other games running at the same time. the little slut. 

compare your lives to mine and then kill yourselves

Jesus fuck, these things have 1600 Stream processors on them now? LOL, I think my card has like maybe 128 lol.

Meh.

Overkill after awhile. I don't spend a lot of time really admiring textures in games.

I'll wait for nVidia anyway, I absolutely despise ATI.

I've been back and forth with the whole ATI and Nvidia stuff, I'll hate ATI, then I'll hate Nvidia then I'll had ATI again. Right now seems ATI has their shit together again and Nvidia is slippin. I actually liked ATI better overall except they couldn't compete in performance after awhile and was annoying. I'm talkin back in the 9700 days of ATI, they were actually good. Since thou it's a different story.

agreed, it's always love/hate, i bought an ATI 1900xt for almost $700 the day it came out (one of 5 available in canada) and it died on me in a year and a half, and they told me to fuck myself when i asked for a warranty replacement. so i said fuck ATI, i'll go nvidia 8800gt, and a little more than a year later it fried too, at least this one i can get an RMA, but still, i burn through gfx cards too quickly...

the 5870 is definitely overkill, that's the idea i'm going to enjoy playing anything that comes out in the next 3 years at the highest settings and the highest resolution, without having to worry about losing frames. (crysis looks godly)

fact is that the new nvidia is supposed to have 3 billion transistors, as opposed to ati's 2.17. so it's even bigger. in the past, raw horsepower could outperform anything ATI could cough up, back in the directx9 days. where the techs had nothing to do with it, just the faster you could push your shitty architecture card meant the better framerates you'd get with these games. but now it's all about new tech. DX11 adds alot which makes the game more immersive, the volumetrics effects, advanced lighting and shadows. too many to mention.

And ATI has dedicated hardware componants to their chips which basically means you can enable these effects with NO PERCEIVABLE performance loss. ATI cards can do AA like crazy without a performance hit, soft shadows they laugh at, up to a million lines of shader code in a game like crysis, it can do without breaking a sweat, these cards were designed for people to enable all the detail possible, and still get great frames. with nvidia, the process to add AA or softshadows it takes a performance hit. so instead of developing smarter tech, they just made their cards faster, and bigger. And this worked for several years, they've been the kings of the game, but i have a feeling that if they don't change their strat dramatically soon, they're gonna be de-throned.

and this all hinges on games which actually take advantage of the amazing toolset that is dx11. i'll hold my breath, with the industry as a whole using the aging consoles as the foundation for their development, it's gonna take a real push to get some crazy looking shit like we deserve being made for PCs. and these games ATI's cards will pwn. i have a copy of DirT2 waiting for me in december, the first dx11 title, so i'll have to hold off judgement. but i'm betting on ATI this round, they've had their shit together in regards to these new techs for a long while, while Nvidia is playing serious catch-up. but who knows.

oh btw, i have a new 8800gt coming back to me soon, anyone want it? (possibly with a 680i mobo, q6600 intel quadcore, and 4 gigs ddr2 800 mem?)

 

imagine crawling up this staircase with your M16 in BF3

 

YARR!

 

Order-Independant Transparency! (for things like smoke, fire, etc. renders in one pass, instead of like 8)

 

/seethe with envy

there are you happy now you JEW?!

...if i wasn't retardedly broke as fuck, paying off 2 cars, working full time, going to school full time, entertaining a girlfriend (another full time job in and upon itself) and trying to get into law school i would have to buy one of these and build a new gaming PC...but until the next great game comes out, well, i'm just gonna sit here on my ass and admire that card.

make sure you want to go to law school.

im not biased or anything, but make sure its what you want. if its just something that interests you, teach yourself greek instead.

Yeah, I've attempted to talk myself out of law school a half dozen times and every time I come back to it. Call me crazy but I enjoyed the logic games on the LSAT (and yes, I realize that the LSATs have absolutely nothing to really do with law).
So, we shall see how things go. I start applying next week. Time to get really really retardedly broke.

eh, fuck it. if you're really wanting to be a blood-sucking attorney, go for it. its just what this world needs is more fucking attorneys.

shit, even if you don't practice law in the classical sense, having a JD opens a lot of doors otherwise closed.

even though applying to schools cost between $25-$100, make sure you apply to at least 10. i'm sure its common guidance counselor advice, but apply to some schools outside your reach, and pick some schools that you know you can get into.

regardless, burn some apps and cash on Tier 1 schools ranked from the 20's to the 50's. I could have gotten a full scholarship to a Tier 3 school that actually isn't bad and is right down the road, but went to UC because its a Tier 1 school. Those things do matter.

and yes, be very prepared to go into debt with loans and credit cards. you won't be able to work more than a few hours per week without pissing your school off.

sign away your life, give up the kids and wife

turn over your keys, no longer do as you please

your life belongs to the system now, your future's no longer in your hands

because we will decide weather or not to unleash another lawyer to this land


an old roommate was from Cali, trying to be a lawyer too, i loved going over the old LSAT preps with him for kicks. if you have any PDFs we could compare notes. i usually scored 90-95th percentile routienely. my dad's a lawyer, maybe it's in my blood, but i'd never practise, i'd just get the degree so that i can better protect myself and self-advocate if/whenever my rights get trampled upon. infact if you have a prep you should make a new thread, and get the clan to weigh in, let everyone try their luck, just a quick 25 question section would be cool.


don't forget that big school is big business. If you're serious, appraise all your options.

it's that part where they trap all youth in inconceivable debt they'll be paying interest on for 15 years that frightens me, how it's so accepted and part of the system. fuck that, work on getting a permanent residency in canada or the uk or france, and then you'll get an equivalent education for about 5% of the cost. it's criminal what you US brain farms charge for growing brains, when i can grow them just fine in my home laboratory. muhuhahahahahHAHAH!

LSATs logic games section are relatively fun, but have nothing to do with law school...not that I'm knocking the logic games themselves. They are good to measure your critical thinking using abstract information that is really more of a distraction than anything else.

The reading comprehension on the LSAT relates directly to law school itself, since its testing for your ability not to just regurgitate what you read, but analyze it and understand it.

Trust me, I know all about the debt. If I thought I could move to Canada and get a Law Degree that would work in the States and do it for cheap, I might have looked it up, but it seems like a lot more paperwork. Of course I wouldn't owe about a mortgage-worth of money for a couple pieces of paper, but hindsight is 20/20 and at least I can say I got my degrees the American way, instead of resorting to terrorist-loving Canadian communism.

If you enjoy the LSAT logic games, you can google 'em and do as many as you want. They are a lot more fun when you aren't be graded on them though, trust me.

And about self-advocating... an old lawyer maxim: An attorney who defends himself has a fool for a client. As an attorney, the first thing I'd do is hire a competent attorney if having legal troubles.

Thou this is a complete nonsense post i have to add " terrorist-loving Canadian communism" made me LOL IRL. ha! Move along nothing to see here...

P.S. the XFX ATI RADEON 5870 has just been made a saint by Pope Benedict XVI.Some random humor for those that watch or read about current events.

click below for those that didnt get the joke:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europ...index.html