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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.
Wait till February if you are going to do that. They haven't even released test samples yet. They have just finalized the design.
Actually, Anandtech has a benchmark that was provided by Nvidia showing a 40% increase over ATIs 9700.
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
AnandTech's coverage includes an nVidia-supplied benchmark that shows the NV30 beating the 4600 by 2.5x in Doom 3 (and the Radeon 9700 by about 40%). Of course, no one knows under what circumstances these benchmarks were obtained. I don't think any "independent" benchmarks will be available for awhile.
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".
If you look at the box in the corner of the benchmark, it says its running at 1280X1024 HQ. It also says its running "nvdemo3", which wasnt in the leaked alpha. The FPS shown for the R9700 are NOT consistent with mine and other's results with the leaked alpha.
It will be a while before we see real independant benchmarks.
Compression within graphics boards is very different than other kinds of compression. They aren't really trying to make the amount of data you need to store smaller; they are just interested in making the amount of data you need to shuffle between the chip and the card memory smaller. They also know that in some circumstances (multi-sampling) the data is going to be redundant in very predictable ways. This lets them take some shortcuts that let them have good average compression ratios, lossless, with very low latency. The risk of very bad cases is small--people aren't going to run games where everything looks like TV snow--and the worst-case penalty isn't too bad.
Actually, the weird part about that quote is Doom 3 runs in OpenGL, not DirectX.
Another preview at HardOCP here.
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.
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/videocards/
My dog ate my sig.
free ipod? yeah.
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/
Dust doesn't hurt chips, but it does insulate them which can lead to excessive heat which does damage chips. Filters on cooling fans is a bad idea, simply because having a filter will increase resistance and reduce airflow which kills the desired cooling effect.
:) ) It's nice to see that nvidia is thinking of these things.
Instead of using a filter simply buy either:
1: A can of compressed air every now and then (expensive, but easy and reliable)
or
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)
I must say though, what a cooling system! I don't know about everybody else, but I used to have a nice voodoo 3500 that would get so hot that you could burn yourself on it, I was always worried about that thing.... I finally rigged up a cooling system for it (yeah I know, buy one.... but it's more fun to make it out of old parts
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)
I doubt you know enough about GPU architecture to make that sort of bullshit comment. Graphics is a very simple, very parallizable system, when you get down to it. What matters, (assuming good drivers and adequate memory bandwidth, which isn't always the case) is clock_speed * pixel-pipelines. This has been the case since the Riva 128! Improving the architecture means adding more pixel pipelines (not always useful, if the developer can't use that many pipelines) or upping the clock-speed. Most operations in a modern GPU already take one cycle, so it's not like they're just pushing along inefficient architectures.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Or they could place the GPU back on the 'top' of the card so that heat can rise off it and out of the case, equip it with a more conventional GF4 style sink/fan, and there ya go.
Can't do that -- there's not enough clearance between the AGP slot and the CPU slot or other MB components to put in a HS/fan, much less this monstrosity.
Heck, I bet the heatsink on the back renders it incompatible with some motherboards because there are large caps too close to the AGP slot.
The venting slot uses the first slot BELOW the AGP slot, not the slot above it.
It's similar to how you can't feel the air blowing towards a fan intake as well as you can feel the air blowing out. Try it with a household fan sometime. Orient your hand parallel to the intake/output so that you're not blocking the flow much.
So, if they can get the cool air from outside, it's a better solution than using the pre-heated air from in the case.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
"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." Doom is based on DirectX 8? Well, maybe for sound and control input on windows but not for the renderer. Does this refer to the version of shader specification being used or is Anandtech smoking crack? In the video graphics market, the first generation features of a new card are almost NEVER used until two or three successive generations later. Eg, the Geforce vs the geforce 2,3 and their 'hardware transform and lighting.' What matters is, how well is the card going to play TODAYs games like doom3 (both the card's and the game's release will roughly coincide)? By the time 'tomorrow's games' that use these new features come out, this GeforceFX will be far too slow to play them well anyway. The GeforceFX 2 or 3 should be able to...and guess what? They'll have some new features..and so on and on and on.... I buy video cards based on how well they'll run my favorite games of today on my current system, not on how well they'll run QuakeEngine(tm) version 7 two years down the road. I'll worry about that then.
"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"
Hi All,
There is another article here, regarding the new GeForce FX, at HotHardware.