So i seem to recall that there would be close to a new generation of graphic cards every year from ATI and Nvidia. do you all think we'll get another set this year? Or will the current state of the economy cause a downturn in how quickly generations of graphics cards turn out. Personally i'd love to see Nvidia get their act together so that ATI can bring out an ATi HD5870

They're probably going to keep updating their old ones, graphics cards sales are already down because of the stale PC market, and they're even more down with less people needing to buy high end video cards. The current video cards can play all the most recent games on the highest graphics settings at the highest resolution. No one's really rushing out to buy another card if they've already got one made in the past year or so.

The graphics card market is also in a slight flux with the idea of hydra floating around, which will provide proper scaling to cards. This may make anything new that comes out in the near future obsolete, so companies are being cautious of investing 10's of millions of dollars into R&D for a completely new architecture while that's still a possibility (although in all likelihood either Nvidia or ATI, probably Nvidia, will just buy up the hydra tech).

Nvidia's still going to release their GTX 350 later in the year though, so there's still something for enthusiasts to get excited about.

yeah, i have a 8800 gts 512 - even plays Crysis warhead at max

There isn't a market for huge graphics games on PC anymore.  PC games are either console ports that are fairly graphically advanced but you don't need a HUGE GPU to run them, or they're PC exclusive stuff with even LOWER requirements than the console games (Valve, Blizzard, and so on).  PC game sales are down somewhat, PC hardware sales are down 20%-80% depending on the component and company in 08.  With the recession deepening, I wouldn't be surprised if they're even cutting R&D greatly.

I doubt we'll see an entire new series this year. Probably just updated ones in the 200 series or something.

I agree with all of you, it just makes me a little sad because my favorite part about pc gaming is the technology itself, but then again, this will be good for my wallet.

"I agree with all of you, it just makes me a little sad because my favorite part about pc gaming is the technology itself, but then again, this will be good for my wallet."

well, we might want to reconsider the fact that we wont see new cards this year because we dont want to forget the iminent release of Windows 7 in Q4. if anyone is foloowing Windows 7 or has tried the Beta, they know that it brings with it DirectX11 (there is SP2 for Vista coming out along side Win7 and this will bring DX11 so getting Win7 is not required) So with this new DX we will see the release of new DirectX11 cards near the release of Windows 7. 

Nothing new this year in my opinion, just a few updates on the current series.

lol i remember reading a topic exactly like this last year. Only reverse the Nvidia part with ATI.. Ahh technology.