Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia Talks About Next-Gen Geforce, Plus Pics
Per Hansson writes "Techspot was at Comdex in Sweden a few days ago; we have now posted a small interview with Nvidia along with some high-res pictures of the Geforce FX on this page in our new comments system." This is one of the strangest looking video cards I've ever seen (and it isn't cheap), though it may look different by the time you can buy it in a box. Which is not yet, despite all the hype.
I wonder if we're ever going to get to a point where "this is the hardware. You have 10 years to do something cool with it"
Only when, if ever, we can render something like the Final Fantasy movie in real-time. Something tells me Moore's "law" will have broken down before that though.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The fact that something may not be as fast (or as expensive) as the newest new computer hardware has nothing to do with obsolescence. It is only obsolete because they want you to believe it is obsolete.
There's very little reason someone with a video card made a year or two ago would need one of these. My Radeon 8000 works fine, thanks. $400 for a 10-frames-per-second improvement isn't what I call revolutionary progress.
~D:
the most complex games, on the highest resolutions, get WAY too many frames
you're kidding me, right? Get UT2003 in 1600x1200 with everything maxed out and even on a 9700pro you won't see more than 30 or so fps on certain maps (alone, just looking around, in heavy firefights I'd suspect it'll drop to the teens: I don't have a system like that but I'm basing this on vidcaps I saw when UT came out).
Human eye is unable to perceive extra frames beyond a certain number
bs, it also really depends on what you're doing. If you're in a driving game going straight ahead and you get 30fps, you *might* not notice the difference between your 30 and 90fps. In a shooter or other game where the screen moves around quite a bit, I'm sorry but I can see the difference between 30fps and 70fps quite easily...
The moment somebody creates a card that is able to mantain refresh-rate-synced-updates (say 85fps) in any available game at any resolution regardless of what is going on, it's the moment a new game will be announced that will take a card 4x as powerful to do the same.
It really never ends... of course if all you'd like to do is play counterstrike you can get by quite well like myself with a really old p3-450 + geforce1.
-- the cake is a lie
The GeForce FX is in my opinion, not going to be what the world has expected from nVidia. It is simply too little, too late - 6 months too late. It may have the performance crown for a month, but it will be short-lived.
.13u process. In case some people haven't noticed, the leaked benchmarks of the GeForce FX show it to only be marginally faster than the Radeon 9700 Pro. Not to mention that it's 500MHz vs. 325MHz. It seems that ATI is faster in terms of IPC's.
ATI will simply respond with the R350, which is likely going to be an improved R300 core, as well as DDR2 and manufactured with the
It would be unfeasible for nVidia to respond until the summer with the NV31/34, at which time ATI will announce the R400.
I will have to give nVidia one thing though, their drivers are excellent. This is perhaps the only thing they have going for them at the moment. However, ATI is pumping out a new driver set almost every month, and at this rate, they will soon reach parity with nVidia.
why does the announcement of a $600 board from nVidia render a $400 from ATi obsolete? When Mercedes announces a new S-Class does it render the BMW 3 Series obsolete? WTF are you on about?
That was classic intercourse!
When I talked with the guys from BFG (who are already taking preorders) at the HardOCP Workshop, they had a FX card on hand that you could look at up close. I asked one of their guys about the huge ass coolers and they said that the manufacturers had the choice to put their own type of cooling on it if they wanted. So I'm sure there will be some 1 slot options out there if the customers demand it...
People call liquid cooling dangerious, unneccesary, and extravigant, and then buy video cards that have cooling such as this one, cpu coolers that are enormious, and put half a dozen case fans in their case to try to keep the temperature down.
I do security
Please, The market that this card is aimed at could care less that they lose a slot. Reason 1 being that the AGP adjacent slot normally shares and IRQ with the video card. Reason 2 is the target market is also obsessed about cooling, having a card in that slot reduces circulation. Look at the Abit GF4 Ti 4200 with the OTES, that's a production card. And the last reason being that the trend towards onboard peripherals has increased. Onboard audio has gotten better and LAN/USB 2.0/1394/RAID is onboard now on many high-end boards. Oh, and the people who buy those high-end boards will be the ones buying the GF FX. Hell, with all of that onboard and there being 5 or 6 pci slots, you really think that burning one slot is gonna keep someone from buying the GF FX? I don't have a PCI card in the AGP-adjacent slot, don't use the onboard sound and have a PCI nic. I still have 2 PCI slots left.
What I wonder is why just not put all the transistors, the chip and the ram...on the other side of the circuitboard! No-one looses a pci slot that way.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
C. It exhaust the heat onto those other cards.
I would rather it blows the hot air to the other PCI cards than to the CPU. Most modern CPUs are already hot enough by itself. So putting the GPU on the other side will essentially blow the hot air towards the CPU, which would make it hotter still.
I remember reading that John C is going to cap the FPS on Doom3 to like 30 or 40 FPS per seconds. I'm hoping so, I bet he is tired of people grading video cards by how many FPS they can get Quake 3 running.
The best thing about the FX isn't the overall FPS per second. It is the pixel shaders and such. The number of instructions it can excute per shader, and the rate at which it processes these is the real evolution of this card. The more complex the shader and the faster they run the more life like graphics will look.
We have been stuck in the same basic quake engine for a while now. Unreal II and Doom 3 ( doom3 more ) will be the first real change in graphics we've had. Now the GPU's can handle movie style rendering, without a ton of little tricks.
We really do need the horse power. The FX could probably render toy story in real time, that is pretty amazing. I can't wait till I can watch a movie and pause it and change the angle. The ability to have true 3-d movie projection is becoming more realistic with this type of hardware ( of course we need the 3d projector )
$400 dollars for this is nothing. You don't seem to realize that just 10 years ago a 486 DX system could cost over $4000 grand. With 16 megs of ram and 1/2 gig of harddrive. The price is rather low considering what it takes to create such wonders, stop bitchin.
Open source will help out in this arena as well. You got to think that the pros that did the work on Golem for LOTR are fans of open source, it won't be long until those kinds of shaders and techniques will be available for game programmers.
To me saying "why do we need all this power" is kind of sacreligous. Remember that increasing speed and creating a market for new hardware is what keeps most of us employeed. Never say more speed is a bad thing. And don't blame sluggish performance on the developers, as software becomes more complex you have to give up some performance for stability and expandability.
Problem.
Volume.
ATi doesn't ship lots of chips to be sold to OEMs on the cheap. nVidia does, and will still do. This was 3dfx's problem, and this will be what keeps nVidia alive. Whether or not it'll keep them competative or have them go the way of the Trident or not is another story.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Ever since AGP rolled out, most system builders have written off the first PCI slot.
The first reason is that the first PCI slot tends to conflict with the AGP slot in terms of resource managment. This may no longer be a problem, but old habits die hard.
The second reason is the damn heat-sink and fan is on the bottom of the card. I'll never figure this one out, but why did the hardware enginers do this? The heat from the heatsink rises back into the card and makes the ambient temp even hotter. Most people leave PCI 1 open to help dissapate this heat.
A third reason is that most people are not going to fill their slots anyway. Good mobos today have good sound, 10/100 NIC, and USB2 onboard. Add a good video card, and the rest of your slots are pretty much empty. Even if you add another card, just follow the urinal code. Never place 2 cards too close for comfort.
In short, the 2 card rule has been the de-facto standard for years now, why shouldn't nvidia embrace it for their own purpose?
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.