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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.
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.
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,
I could hook that thing up to my ductwork and save a fortune on natural gas this winter.
Trolling is a art,
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.
NVIDIA has a few more shots of that Fairy:
1
2
3
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.
Dear Timothy,
1. Do you understand what the word 'launch' means?
2. Are you aware it is not yet February 2003?
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.
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...
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
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?
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.