Like I've said before I've tried out S3D on other peoples machines, and, my opinion as stated on this forum is that it isn't something I'd purchase and I don't believe it is fully mature and ready for prime time yet. Your opinion is different, and I have no problem with that. What is the good of a forum you cannot express an opinion on?

As for the Radeon cards, They cost almost exactly the same as a GeForce card, yet have inferior tessellation performance (major DX11 selling point and something MAD hyped prior to Fermi landing), inferior GPGPU performance and API support no meaninful (ie: widespread developer support) Physics API, but they do have a bunch of cheats and tweaks -- FP16 HDR replacement, "perfect AF" and a tessellation quality slider.

Why would any sane person pay almost the same price and settle for less. The only ones would be those the feel they somehow have to support AMD "just because", those that "need" eyefinity and those who don't know enough to avoid the cards (because someone else built their PC for them).

"Just because" of the American (and the world's) way of finding a favorite team to root for solely based on the color (my favorite color is Red, so I'm rooting for the red team that has more sexy-looking people)! Sarcasmically!

Again ... in your little corner of the world, perhaps. In Europe and in the USA, the competing GeForce video cards are always priced higher - with some exceptions like the GTX 460.

Also AMD offers in their highest end cards, superior performance over many games at resolutions at or above 2560x1600. No one is losing out on anything meaningful by picking one vendor over another unless they have something specific in mind - like Eyefinity on a single card - or PhysX on a GPU (and many will settle for medium on their CPUs anyway).

What can I say? Quality costs (unless you live in Australia apparently), but I read lots of forums and I don't think the cost difference is much more than 10 - 30 dollars except right at the very top end.

I"m deriving much entertainment from catching up with the Anandtech thread at the moment and watching the posters argue about whether the patch would have come out or not without nvidia's funding.

The simpletons are missing a very obvious point. Crytek is now owned by EA, and we all know EA's track record when it comes to supporting titles, especially "older" titles with patches, especially patches that do not address bugs the game shipped with.

I actually like them based on his style offers differentiation and an attempt to actually investigate instead of just simply benching and offering a number. The only problem I had was having more apples-to-apples in his review format and addressed to him at Beyond3d. The subjective analyse needs a foundation for readers to gauge more was my point. Was very pleased to see more apples-to-apples.

i think all of us reviewers attempt to investigate instead of just offering a number. i try to relate the benchmark numbers to the game experience in my comments. What Kyle and i both do is take chances - we are very active on our own forums as ourselves (Anand has been active under aliases) and make ourselves a target.

i think it is easier to disagree with me - but i could be wrong

If one has strong convictions, passionate about technologies, there are always going to be supporters that agree and dissenters to disagree; it's all good and welcomed to me. Popularity, well, one becomes a target and some individuals enjoy their odd attacking fetishes; it's all good though!

Well, i am finally playing Crysis 2

Yes! (although i didn't bother with DX9; i am just going by the screen shots and what i see now). Impressive.

Crysis 2 from EA's site is a 9.2GB D/L
Patch 1.9 is 131 MB
DX11 Patch is 545 MB
DX11 Hi Res Textures is 1.65GB

Crysis 2 takes 11.6 GB on the HD
(even with the "free" day - i am at 97% of my allotted bandwidth of 17GB and i still need to re-D/L Dungeon Siege III; Damn Steam! )

Yes, Crysis 2 graphics are now the new standard for DX11 imo
- i do get some texture flashing (anyway) and S3D is difficult for me to handle
- unless i can get the adjustments right, probably 'not recommended'


i had to also set motion blur to low to look more natural to me; i am using i7-920 and GTX560 Ti SLI to play it. Just doing a Fraps run for about 5 minutes as i run around shooting soldiers and blowing things up gives me an average of 47 FPS (26 min/69 max) - and this is on Ultra *everything* (except motion blur - low)

i like it so far. My reviews might be a little late

There is a built in batch file (just like the ones for crysis and warhead) that you can use for a quick benchmark, but there are other levels and places that show the tesselation and performance impact much better.