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Nvidia GeForceFX(NV30) Officially Launched

Posted by timothy on from the small-with-lots-of-dots dept.

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.

5 of 426 comments (clear)

  1. Good now I can afford a Ti4600 by NetNinja · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Time to buy a Ti4600 :)

    1. Re:Good now I can afford a Ti4600 by swordboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Time to buy a Ti4600 :)

      Not necessarily...

      nVidia like to announce things well in advance of shipment in order to convince people to wait. This is perfect timing to keep those gamers from scooping up the 9700s for the Christmas season.

      Make note that nVidia announced the nForce 2 way back in July and you still can't buy them.

      With business practices like that, I like to take my dollar to the competition. ATI is very good about keeping products hush-hush until they are close to shipment. I wouldn't expect the FX anytime soon.

      So the prices of the 4600s won't be dropping as a result of nVidia announcing something that won't be on shelves until next spring.

      --

      Life is the leading cause of death in America.
  2. cooling excess... by sapgau · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:cooling excess... by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Most enthusiasts know to leave the next PCI slot next to the AGP free as it is, for at least 2 reasons.

      1) Imrove airflow to the Vid Card

      2) That first PCI slot often shares an IRQ with the AGP slot - uncool, performance wise.

      So for the gamers that the card is targetted for, business as usual.

      For everyone else, I'm sure it'll be implemented with a more 'normal' cooler.

      If a 1.3ghz tualitan P3 and 1.8ghz P4 can run a low profile cooling setup in a 1U rack, so can this.

      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.

      Also note, that this is an optimized, hopped up reference board for Tom, and not something we'll ever be buying. It's like a concept car at a car show.

      I've been burned enough with Tom's special 'reviewer edition' hardware ad-hype pieces. Wait for the real thing.

      --
      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  3. Re:Crazy World by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's this trend in computing to make everything faster, more featureful, hotter, and more energy consuming.

    I agree. We're not getting huge, usable leaps in computing capabilities, we're getting continual, incremental improvements. Even these incremental improvements are not coming for free, we're getting them at the cost of increased power consumption, and millions of people throwing away motherboards and video cards every few years. And the incremental nature of it all keeps developers back a couple of generations. It's just barely getting to the point where you can realistically ignore everyone who doesn't have hardware T&L, several years after the introduction of the GeForce 2. But this is still a questionable choice, as a large number of PCs from Dell and Gateway still ship with generic video chipsets that don't have hardware support for T&L. Doom 3, which isn't even on the release radar yet (2003? 2004?), is the first game that's going to require the pixel shaders of the GeForce 3 and beyond. No other developer is going out on such a limb, as cool as shaders may be.

    I'd love to see a quantum leap in desktop PC capability that isn't a one-to-one trade of MIPS for wattage. It's very possible, but we're running down this bizarre path where everyone gets all excited about a 9% increase in raw clockspeed (which translates into maybe 4% in benchmarks), even though it increases power consumption by 9% or more.

    I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs--x86, UNIX-like operating systems, C++, gcc, etc--for something simpler and cooler running, whose blatant wrongness doesn't eat away at your soul every time you use it. The whole Windows vs. Linux nonsense is a complete red herring in that regard.