Nvidia GT280

[Flyby]

Hey Zoomie,
I think a lot of people share your view on the 4870. It's a highly competent card at a good value/price position; better in that sense than Nvidia's latest offerings. Super-powerful cards like the GTX280 and the 4870X2 seem like overkill in some ways. Their true benefit seems to come in running max settings at very high resolutions, as on 30-inch monitors. I'm not sure many simmers here run on 30-inch monitors. Like those super gpus, 30-inch monitors are very expensive. It's hard to see spending so much money for the most powerful graphics cards only to run them on the (average) 22 monitor.

I guess that's where I'm at. I want to build a new system one day, and I want a video card that will perform very well in new combat flight sims, on the monitor I select (22-24 inch). Oddly it seems that newer cards like the 4870 have shifted the "bottleneck" back to the cpu. In that sense too the ultra powerful, very expensive GPUs seem like overkill. You can't get max performance out of them unless you spend the $$ to run them at their most taxing settings, again on huge monitors. at very high resolutions. I think if I match a video card's best performance to the average monitor resolution (on an lcd its 16x or 19x, generally speaking) I'll be fine. I doubt that SoW_BoB will tax a modern gpu like the 4870 as much as it will a modern cpu like the e8500 or a quad 9300.
Buy hey, that's just my opinion. I'm sure I've overlooked a lot of considerations.
Flyby out.