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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 :)
Most systems now don't have filters on any of the other fans, why would this be any different? I'd assume that this system is needed because it gets really hot, and adding in a filter wouldn't exactly fascilitate air flow.
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,
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".
You don't need filters if the fan is always blowing out. Besides, there's always going to be dust in the box anyway, you just open it up and blow it out with Anti-static air. Looks like you could blow out that cooling unit too. That's a good thing to do every 6 mo. or so anyway, depending on the environment.
I could hook that thing up to my ductwork and save a fortune on natural gas this winter.
Trolling is a art,
Who's to say everyone had a fan in the front of their case? I don't bother.
It's always easier to work within the confines of a self-contained system such as the one they've created than rely on outside factors being just right.
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.
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
Actually, the weird part about that quote is Doom 3 runs in OpenGL, not DirectX.
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.
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.
Abit's OTES line of GeForce4 cards has coolers similar to the NV30 reference board linked in the post. Abit OTES link: here.
I think most of those things already exist. Oh, except for the 'cheap' part. :)
-- Jim
Dear Timothy,
1. Do you understand what the word 'launch' means?
2. Are you aware it is not yet February 2003?
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/videocards/
My dog ate my sig.
free ipod? yeah.
I think it's better to do this this way. If I ever get one (ha ha) I'll probably add an exhaust vent and an intake filter. On the other hand, I'm currently running a 4U aluminum rack case (mostly because it was roomy) and it's got a filter on the input fan, so in this box I prefer that everything else simply get air from inside the case. The big fan blows right over the hard drives...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...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.
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.
The bottleneck for the target market for this product is not storage. Gamers are quite happy to take a break between levels while the maps spool off disk.
If this were a product aimed at video edit suites or database systems, you'd be correct.
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!!!!
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.
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.
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/
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
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.
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?
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)
Well, you dont' have dust filters on jet engines equipped with afterburners either.
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.
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.
It's Dx8'ish (even though it uses OpenGL) in that it uses features specified in the DX8 shader APIs. This means integer pixel pipelines, and small shader programs without loops or other flow control. This card offers full floating-point pixel pipelines, and support for complex shader programs with branches and whatnot. These features are requirements for being fully DX9 compatible.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
In a desktop the reference design is already FUBAR - the output vent is below the intake vent.
Oops.
You can't suck in air from the case because you can't be sure that there's enough ventilation to let you suck the air in -- you always want to maintain an equal ratio of input and output airflow. The only way Nvidia could do this is to put the intake and the output on the card itself, which leads to the situation we see currently.
Preventing the output being sucked back into the intake is pretty trivial though - take a piece of cardboard and put it between the two. That will solve the majority of the problem. Yes, it's inelegant. But if the cooling problem has gotten to the point where you need a heat pipe with a blower separate from the rest of the system then you're pretty much SOL on elegant solutions anyway.
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.
A GeForce4 MX 440 will play older games *really* fast, and runs about $50 (including shipping) on pricewatch. It's got TV-Out too!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What ARE you talking about? Since when are computers holy and have a "blatent wrongness" about them? Just because companies prefer to stay close to a known money making path they are curropting the true beauty that a company could be? The amusing part is that these companies ARE making things use less and less energy. Compare the .35 micron p2 (IIRC) and this .13 gfx, the energy used per transistor is MUCH less, but they add a bunch of transistors so that people are more interested in buying them. Would you really prefer to still be using a Riva TNT equivilent Vid card, but that uses only a tiny bit of energy? Would you keep buying the upgrades? This isn't a bizarre path, this is the path of the market. Most people want better and better cards, and while they wouldn't accept massive 30kw power suckers, increasing the woltage just a tad is acceptable.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
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!!"
This is an old-fashioned AMD-style Paper Launch (see the XP 2400-2800 processors).
If you want those things, it's simple: vote with your dollars. If everyone stopped buying into these semi-annual incremental upgrades, and insisted on real, substanstial improvement, you'd change the industry overnight.
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.
I know exactly how you feel. Others agree as well -- for example, Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, colorForth, and the very impressive 25X chip design (25 asynchronous processors in one tiny, low power chip, interfacing directly to an SDRAM or whatever else you want -- each of the output pins is software controlled by one processor).
I'm not sure whether anything could ever come of such -- but I'd like to see it.
-Billy
can also toast my english muffin at the same time.
So, how long until the nude version of Dawn is leaked? ;)
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
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.
years after the introduction of the GeForce 2
2.5 years to be precise. The GF2 was released in May, 2000. I wound up having to buy one the 2nd day it was out, so I remember (old V2 setup wouldn't work in new system).
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
Doom3 is allegedly scheduled for Christmas of 2003. I'd be surprised if they missed that, but id software is usually more focused on getting it done right than on time, so who knows.
As for the features - by that time everyone will be going out on the same limb. As usual, the D3 engine will be licensed by many people and all those games will require the same level of hardware. D3 will take advantage of most of the features present in the GF4/GFFx as well, so now we're back to the games being only a year behind the hardware.
I'd love to see a quantum leap in desktop PC capability that isn't a one-to-one trade of MIPS for wattage
Well, I have no idea what the power consumption of the GF Fx is, but it's not a 1:1 trade of speed to MHz - the GF Fx runs at a 500 MHz core, which is roughly a 40% improvement over the Ti4600. For that speed improvement you get (allegedly) up to 400% of the speed. Not bad.
Realistically, though, you've got to be kidding. Science and technology rarely deal with sudden massive jumps in capability or performance. It's all building blocks. If you want a sudden massive jump then you have to skip a few iterations.
Did I mention that I'm still using the aforementioned GF2? Yes, I'm looking to upgrade right now and I do expect a considerable leap in capability and performance.
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs
So vote with your wallet and stop buying stuff you don't need. The only blatent wrongness is in buying crap you don't need and then whining about it being evil.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
I don't know why the card Tom's Hardware reviewed didn't have one, but this shot which I've seen everywhere else has a gray filter on it. It looks like styrofoam to me, but I don't know what filters are usually made of.
and the very impressive 25X chip design (25 asynchronous processors in one tiny, low power chip, interfacing directly to an SDRAM or whatever else you want -- each of the output pins is software controlled by one processor)
I'd be careful calling this impressive. Even *one* processor often ends up being memory-bound - 25 on one die will cause most to be idly stalled on memory loads.
Also, the previous article on this chip said that the pinout was chosen so that it could be put back-to-back with a specific SRAM chip, not SDRAM.
Another poster called into question the claim that you could have all of those processors active at once without overheating, but without actually checking a chip or reading a detailed electrical specs sheet, I can't confirm or refute that allegation.
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.
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"
or
3: A cannister vac with a hose on the exhaust port. Works great for getting crud out of the computer.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Get a job! Then you get to buy all kinds of fun toys!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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Hi All,
There is another article here, regarding the new GeForce FX, at HotHardware.
It's nice to see that nvidia is thinking of these things. :o)
Well, most likely, they had to. In other words, I think touching the heatsink on this card is definitely not a good idea. Unless you want to tatoo yourself a la "Raiders of the lost ark"
I must admit, however, that I am impressed by this heatsink, too.
Sigged!
I don't quite follow. Wouldn't even-numbered ones be the new cards to buy? Give everyone else a chance to mess with the bleeding edge when they come out with a GeForce 5 or 7, and then snap up a technology-perfected GeForce 6 or 8 for half the price of the original 5 (or 7) series, with more features, more memory and many small improvements.
I've done this for the GeForce series up until now, sticking with my Riva TNT until GeForce 2 came out and then keeping my GF2 until I could afford a Radeon 9000 (which is a GF4 equivalent). I've always been happy with my affordable, yet cheap graphics performance (my last three cards have been less than $100 apiece).
Getting more people & software written for the (highly portable and relatively standardized) Unix-based operating systems is going to facilitate moving to this new computing platform as long as your 'quantum leap' in computing technology doesn't completely obsolete current ideas of OS design.
I'd argue that UNIX is hardly a "current idea" of OS design. UNIX is holding us back, not moving us forward.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
And what's your grand idea of a "current" OS design? 3D file drawers with lickable handles?
You must be one of those people who think that there are three operating systems in the world, four if you count BeOs.
Power consumption is also reduced by a full 36% according to NVIDIA.
If that's true, then why does this card require an external power supply? Yikes.
I'd be careful calling this impressive.
You've got a very good point -- it's not even close to being in production. The author lacks the resources to fab it. The design is nonetheless impressive, and his previous chips testify to that.
Even *one* processor often ends up being memory-bound - 25 on one die will cause most to be idly stalled on memory loads.
Did I mention that each one has an on-chip block of memory?
Also, the previous article on this chip said that the pinout was chosen so that it could be put back-to-back with a specific SRAM chip, not SDRAM.
My typo, sorry. Yes, he picked the fastest SRAM he could find. But the pinout isn't specific to that -- it's software programmable.
Another poster called into question the claim that you could have all of those processors active at once without overheating, but without actually checking a chip or reading a detailed electrical specs sheet, I can't confirm or refute that allegation.
It's a rather premature allegation -- look at his other processors, the ones he's actually built. It's not a _silly_ allegation, just groundless.
-Billy
Even *one* processor often ends up being memory-bound - 25 on one die will cause most to be idly stalled on memory loads.
Did I mention that each one has an on-chip block of memory?
It doesn't matter. Working set size for most problems is far larger than you can reasonably cram into 1/25th of a die (or arguably even a whole die, though that claim's harder to make now that HP's embedded DRAM caches are maturing). Or to put it another way, only a small subset of problems will have a small enough footprint for this processor to be better than a less aggressively muticore design at solving them.
Give it a few more linewidth shrinks, and sure, you'll have enough cache per core, but by then everyone and their kid brother will also be rolling out CMP systems.
I'm afraid that in the absence of hard data, I remain skeptical.
That's how I feel: buy 'em cheap and make the most out of 'em, because there'll be something fundamentally better within 18 months anyway.
For awhile, the modem was the most frequently updated disposable peripheral; it seemed I found myself buying a faster modem every year. Of course, the hardware didn't always live up to the hype and noisy phone lines usually knocked your speed back down to 28.8 no matter how fast your modem.