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Nvidia GeForceFX(NV30) Officially Launched
egarland writes "Tom's Hardware has a new article previewing the new GeForceFX chip and discussing its architecture. 0.13 Micron, 16 GB/s memory bandwidth, 128-bit DDR2 memory interface, 125 M transistors, support for 8x FSAA. Sounds like an interesting chip. They stuck with a 128 bit memory bus so ATI's R300 still has more memory bandwidth (19.8 GB/s) but NVidia has new lossless memory compression so we will have to wait for benchmarks to see if NVidia comes up a winner here. The reference card also sports a massive new cooling system which is worth a look."
Readers Oliver Wendell and JavaTenor add links to additional stories at The Register and at AnandTech.
...poor Tom's Hardware, we knew him well. :-(
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
That's nice. Now maybe NVidia will find the time to FIX THEIR FUCKING DRIVERS. Christ, they're becoming the new Diamond when it comes to shitty software.
Anyone know how it works with Doom III?
Not like Tom's would post benchmarks, but maybe "someone" has tried it
Time to buy a Ti4600 :)
I don't see any filters over that fan... Wouldn't it be better if there were SOMETHING there to block dust from getting in?
too bad I bought a 4200 yesterday. Blahhhhh
How does it run Doom III?
Well, I can see that it allows blood to drip 2x as fast as my 128 Meg Geforce 4400.
And, wow! You can totally see the eyelids blur as characters blink!!!
What great features in this cool cool engine. I think I can even see the blood polygons underneath the characters' pixelated skin!
Don't even get me started about the quality of reflections in the moving water.
DAAAMN!
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
NVidia's official Geforce FX site
NVNews has a large group of links to previews(scroll down to the "Geforce FX Preview" article)
Some impressive images from the release demos
I'm not so sure about that cooling system. Why put the intake right next to the output? Seems to me like it'll just be sucking that hot air right back in.
I'd think it would make more sense to use air inside the case and blow it out the back. With a grill/fan on the front of the PC, you're helping to improve the overall air-flow inside the system instead of just recycling your heat-wash.
How many Watts does this monster dissipate?
:/
I'm just thinking of the power economics of the todays 3D accellerators...
Won't compressing that data win bandwidth at the expense of latency? And if it's really lossless, the compression will be worse than useless on some data sets (maybe they can optimize so those are unlikely/invalid ones, I dunno..)
So how many watts is this GPU drawing, to require an active cooling system that major? It seems that the latest GPU's from both major manufacturers are favoring a brute force approach to performance, rather than improving their architecture. I wonder what implications this will have for power supplies in your average PC - are we getting to the point that a fast P4 or Athlon system is going to require a 600 watt or more power supply to be adequately stable?
I also would love to hear how loud this video card is..blowers are generally pretty noisy.
There I was with my Beowulf cluster of GeForceFX(NV30) cards..
The duct tape glistened in the weak 40 watts of light in my parents' basement. "g1bb0r m3 T-Fl0p5!" I screamed but it was not to be. There was no joy in Mudville, the mighty cluster had blown a fuse.
Trolling is a art,
Remember, this is NVIDIA. They "launched" their nForce2 chipset almost two months ago and production boards are only just now showing up.
But at least this should drive down current card prices.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Firing Squad, also has some preview (with pictures) up here. From a technical stand point, seems to be pretty nifty, but I'm not convinced I'd rather have this card instead of 3 hours with a "massage therapist".
...and it just is what happens in a market as mindless as this. The real bottleneck is storage. Everyone is sitting waiting on disk drives, yet we are getting faster and faster (and hotter) chips. What about multihead, multichannel drives in cheap preconfigured RAID arrays, hot pluggable? Cached so that you get sub-millisecond access.
I now, I'm dreaming. But some engineer will get a brainstorm on this.
I could hook that thing up to my ductwork and save a fortune on natural gas this winter.
Trolling is a art,
Is that a leafblower onboard?!!! Game gamer lameo's!
I love your surname... is your first name "Sid"?
Thanks
Damn, Nvidia, why couldn't you have this thing ready for fall?
I've been searching for years for a leaf blower that could run Doom III at acceptable frame rates.
This board is clearly out of spec... since when I need to free up two slots to add a graphics card?
Obviously inserting it wont be easy and expect many breakage and damage returns.
What the hell is up with this quote at the end of the article?
The launch of the GeForce FX reminds us a lot of the GeForce3; the GPU is impressive and it can enable a good deal of developers to make some great looking games, but it won't be out for a while and neither will those great looking games.
The perfect example we like to use is Doom3; Doom3 was designed around DX8 technology, it will be Doom3's successor that can truly take advantage of the features of GeForce FX.
Someone want to explain the DX8 comparsion to Doom3, which makes it sound like Doom3 is catching up to DX8?
There's this trend in computing to make everything faster, more featureful, hotter, and more energy consuming. Do we really need PCs that do 80 TFLOPS and 900 frames per second, and require a special industrial strength power supply to power all the coolers? I'm sick of this. Just give me my Pentium machine (no CPU fan necessary!) to do my work, and if I want to play games I'll just play some with my friends. And they call _me_ a computer junkie!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Looks like nVidia's hoping their massive rendering speed will minimize the need for loads of memory. I wonder if this will play out - depending on how much info everything starts sending through AGP to the card, this might have some major drawbacks.
Then again, that card goes really fast.
Anyone have any idea on how it will play out?
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
That's nice of you.
There's thousands of people hammering their servers, costing them money for bandwidth and power, and all you can think about is bypassing their MAIN SOURCE OF REVENUE, because it inconveniences you? That's great.
Way to go mods, +5 for stealing advertising revenues.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
NVIDIA has a few more shots of that Fairy:
1
2
3
Now that they have a video card that has more impressive specs than my PC I have to upgrade or be made fun of by my rich friends.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Looks like they didn't use enough silicone sealant and suffered a catastrophic blowout!
Another preview at HardOCP here.
And now it has one. With the noise that card's air cooler is sure to generate, perhaps this is the card that will spur DIY types to implement water cooling and make it commonplace. Once it's commonplace, it should become cheaper (one would hope anyway)...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I've read that nVidia has stopped GeForce4 Ti4600 production and is only selling the GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU.
In short, better get that Ti4600 card very soon, because they could be gone in a matter of months.
The real bottle neck is the monitors, We will need to replace them with better, next generation graphic displays, one that dosent get crippled with pixels. One that can truly match up and beat the human eye.
Until then, ill be sticking to my 8mb grapchic cards, and i will not buy and over priced, over heated card in box with an ugly face on it.
Abit's OTES line of GeForce4 cards has coolers similar to the NV30 reference board linked in the post. Abit OTES link: here.
Dear Timothy,
1. Do you understand what the word 'launch' means?
2. Are you aware it is not yet February 2003?
No shit, I bet he even goes the bathroom when there's commercials on tv!! What a fucking asshole. Surely he's a commie.
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/videocards/
My dog ate my sig.
free ipod? yeah.
...What ASUS, Gainward, LeadTek, PNY and other nVidia chipset graphics card manufacturers will do in terms of cooling the graphics card for the new GeForce FX 5800 cards.
Have you seen the cooling systems some of these manufacturers have attempted with their Ti4600 cards?! (eek.) I can just see the enormous monstrosities in terms of cooling systems for GeForce FX cards when the production models come out in late January 2003. It could make CPU coolers look downright conservative in comparison.
Nice try, but I did it first.
Comdex is some time away...?
How come the card's been "Officially launched" if it's not been unveiled yet?
Pardon me if I'm making a fool of myself :/
Please mod this asshole (literally) down.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
It's the open sores way!
Mod this guy troll. Just kidding. He has a point, and the parent of the parent is one serious asshole.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
You won't see the GeforceFX in stores until next February, and then it will probably be around $360 according to NVidia. The Radeon 9700 came out a couple of months ago at about $400, and the mid-range version won't be out until next month at under $200. So the mid-range GeforceFX will probably be out some time next summer.
I'm telling people who are prone to buying me gifts to go for the Geforce 4 Ti4200 128MB, which is about $150 right now. The Radeon 8500 is nearly as good if you're not stuck on NVidia like I am, and the 128MB version is under $100.
And for those of you who haven't seen it yet, here's the NVidia promo video, which has taken a lot of criticism.
It's not theft anymore than installing ad blocking software is theft.
People do not want advertisments, print, radio, TV or internet. Futhermore nobody needs advertisments. Companies need to advertise to compete with other companys.
Futhermore, I cannot think of one industry where the generation of revenue from advertising has not affected that industry in a negative way. Can you?
Well, I think that its the customer's prerogative.. I think there's a sublimal programming thing somewhere that makes all customers want to look for the straightforward bullshit instead of getting the bullshit with the news..
I'm sure that even YOU go to the bathroom or grab drinks during the commercials on TV.. well shame on you for not holding it or watching the commercials THEN going to the bathroom during the show!
Its pointless to yell at people for doing something you probably do yourself.
Sounds like a good card. I'm assuming it has Linux drivers, otherwise it wont work on my system and I will have to buy a 4600.
No reason to fear from NVidia, they've produced Linux drivers for all their cards since befoe they were on shelves since the GF2Ultra, but does anyone have any info?
3D graphics are fine and good, I do play enough games to want some polygon-smashing horsepower.
But has nVidia done anything towards improving 2D and multimedia performance yet?
The difference between the Radeons and the GF4's when it comes to watching DVD, using TV-Out, or just plain desktop computing is night-and-day.
The nVidia offerings always seem plagued with washed-out colors, shimmering refresh rates, albeit not nearly as bad as the 3DFX offerings. ATI cards have always been as good as it gets.
Sure I do alot of gaming, but not all of it is in 3D. I also watch movies, write code, surf the net, etc, etc.. Not only does nVidia never pay attention to any of that, nor do any of the review sites.
Video card != 3D Accelerator alone, IMO.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Funny, I've not had a single problem with the 40.72 drivers with my GF2.
Maybe you'd prefer to use an ATI card and have to hunt down the drivers, rather than having a set of universals.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Hey dude, I use junkbuster, I see zero ads.
Am I being bad?
I suppose if one wishes to add an informative.
Are there any references (books,tutorials,papers, etc) on programming effective pixel, and vertex shader programs?
I predict that we'll soon be buying big metal graphics controller boxes from nVidia complete with heavy duty power supplies and massive cooling capacity. After you get it home, you'll open up your graphics adapter and insert a little motherboard and CPU into an option slot to complete your computer system.
They cause my system to bsod when I run some programs with 2x or Quincunx on.
New hardware mentioned on Slashdot. Now it's time for all the lamers to come up with the following posts:
:) Maybe along with a dual Opteron machine. And before you scream excess, have you checked Pricewatch lateley? I remember paying $3300 for a single processor PII-300 with 64MB of RAM and a Riva 128 in January of 1998. If the Opterons don't cost that much more than the high-end Athlons today, I could put together this machine for significantly less than that!
1) Who needs all that power anyway? I'm running Windows XP just fine here on my 486SX/33!
2) Why cares if it's fast? It uses up too much power and has a *fan* on it. God forbid a computer have a fan on it! It sucks because it's not fan-less like my Mac!
3) Sure it might be fast, but I bet it isn't as *efficient* as a G4!
4) NVIDIA sucks because it's drivers are closed source.
Did I forget anything? Anyway, I couldn't care less what the lamers think. This is a genuinely cool piece of hardware. There are a few things that make it so:
1) 500 MHz! That's half a gigahertz! A very large jump in clock-speed here, much more so than the usual 33 MHz pussy-footing the industry (particularly Intel!) is guilty of.
2) Compressed-memory access. Ah, computational power exceeds memory bandwidth to the point that it's more efficient just to compress the data before sending it over the bus... The 16 GB/sec memory bandwidth (which is also quite a big jump from existing machines) is made even more impressive by a lossless compression that can achieve 4:1 ratios. This is very helpful for multisample AA graphics, because it reduces the memory bandwidth hit to just the pixels that occupy the edges of polygons rather than every pixel in the scene.
3) Fully floating point pixel pipelines. Carmack was asking for 64-bit floating-point point pipelines a while ago. While this doesn't quite get there (it's 32-bit floating point) it is a major step, and makes life a lot easier for game developers.
Overall, this card is definately in the cards for me
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What!
First of all - this post assumes that the fundamental reason for the internet is Advertising Revenue - instead of information sharing.
And you get modded up insightful?!
Its funny how things can shift so subtley (sp) yet so significantly.
On the one hand - they need to have revenue in order to stay in business - and provide us with the reviews we want to see... on the other hand the internet is about sharing information, without a bias from marketing.
Yet - now we see the both are so dependant on eachother we even get people who are upset over the bypassing of Advertiser Sponsored information in favor of just the raw information we are talking about in the first place.
WTF has our perception of the way the internet should be come to?!
Just because its the way it is - doesn't mean its the way it should be.
NVidia has a list of "Lauch Games" for the GeforceFX. Command & Conquer: Generals, Unreal II, Rallisport Challenge, Sea Dogs II & Splinter Cell. Screen shots and some movies are included.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
...but too bad it will cost my left nut just to own one.
Is Slashdot getting paid for posting articles from Tom's Hardware Guide? EVERY time there's a tech announcement, that's always the FIRST and many times the only link to it. Perhaps you seem to forget there are dozens of good tech sites out there, that can provide a more unbiased and more detailed analysis than THG.
Since I am in the market for a new one...what do you think is the best value for a graphics card right now?
:)
Disclaimer: I am cheap. I got my P3 550Mhz PC for next to nothing (ok, I got it for nothing). It has an SR9 8 MB AGP 2x card that fine for 2D but absymal for 3D gaming.
I can't see how many of you think nothing of paying $300+ for the latest and greatest video card, but apparently I'm in the minority (and cheap).
I'm not looking for a high end card like the GeForce4 Ti4600 since I rarely play games on my PC, but I'd like something that will make playing Quake II or an 2-3 yr old FPS fun to play once in awhile. TV-Out would be nice, but that's not a necessity.
Anything under $100? $75? $50? $30? Less!?!
Thanks!
Chris
Interesting opinion. Why do you feel that way? Personally, I never really had anything against Nvidia. They've been good to be for the past few months. I'm not too thrilled about Doom III, but I think I might pick it up just to poke at it and make stupid noises at it. I'm a shitty consumer, but what can you do?
With a good amount of hose you could clear your yard of any leaf litter. Also, by plugging the hose into the intake side, with a small inline filter, you could have a central vacuum system for your home.
I definitely want good graphics but, the cooling problems that these new cards bring with them is just getting ridiculous.
Not like anyone actually takes tomshardware seriously anymore. It's equivalent to pcmag....
I am the only one with my AGP slot as the first slot at the top on my motherboard? That means there's no open slot on the back of my case for that fan to stick out of. The only way I can see a contraption like that working is if it was taking up two PCI slots, which of course it doesn't... Any ideas?
There is no way that a human being is this incredibly dumb.
Aside from flooding the market with variations of an existing product (graphics pro ultra turbo rage 1 2 3 4 express), ATI has a history of dropping support for earlier products anytime a new version of Windows comes out.
Extortion should not be the primary method of getting existing customers to upgrade. Perhaps this was learned from Microsoft.
Ask anyone with an early tv wonder card who wanted to use NT, or anyone with an original all in wonder card who wants to use all of its features in XP.
All things being equal (technology wise) think carefully about where you want to go for drivers and customer support two or three years from now.
Awesome
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Well, I've had my GeForce2 for almost 2 years now, and with this announcement of the GeForce FX, it's finally a sign to upgrade.
:)
It's funny, practically my entire workstation (P4 2.2GHz, 256MB DDR400, 80GB HD, etc.)has been upgraded in terms of components, however, my video card has remained static. Not that I'm complaining, because I can run pretty much every game out there at (what I consider to be) fairly decent speeds. Take Age of Mythology as an example. It's more than fast enough. Unreal Tournament 2003 is a tad different, as I have to turn down some of the graphics, but it's is still fine for the 'average' game. Plus, my Xbox and PS2 are for my gaming needs
Now, does the theory of diminishing marginal utility apply to video cards, or is it the opposite? How much more powerful can video cards get so that we won't even 'notice' (at least in the loose sense) any difference when playing games? The Radeon 9700 Pro (with a fast CPU) can run pratically every game on the market at max details at most resolutions. Well, so can the GeForce FX 5800. Sure it may be 30-50% faster, but the utility gained for current games is definately marginal.
Since I've held out for 2 generations of video cards, for me, it's definately the time to upgrade. Though, it's not really because my video card is too 'slow'. I suppose it's an issue of just gloating to my friends!
Moreover, in terms of approaching cinematic rendering, nVidia is definately going in the right step. They are quickly approaching the level of "Final Fantasy" in terms of quality of output. Nonetheless, they'll still need to add quite a bit of horsepower to be able to do it all in real-time.
This goofy two-slot setup reminds me way too much of what 3dfx started doing when they couldn't keep up with a "normal" board. We all know what happened next...
Unless they can trim that extra fat off the board I'll stick with ATI's offerings.
Game... blouses.
So there you have it; the elusive NV30 has surfaced in the form of GeForce FX. ATI has won the first round with the Radeon 9700 Pro, what will be most interesting will be what ATI has up their sleeves when the GeForce FX hits the shelves in February.
Myself, I had a GF3 Ti500, I upgraded to a GF4 4600, but it wasnt much faster, returned it. Then a couple games came out (Battlefield 1942, Unreal2003) that really needed some gfx horsepower. So I bought the Ati 9700, Amazing. I can run older games with 6x AA perfectly, and Newer games run at 60FPS with 2x AA enabled. The GFX card works fine with the CVS version of Xfree also. (Or vesa mode for older 4.2.1) Also, I can output to TV at 1024x768, and have it mirror my monitor, great when playing some multiplayer games, or playing some divx/svcds. The Ati 9700 is a very nice product, and found some great forums at Rage3d for questions and updated beta drivers. (Like the new DX 9.0 drivers and DX 9.0 demos)
My goodness, can you imagine a "workstation" running one of these nVidia cards with dual Itanic processors? Heck, if you got a university to run this configuration, you could bring Enron back from the brink. I see 20amp fuses in many homes going "POP" right now.
"The perfect example we like to use is Doom3; Doom3 was designed around DX8 technology, it will be Doom3's successor that can truly take advantage of the features of GeForce FX"
-Tom's Hardware
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they mean OpenGL.
Wow, you don't appreciate the value of filters until you lower your threshold and end up assaulted by crap like this:
"I put two rubbers on my cock before letting your mom suck my pee sprout."
and this:
"I frequently put the 12" in your wife's slot."
Move along...nothing to see here.
I run a Matrox m3!
WOOT!
i like this one. Can render >100 Jurassic Park dinosaurs at 100 frames per second.
powerful, yeah.
I want 2D games back.
Damn, I'm just gonna come out and say it (and risk major flames):
I'm disgusted with the overabundance of hype with this launch. That's what this launch is. Of course there's no real substance because there's no shipping product!
And maybe it's not just NVIDIA. A lot of companies hype their products when they launch. Gee, even if the launch is three months away. But what really gets me though is the AMOUNT of pure meaningless crap that is spewing from the websites I've seen.
Tell me how it's going to benefit the consumer, by:
1. Comparing the numbers like the "instructions," "constants," and "registers" that this new chip allows. These kinds of numbers mean nothing to the consumer. If nothing else NVIDIA should be pitching this crap to developers.
2. Posting some really pretty pictures of things supposedly rendered with this card. Let me tell you why this is so rediculous.
I did a little test. This is what you were supposed to get with your Geforce 3 (according to the picture on a HardOCP preview). Guess what, no games even LOOK like that yet, let alone if you had one could you play it on a Geforce 3 at acceptable frame rates! Sigh. Things are just getting worse.
3. Real performance. I really can't believe that Anandtech posted frame rate numbers from Doom 3 that were supplied by NVIDIA. Data from an alpha game supplied by the card's manufacturer?. Yet no tests were shown of any other game, be it current or old. That is just rediculous.
Maybe it's not realistic to do this since the card is not even in production yet. Yet NVIDIA chooses to 'announce' their card anyway, in the same fashion they have done in the past (usually when the product is available). Right. It's a very clever game NVIDIA is playing; announce this new product and attempt to hurt sales of their competitor's product in the hope that the consumer waits for this new, overly-hyped and untested product. We've seen this before with the Geforce 3 and we're seeing it again on a larger scale, and I'm sick of it.
ok, so please flame me up the arse for bitching about the current state of deception that's going on in the industry. Yeah, lots of companies do it (while I think NVIDIA is the worst), yet people just eat this shit up! What's the point of going to different web sites when they're all supplied with the same incessant crap that NVIDIA created? I don't want to hear that it's just "the way things are" because I'm saying that they shouldn't be this way.
Thanks for reading.
Having to use two slots is a real turnoff. I'm more excited about whatever ati will have to match this. Something that will stay in it's own slot I hope.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
That new graphics card sure looks pretty and EXPENSIVE with all that copper. This will certainly add to the cost of that product. I wonder what percent by weight of the entire product is copper, seeing that copper is a commodity metal.
Regarding those comments about the cooling system not having a filter, this is a pre-production model. Give it some time, it will have to use a filter to keep the small space between the copper fins free of dust.
Hey Bob, while you're out at Murray's Automotive, get me a new oil filter model number P3160 for a Saturn SL2 dual overhead cam and FX160 filter for my NVidia graphics card, 128MB DDR2 RAM, and be sure to read the serial number information. My FX card is post 4375XXX, so it doesn't need a finotany rod or a muffler bearing.
Red Lord Scarlet (1:26:11 PM): have you seen the GeforceFX Red Lord Scarlet (1:26:26 PM): its got a fucking air intake and exhaust satansBeercan (1:26:35 PM): a video card? Red Lord Scarlet (1:26:48 PM): http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q4/021118/ge forcefx-03.html
satansBeercan (1:27:52 PM): AGP INTERFACE TYPE R WITH VTEC
Red Lord Scarlet (1:28:07 PM): YEAH!
satansBeercan (1:29:19 PM): CoreIsNotAGenre (1:29:10 PM): Hahahah
CoreIsNotAGenre (1:29:17 PM): special collectors edition shaped like Kevin Mitnick's head
Red Lord Scarlet (1:29:34 PM): haha
Red Lord Scarlet (1:30:49 PM): intsead of overlcocking it, they can put some racing bumpers, and NOS booster, and a bucnh of racing stickers on their computers
satansBeercan (1:31:41 PM): chrome the heatsink and throw on a stickers, thats all you really need to do
Even if I say something insightfull or inteligent, it doens't matter cause I'm an ass.
Well many people were interested to see what elements of 3Dfx might show up in Nvidias latest design..
The result seems to be making bloody huge cards! I think they need to concentrate on finding ways to keep these cards SENSIBLY cool - not bolting on huge copper coolers, which expand onto a 2nd PCI slot, just to keep the GPU cool.
Its crazy I tells ya!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Does this machine mean that people with those little shuttle boxes are going to have to give up the PCI slot now? Is this thing really that hot that it needs such a huge cooling system? I never understand when they die-shrink they use less power, yet run hotter. Is transistor count proportional to heat output?
Hahahaha. I love you. All the good posts are at -1:Troll. Keep on trolling!
can also toast my english muffin at the same time.
I have a GF2 GTS, and I used 40.72 for a few weeks.. overall, I'd say the release is total shit. 3D stutters more often, and most textures look less detailed. The real downside to 40.72 IMO is the very poor 2D performance and quality. Under Windows XP, I noticed a lot of problems such as slow and choppy movement of windows, especially when minimizing and maximizing. Currently I'm using 31.40 without any of these problems.
As for ATI, their drivers are just as easy to find on their web site as nVidia. Right on the front page they have a link to "find a driver". On the page you choose your operating system, and product you have, then you're taken to a page with the corresponding drivers. Simple as that.
So, how long until the nude version of Dawn is leaked? ;)
What a beast! Maybe someone could port the Distributed.net client to run on it so it would have something to do when I'm just reading Slashdot.
ATI is very good about keeping it's product hush-hush. Not so with other companies products they work on, remember the Apple deal and Doom 3?
In all seriousness, I really do want nvidia to succeed, and I'm not an ATI fanboy but...
By the time nv30 comes out, ATI will most likely have a .13 micron ddr-ii part to counter it. They most likely won't drop their 256 bit interface either...
He who releases a press release first is not he who wins.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I might hold off buying a GF4 Ti4200 in favor of this baby.. *_*
From a developer perspective, we're headed for a shader fight between NVidia's Cg, OpenGL 2.0 shader languages (shader assembler, ISL, and Quartz Extreme) and Microsoft's HLSL. It's not enough to have shader languages; they have to be supported in the content creation tools, so the artists can see what they're doing. This will take a while.
Developers need to buy this thing, but everybody else can wait a year.
Fuck adds. They don't work, and the sooner we all realize that the sooner we cab get on building a better model.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Hey dipshit, Doom3 uses OpenGL not Direct3D (the 3d acceleration part of DirectX). That is what needs explaining.
My take is that the odd numbered GeForces are the ones to buy, major technological jumps over the even numbered ones, which are basically optimizations and ramping up clock speeds without any actual new technology. And with a decent computer, you can get the 2nd best video card of a new odd release and be set for at least a year, even an early adopter like I consider myself to be.
No one listened when I said 3dfx was doomed! You laughed at my TNT! I told you so! Who's laughing now huh?!
---
When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
Its amazing!
The specs for this board should include a noise dampener to counter the hoover that they have strapped to its circuit board.
The ex-3DFX engineers that NVidia acquired somehow managed to brainwash the NVidia guys into releasing a gigantic monster of a board that can only rival the VooDoo 5000 in its unpracticality and ungainliness.
Those 3DFX guys have had their revenge.
who would think.. a cooling system that actually gets cool air from OUTSIDE the computer.
watch and learn.
nVidia, with heavier competition from ATI than they had with the GF2 or 3, needs to have a strong launch of the NV30. Marketing is innevitable. We know they're evil. But get past it and look for what yer interested in. If yer not interested in it, move on.
I don't have any flames for you, but I think yer overreacting to a constant of doing business.
---
When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
I own one of these. So far, I have played Q3, RA3, UT, BF1942, AA:O, etc. at the MAXIMUM resolution, with FSAA set at highest rate, i.e. trying as hard as I can to get it to slow down. No go!
I haven't met a game yet which can slow my framerate below 90fps or so. Not only that, it's so crisp it almost hurts.
I'm all for early adoption, but geez... the low end GF4 ti can easily handle any software I throw at it...
It's a good buy (got mine for $89).
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
hmmm,
my shuttle ss51g has it's one pci slot on the other side of the agp from most boards, but i think i might be able to cut a slot for the fan. In fact I was considering modding that side to cool my geforce 4 anyway:)
Has anyone else done any modding of the shuttle case?
~m
If the amount of power used by this card doesn't increase your electric bill, then the amount of air conditioning you will need to keep yourself from burning up in the same room with it will...lol.
I am in the same boat as many ppl. While I do play games and like them to run well, I still use my GeForce2 GTS cards for our (my wife's and mine...yeps, she is a gamer too) gaming rigs.
The "average Joe" PC game player does not have high end hardware. The only real time they feel the "need" to upgrade is when a game they want to play can't be played well on their current system.
These constant available options for hardware upgrades, while cool, are not necessary to just play games (or do the majority of anything else ppl do on a computer). Unless you are doing computer graphics or video type production work, the only "need" for this type of stuff is if you are a one of those "hardcore" g4m3rZ that "must" have the latest and greatest gadget.
And some ppl still don't understand, or wonder, why there was a tech bust...
Agreed. Once your Nvidia card gets a year old, the unified drivers start crapping on it. The optimisations for latest models start actually hurting older models. (But you still need the newer drivers to keep up with OS releases et al.) I like ATI's model better. It's clearer and the result is more predictable, now that they actually produce pretty good drivers over there.
I remember reading in boot magazine back in high school when AGP was coming first coming out, some graphics company was working on a spec for graphics chip sockets on motherboards. They figured it would allow for faster bandwidth, and make it easier to build imbedded video onto motherboards (just take out the socket, and solder on the chip :P)
Anyway, I'm wondering if maybe the time for that hasn't come, I mean wit the insane cooling these new cards need. I mean, really. I remember surprise the first time I saw a graphics chip with a heat sink! Now cards these days need more cooling then my first CPU (and that was a Pentium 75 by the way). I don't think slots are really the best place to put these things.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Right now I'm on a project where we are reluctantly (well, I'm reluctant: others are quite happy) using SGIs: we just dropped mid-five figures, and will probably come close to six before we're done (on this machine, we have about another $500k or so worth already). A lot of this is because of SGI's graphics pipe: we're doing some convolution and other stuff where we use pretty much all of the 512MB of texture memory that we have.
I believe that current Nvidia Ti4600s have 128MB (256?) of memory, so I hope that a professional level of this new card might scale to the half Gig we need.
Additionally, the SGI is 12-bits per color channel, which is a bummer since the interface it is simulating is 16-bit monochrome. Sure, you can try and do tricks, but from a quick glance over the FX's specs, I see 32 bits per channel, which would be very nice.
With this FX card, a reasonably setup AMD Clawhammer system, and the scalability and preemption stuff that's going into 2.6/3.0 Linux kernels, we might be able to move from SGI within the next year or two, thus saving taxpayers on the order of $40-80k or more per system. A lot of development is already done on Linux, but it sure would be nice to move over fully.
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/3648/SUPP/large03.jp g
I 'pated today on this image in my mind.
Here are some ASCII diagrams:
:)
Case/motherboard:
TOP
] AGP
] PCI
] PCI
] PCI
BOTTOM
nVidia card:
TOP
]======
]--/
BOTTOM
Note how the ==== card can sit in the AGP slot while the --/ cooling fan sits over the adjacent PCI slot.
Seriously, after playing so much Tetris, how could you screw this up?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Why didn't they name it the GeForce5? That sounds soo much cooler than FX. FX doesn't sound powerful at all, especially when their low end chip is called the "MX." Pronouncing the two isn't that different, too. Which sounds faster: Radeon 9700 Pro or GeForce FX? Sheesh.
Oh shut up you retard. When everything is subscription based you'll be the first fucktard roaming the net for rips of it, claiming that subscriptions are a heinous IP crime. You hypocrates are such a pathetic bunch that it really boggles the mind.
I don't get it. OK so this card is fast as hell, and does some serious-ass rendering. So what does this mean for me being a Linux user? All the benchmarks are Win* stuff. That means nothing to me, esentially.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
"NVIDIA has hinted at offering another version of the GeForce FX at a lower clock speed that would only occupy a single slot cutout, but we will have to wait until the product line is announced before we can find out what the differences will be. Our initial guess would indicate that a simple reduction in clock speed would be enough to go with a more conventional cooling setup."
And:
"The other issue that users may have is noise, luckily NVIDIA has taken steps to make sure that the GeForce FX is one of the most quiet running cards they've ever produced. Borrowing technology from their mobile parts and combining it with the FX Flow cooling system, NVIDIA is able to dynamically reduce the speed of the fan based on the graphical needs of the system. When sitting in a 2D situation the card will scale back the clock speed of parts of the 3D pipeline that aren't in use, thus allowing the fan to spin much slower. As soon as you start using the GPU for games or any other 3D intensive applications, the clock speeds up as does the fan. The idea is that if you're gaming you're not as concerned with noise as when you are typing in Word."
Link: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1749&p=6
"Your mother sent me here to kill you..."
- "Bill Cosby - Himself"
SKO: Add Carmack to your foes list.
Alice: Why do you want to do that?
SKO: He's gay.
Alice: Gay? Do you mean he's happy or his sexual preference? You have verry unintelligible use of the English language.
SKO: Go download yourself.
Alice: I don't need to with you around...primitive AOL user.
SKO: you slut!
Alice: No, you're a slut.
SKO: No, you're a slut.
Alice: No, you're a slut.
SKO: No, you're a slut.
Alice: Now you DIE!
Of course, according to Anandtech's intellisample page, Here, 16GB/s times a compression ratio of 4 = 48GB/s...why don't we just reinvent fckin math for FPS in DOOM III
Soon the chips will get so hot that air cooling would not be enough and they'll have to go watercooled. Not much dust problems any more, but we'll have to take the PC in for water-pump replacement and CompUSA will start selling radiator plug-a-leak...
Get a job! Then you get to buy all kinds of fun toys!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
More details on other overclocker forums, including evidence.
Hi All,
There is another article here, regarding the new GeForce FX, at HotHardware.
Due to the length of traces and general increases in signal quality / features etc required on todays video cards, along with potential external power (see the R9700, pics of the NV30 from today and the Voodoo5) etc etc.
It's all nice in theory, but it just won't happen.
nForce2 motherboards have been available for the general public to buy for about a week now. You can get them here or at other stores. The Asus A7N8X board based on nForce2 is about $150, which isn't bad considering the KT400 alternative is about $125. IMO the performance boost from of nForce2 over KT400 (look at the benchmarks) is worth the extra $20. Plus you get great integrated sound, 2xlan, etc so you don't need to spend more on those things.
Repeal the DMCA!
He just posted the link to their printer-friendly version which Anandtech hosts themselves.
(well kind of) "The perfect example we like to use is Doom3; Doom3 was designed around DX8 [b]technology[/b], it will be Doom3's successor that can truly take advantage of the features of GeForce FX" DX8's feature set, not necessarily the API itself.
I don't know if anyone is aware of this, but I recall reading way back in the TNT2 / Geforce days some press releases from our pals the bit boys.
One of the features they claimed to have on their cards was the ability to sync the _2D_ windows frame rate with the vertical frequency that windows was set at (ie, vsync for 2d)
The results of this would have been the ability to drag a window around the screen with no tearing (apparently) at all, which would have looked BRILLIANT, it wouldn't have actually BEEN any faster but it would have appeared smoother / better (see PS/2 Rate or USB mice also)
I'd like to see this implimented some time,....
Thanks
You still gotta cool the water, and unless you pump the heat into the ground or a river, you'll probably use air for that.
Looking at that cooling system brings one thought to mind-
;)
It's good to see that NVidia is finally putting their 3DFX intellectual property to good use.
-dmc
Why didn't they name it the GeForce5?
...errr...hey wait a minute...
Remember that company called 3DFX whose "last" card was the Voodoo5? Then a powerhouse called Nvidia took over as highend "King of the Hill".
Funny how that works, eh?
I mean it is not like Nvidia has anything to worry about with ATI taking the performance cro
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Hell any modern 56k modem (and even my old Sportster 14.4) does 4:1 lossless on the fly compression. Granted this is a little slower than what the GF FX is doing, but then again the GF FX does EVERYTHING super fast. It's not too tough to speed up that compression. Low-ratio lossless compression is pretty easy to do on the fly in hardware, just turn up the clock rate and bam. VHDL anyone?
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Yeah, I'm very interested in these announcements too. And the terawatt cooler looks awfully hip, dunnit? But then I see the pictures, and become disappointed. Computer games look more detailed than ever before, but they're all obviously computer generated. So I've promised myself I wouldn't get excited until I see a significant jump in actual picture quality.
I guess Carmack got it right (doesn't he always?) -- we need 100 passes per pixel.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
I'm disgusted with the overabundance of hype with this launch. That's what this launch is. Of course there's no real substance because there's no shipping product!
I have yet to see any ATI demos, let alone anything like Dawn (still needs work, but I'w finally becoming happy with the state of graphics rendering).
Hell, all I see when I go to ATIs site are "desktop solutions", and my ATI capture card sucks software wise, and now I'm ranting.
In any case I see more substance to the NV30 chip than I do to ATIs latest release, which is diisappointing, I'd like to see competition (and not just imagine it, like I have to do now).
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I missed hemos's picture. Where was it on the site?
They don't have 3D support or dual head support for the 9700 yet, do they? The changelog only seems to mention 2D support.
2: A small air compressor (however this can get much more expensive in the short term especially considering you need not only a compressor, but also, hose, fittings, an air chuck and most importantly a dryer (aka de-humidifer), so unless you have alot of stuff that needs cleaning and you live in a place that makes it needed fairly often you should probably stick with #1)
Or take up scuba diving as a hobby. You can get an air chuck that attaches to the low pressure hose that would normally connect to a bouyancy compensator (inflatable vest). The air from the cylinder is already filtered and dry.
Don't think I saw anyone wondering about this...
.sig there!
I wonder what ATI will come out with next?
I mean the 9700 was clearly the answer to the Gefore 4 Line (specificaly the ti4600)....And like I saw someone else mention..ATI is pretty good at keeping things under-wrap (well, except others software maybe) so I wonder what they have up their sleeve?
caino
don't touch my
Yea, they did a great job keeping the doom 3 alpha under wraps...
caino
don't touch my
after seeing "dawn" ..
i can't help but anticipate the release of a new leisure suit larry type game!
-judging another only defines yourself
Exactly which graphics card manufacturer do you work for? The only reason you would say this is to sell video cards, because cutting production of the Ti4600 makes no sense. What would Nvidia sell someone who wants to pay more than $100 for a Ti4200 and less than $400 for a GeForce FX? Are you proposing that Nvidia is just conceding that market to ATI?
This reminds me of my old job. At the time memory prices were steadily dropping. We were told to recommend that customers buy memory now because the trend towards lower prices could reverse tomorrow. I guess it is hard to come up with a good excuse for someone to pay more now rather than less later.
it should be noted that Anonymous Pancake was the one who started that trend
You fucking Canuck motherfuckers! We know ATI and Matrox are trying to suck us dry, and we will stop them!
The technical concepts have been in use for decades, provided that you don't myopically focus on "console gaming" as the definition of platform.
Go wayyyyyy back to the days of the "dumb" terminal, the mid-80s. The "hot" video games such as Star Wars, Tempest, and their ilk had pathetic processors, but hardware vector graphics engines (i.e. line-drawing only) that would have required CPUs 10-20 times as powerful to render the same data to a raster display. "Intelligent" display terminals used for CAD/CAM often had at least as much raw CPU power as the monstrous VAX midframes they talked to.
Over the decades, the balance of power has constantly shifted between the processing center (CPU or data center) and the presentation/client (smart TTYs, X-terminals, fat clients, thin clients, browsers, browsers with plugins, java download clients, etc.)
You'd be amazed how much of modern graphics and CPU technology was actually theorized as far back as the 60s or 70s, but just could not be implemented with the technology of the day. Some of the algorithms discussed in my 400-series graphics class in the late 80's were only "theoretical" algorithms because even a Cray would have taken a couple days to calculate a single frame using them. Now we take it for granted and argue about which is "better", myopically ignoring all which came before us.
Case in point: Darwin Peachey was one of the graphics grads/profs at the University of Saskatchewan when I graduated. He left that year to work for a little startup you might have heard of: Pixar. Most of what he'd studied was research, and he saw Pixar as a chance to work with a bleeding-edge company that wanted to make the theory real. To the public their work is "new", but to their staff it's something they've been working on for 15-20 years, and far from new!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
[01:55] Estimated Price: Not Released
[01:55] Translation
[01:55] "Plan on having a second child"
[01:55] "You'll need to sell the first"
Great, a perfectly good solid state design now depends on moving parts to survive.
has 3d accelerated desktops that actually use 32megs of memory & agp. You must be talking about some computer that still 'switchew' into 3d mode to play a game.LOL
A card this elaborate still needs a motherboard? wtf? Just port linux onto it somebody.
had the same problem....
I'm suprised noone has commented on NVidia's change to flip-chip technology yet. It's the first time that I've seen it used in consumer computer technology. Instead of having small legs like surface mount chips, the chip has blobs of solder underneath it, and the solder bonds to the PCB when the chip is pressed against the board during manufacturing. It's important because it lowers the capacitance of the external pins, which means that the chip can interface to the outside world at higher clock rates. It's an important shift in packaging technology.
Official MacOSX 10.2.7 Patch schedule
Because many new GPUs are reaching a stage where they are faster than our G4s, code has been added to swap the GPU into a CPU and the CPU(G4) into a GPU. We anticipate a 15-30% boost in Photoshop.
Well, you asked for flamage, so here goes...
You're an idiot.
Stop bitching, start thinking for yourself instead of crying because some site told you to think the wrong thing. Stop reading that site. Start learing how to interpret the stats if you don't want to get screwed.
As for the fortune teller demo, it was the first thing I ran on my GF3 the day after the card hit the shelves. It looked sweet, and ran fast. What the hell are you complaining about on this one? The demo shows very clearly that the card is capable of those graphics. Don't blame NVIDIA because game developers haven't taken advantage of every neat little effect the card can do.
So what if they're hyping their new creation? I'd be proud of this card too, and I'd also try to get people to not buy my competitor's card if it meant they weren't going to buy mine. I'm glad they put these press releases out before the card was done. I was on the verge of buying a 9700, but now I'll just wait and buy this. They saved me from buying a card that's going to be inferior in 2-3 months. Then again, that's just my opinion, the same as these other sites you're reading. If you don't like it, make your own opinion instead of crying that the one you're being spoon-fed doesn't taste good. It's nobody's fault but your own that you can't separate the wheat from the chaff.
Blech. Infants like you are the reason my cigarettes cost $5.00 a pack now.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
no, just idiotic. enlightened self interest would seem to dictate that a healthy online advertising market is a GOOD thing.
I remember back in 1998 I was working at a company developing a revolutionary (at the time) graphics unit, and they brought in a guy who was head of digital israel to be the ceo. The chip was expected to run pretty hot, but outperform anything currently on the market by an order of magnitude. He left a month later, with one of his claims being that no one would ever accept a consumer graphics card with a fan on it! Having your new ceo bolt after a month kinda kills investor confidance, and the single largest investor got limp dicked and pulled out, bringing the company down. What a loser.
Kinda like putting a modchip in the XBox you mean ? :)
uh...
Which game(s) are you referring to? My GF2 Ultra (I think thats what it is, definitely a GF2) looks pretty damned good in MW4, Descent 3, Q3, Mafia, and GTA3.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I remember back in 1998 I was working at a company developing a revolutionary (at the time) graphics unit, and they brought in a guy who was head of digital israel to be the ceo. The chip was expected to run pretty hot, but outperform anything currently on the market by an order of magnitude. He left a month later, with one of his claims being that no one would ever accept a consumer graphics card with a fan on it! Having your new ceo bolt after a month kinda kills investor confidance, and the single largest investor got limp dicked and pulled out, bringing the company down. What a loser.
Yeah, I remember that company, they were called FourFold Technologies. I read an article about them back in 97 I think. This is the best link I could find about them. FourFold is mentioned about 2/3rd way down the page. This was in 97 when Mathew Kallis was ceo, before they brought in the guy from the Israel branch of digital, his name was Avraham Menachem if I remember correctly, although don't quote me on that. Israel Seed was their main investor.
That is a pretty big fan, isn't it? Too, bad. Nvidia is something like a $2 billion company now, and FourFold would have had the market Nvidia now has, if the guys at Israel Seed hadn't pissed themselves. By the way, I heard that when Israel Seed pulled out of FourFold and brought it down, the company had just raised about $1 million, a big chunk of which it still had in the bank, and that most of the money got burned in the process of shuting down / breaking up the company. Dumbasses from Israel Seed destroyed the company and didn't even get anything out of it in the end.
oh great, I guess graphics isn't really for those of us that sit more than 2meters away from the monitor and run it in 800x600.. and the only change from that mode is to mode 3..
Screw you dude. I happen to be a computer scientist. I just wanted to reply in order to jam a wedge in your narrow vision of the world so that it might open it up. Computers are many things to many people. They are tools to scientists, productivity enhancers to secretaries, and entertainment devices to enthusiasts. Just because you use your computer a certain way doesn't mean that you are superior. I've followed your posts for the past 2 weeks and you seriously don't add anything to the community. (And what you do add is plagiarized.) Go away.
Could be biased slightly?
Let's wait for more impartial reviews to filter though.
2: A small air compressor
Be carefull with this, you could spray a thin film of water on your components as normal air contains some water. When it gets compressed the air heats up, this does not affect the water. However when you decompress the air is cools down significantly which causes the water to condense.
Cans of compressed air are mostely dried, especially if they are meant for electronics.
We ARE developers, and we ARE interested in those details. stfu.
There once was a master programmer who wrote unstructured programs.
A novice programmer, seeking to imitate him, also began to write unstructured
programs. When the novice asked the master to evaluate his progress, the
master criticized him for writing unstructured programs, saying: "What is
appropriate for the master is not appropriate for the novice. You must
understand the Tao before transcending structure."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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