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GeForce FX Reviews Roll In
Defender2000 writes "GeForce FX NDA lifted today, reviews are up at ExtremeTech, Tom's Hardware, and HardOCP. So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price. Perhaps NVIDIA has something up its sleeve for the long term?" There's also a review at Anandtech, about which reader StrongBad writes "Unlike the rest of the reviews, however, wonderboy
gets down and dirty with the FX's antialiasing and anisotropic filtering methods
using some nifty on mouseover java commands."
It's only 1 AGP card. The Ultra version simply requires a PCI slot for the massive cooler the card needs.
it's 2 slots wide because of the massive cooling system it needs, Nvidia have said they'll be releasing a normal card with a lower clockspeed later.
It does however mean you lose a PCI slot, which is just stupid.
Ahem. I think you mean GeforceFX, not GeForce MX. My MX doesn't even have a fan :)
Mostly 2d performance has been "Ok" scince the ATI Rage Pro. Windows doesn't really use 2d accelleration, and that's a big problem for wide acceptance. 2d performance is actually moving more in the 3d direction, at least for Enlightenment, wit h their newest engine that is still unreleased. It does seem like a really cool idea though. Enough ranting.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
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The drivers are still at the same development point as the card. More worrying is the poor memory interface which the Extreme Tech article pokes the big-stick-o-blame towards.
I'm willing to give nVidia the chance to improve their drivers and work out the bugs before I make a final decision.
The huge PCI gobbling cooling solution just doesn't do it for me though. I mean, sure. If you're using it mainly for games and you don't want to be bothered by the noise doubling+ when you use any 3D functions then you can just turn up the volume and deal with it but can you imaging doing any serious graphical rendering?
If you can't think of something nice to say then don't say anything at all. No, REALLY.
>>> The Bottom Line: The GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is a very hot and noisy beast that may give you a bit of an edge over the current king of the hill, the ATI 9700 Pro in some applications. If you are an NVIDIA fanboy, this of course has your name all over it. At the current US$400.00 price point, the GFFX simply does not seem worth it to us. If NVIDIA can work some driver magic and pull an extra 20% increase in frame rate out of the bag like we have seen in the past; they had best start pulling. Either that or pull out the NV35 chipset, and quick.
This year will be interesting as both ATI and NVIDIA know it is all about having the best VidCard on the market when DOOM]|[ hits. <<<
Windows doesn't really use 2d accelleration
Huh?
Since when?
Video cards have had 2D acceleration for the past 10 years, and it makes a huge difference. Letting the card do simple operations like BitBlt, line draws, etc. instead of the CPU doing all the work and then pushing it off to the DAC offloads a ton of work. You clearly do not remember when text scrolling in a window was orders of magnitude slower than scrolling it full screen. I do. I also remember the first card that reversed this for me - a Number9 Imagine128 that I won at Comdex. This was back when 3D acceleration meant an Onyx with RealityEngine for $500k+.
2D performance is rarely an issue nowadays. If it is, then you're either doing something unusual in 2D or you're using amazingly crappy drivers.
Thing is, the industry convinces you that you need a 3.06 HT enabled P4, 2 gigs of DDR 400 and a Radeon9700 or GeForceFX to get buy. And people believe it.
I put together a couple little rigs for my kids for christmas, based around the Shuttle FV-25 flex atx board. They have 1 gig Celerons (Tualitan series with 256k cache), and 256 megs of PC133 each. The video is an onboard Savage Twister chipset.
I'd planned on just letting them do stuff like watch DVDs, play some of the cheesy flash-based edutainment games and whatnot. But I was surprised just how well modern games run on the things.
They even run Unreal Tournament 2k3 with no problems. Granted, it doesnt run at 1600x1200 with 8xFSAA and wizzlebling texture humping, but it runs and its playable.
I think it just annoys me that they've bred a generation of people calling themselves 'computer experts', and thinking that just means owning the very latest products.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I've had 3 ati cards in my life, and 3 of them had drivers and software as stable as a tau lepton.
:)
I currently have an All in wonder 8500dv. The player crashes while I'm *watching tv*. It also crashes while I'm *watching a dvd*.
I also try to use it as a tivo-like, but for that I have to reinstall the "windows media format" codecs very often (of course you have to reboot when you do that)... they just disappear and I can't record tv.
_VERY_ annoying
BoD
GF FX:8XSAA, 8XAF; 27fps
R9700pro:6XAA, 16AF; 62fps
I think those were at 1024x768(unless they reduced the image size), and don't anyone dare arguing that the fx was using 8x AA, because the 9700pro LOOKS better, not to mention 2x+ fps, just look at the "wire" thing near the upper left of the screen, it is significantly better looking on the 9700.
All the GeForce FX does it improve effects using the DirectX 8 dynamic pipeline improvements
Huh?
It's a DX9 compliant part... it can do quite a bit using DX9 that DX8 can't. The same is true for the ATI 9700.
No, there aren't any DX9 games available yet. And there weren't and DX8 games out when the GF3 was released. But if you're buying with an eye toward the future then you'd be smart to buy a DX9 compliant card, whether it's the ATI 9700 or GFFx. That or buy a $100 GF4 Ti4200 now and the 9700/Fx a year or so from now for $150ish.
I'll agree with you on the cooling issues, and it's pretty clear that nVidia blew it on this one. The ATI 9700 is a better card, cheaper, and has been out longer. The drivers don't seem to be an issue right now (although they may be in a year or two... ATI has a pretty crappy track record on extended support). The new revision of the ATI chip should be out in a month or two as well, and they've claimed 20-30% higher performance than the 9700... which really hurts nVidia.
BTW, there are Fx drivers in the nVidia module (see Appendix A of the README - NV30 is listed). They're probably not completely tuned, but neither are the Windows drivers. Based on past history, you can expect significant driver improvements in 3-6 months.
Read the anandtech.com article, and then we speak again.
There is not a single 3d Mark score, there, but a lot of things that you may (or may not) find interesting.
If you go to their website it says NOTE - Display drivers and multimedia applications for Laptops and Notebooks are NOT available for download from ATI CustomerCare.
From the very same website you linked:
"We strongly recommend that you:
- use the driver supplied with your laptop or notebook computer, or,
- obtain a driver update from the manufacturer of your laptop or notebook computer."
Did you even try to do that before coming here to complain?
I'm sticking in ATI's defense. When I got a dell insp 8100, i had 2 display choices. a gf2 or a radeon 7500. In looking at the benchmarks, the Radeon won hands down. As for crappy drivers, I feel the ATI drivers are stable (as well as the rest of the machine). As of this typing, the laptop hasn't seen a cold boot in 13 days and 10 hours. I am able to play warcraft 3 at 1600x1200 res with no problems, and UT2K3 at 1200x1024 with full detial and frame rates in the teens (I prefer high pixel over frame rates).
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
If you go to their website it says NOTE - Display drivers and multimedia applications for Laptops and Notebooks are NOT available for download from ATI CustomerCare.
I have a GeForce2 Go in my laptop also. nVIDIA's website told me the same thing when I first went to look for drivers. It doesn't anymore, but really, big deal. Welcome to the world of laptops. You go to the laptop vendor to get your drivers. Period.
If you happened to once own an nVIDIA-based laptop that worked with the reference drivers, good for you, you're lucky. Turning it into a childish rant about how much ATI sucks is ridiculous. Laptop vendors are free to tweak the configuration of the chipset as much as they want once they put it in their machine. There is no guarantee that they will work at all, much less completely, with anything other than drivers appropriately modified by the same vendor.
I won't argue that ATI's drivers have been garbage in the past. They still are not as good as nVIDIA's, but they are improving. The important thing here is that drivers can be upgraded as they continue to improve, and hardware cannot. And the Radeon 9700 Pro's hardware is beyond even the GeForce FX. Held back by crappy drivers, it still holds its own against the GeForce FX.
As far as what you say about wasting money on high end graphics cards, I couldn't agree more. For what it's worth, that GeForce 2 Go in my laptop runs Neverwinter Nights quite fine. Oh no, I have to turn some of the detail down, and I'm not getting 200 frames per second! Alas. The gameplay is still the same, and the graphics are acceptably snappy and pretty.
I'm content with my GeForce 2 Go (on the same level as a GeForce 2 MX, for those who are wondering) for now, though I will be upgrading in not too long. To a Radeon.
Random and weird software I've written.
> But if you're buying with an eye toward the future then you'd be smart to buy a DX9 compliant card, whether it's the ATI 9700 or GFFx. That or buy a $100 GF4 Ti4200 now and the 9700/Fx a year or so from now for $150ish.
...Performance Price .. Perf / Price ... 15497 .... $225 ... 68.88 .. 13464 .... $216 ... 62.33 .. 12805 .... $187 ... 68.48 .. 12122 .... $112 .. 108.23 .. 10232 .... $206 ... 49.67 ... 8440 ..... $82 .. 102.93
Yes, I' of the same opinion. In case any one is curious, here's the Bang for the Buck ratios. (Yes, I know a straight linear equation is accurate, but it's "good enough.")
Performance from: Tom's Hardware VGA Charts - 3D Mark 2001 SE
Prices from: Price Watch - Video Cards
Video Card Name
Radeon 9700 Pro
GeForce 4 Ti4600
GeForce 4 Ti4400
GeForce 4 Ti4200
GeForce 3 Ti 500
GeForce 3 Ti 200
Cheers
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