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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."
The geforcemx noise levels are ridiculous. I can't believe how voodoo5/3dfx-goes-out-of-business the card seems. Brute force instead of finesse, they went more overboard than I can believe, and the results aren't very impressive.
Whale
....the review that I saw over at Tom's hardware had this thing as some sort of 2-card incarnation. Call me old fashioned but didn't this 2 card crap always fail? I mean...that is like sooooo 3Dfx.
The Nvidia FX is amazing, but it will be interesting to see what ATI can do with the next gen Radeon if they too can get down to .13 microns...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
1) It's cheaper than the new Geforce FX.
2) Performance on average is almost as good.
3) It doesn't sound like a jumbo jet.
4) It doesn't gobble up a PCI slot
I'm amazed nVidia have "released" this card now (well, a vapour release... you can't actually buy them yet). The performance is barely faster than the ATi card... when ATi released their 9700 it would WAY faster than nVidia's fastest (Ti4600).
It's also interesting to note that ATi's drivers seem to behave better than nVidia's... now that's something I didn't think I'd hear myself saying 12 months ago.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Anyone who is buying this is just wasting their hard-earned money and time. Especially since it costs near $400.
All the GeForce FX does it improve effects using the DirectX 8 dynamic pipeline improvements, and it's been 2 years and 3 generations of cards since DirectX 8 came out, and there have been only 2 cards using the dynamic pipeline.
Also, the GeForce FX is a monstrosity. In order to keep it cool, there is a huge fan mounted on it, which causes it to take up an AGP slot and PCI slot, and the card still isn't cooled adequately.
In short, if you're buying this, you're either rich and/or stupid. It doesn't even support Linex fully yet.
I've been telling people for a long time to avoid nvidia cards because they get too warm inside a case. Now they've released a card with heat sinks on one side and some kind of toad-shaped fan thing on the other.
Anyone ever spit (or put snow) on a hot stove?
I'll bet the same thing would happen if you spit on those heatsinks while this card is running.
Ridiculous.
I'm not going to sit here and say that this card has more power than it needs. Someday, in about three years, there probably WILL be computer games that need that much power.
But in the meantime, how much extra environmental work will the hobbyists and system builders using this SOB need to do to keep their PCs stable, cool and quiet? Seems to me that if nvidia invested all the extra time in designing a cooling solution such as the one that's been shown so far, maybe they could've done some extra engineering work to make sure they didn't NEED a cooling solution along those lines.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
So many new cards seem to accentuate their 3D performance, is there anything done to really make for excellent 2D performance, or is that langiushing?. I know there is a much bigger market for 3D and its the sexy exciting thing, but is there more than can be done for the 2D work too?
But how about getting us a card that normal people can afford? I can't even afford a G4 right now - damn military...
/shrug
/suits up in flameproof suit
I realize that these things cost money, but let's get realistic... You have to keep the prices low, otherwise people won't buy the product...
And I think that the 2 slot thing is jsut wrong...
Why not simply put all the hardware on the OTHER side of the card. (I'm sure there's a reason for this) Then you don't need that goofy looking heatsink/fan combo...I would think that maybe you could reroute the heat that way....
That's my take....
So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price.
Excellent drivers are priceless. I hope ATI will arrive at that point soon. At least two strong players are needed to create a competitive gfx card market.
Every nVidia card I have had suffers exactly this problem. Geforce2 MX200/400, tnt2, Geforce4. With the open source driver they are an absolute dream; with nVidia's driver - crashes of varying degrees. I would imagine that since the linux and windows drivers are now from a unified code base that exactly the same problem occurs under windows but noone notices because windows crashes so much.
How can they allow the open source X driver to be better? I mean seriously - what are nVidia doing? This sort of thing does not instill confidence. Open the source, if you can't because of patent issues then open the parts of the source that you can open. Hire the guys writing the open source driver as they are clearly infinitely better at it than your current lot.
Essentially we are buying graphics cards from a hardware company - the fact that we need drivers is an inconvenience that we all live with because the convenience of being able to mix and match our pc hardware outweighs it. I am not interested in the internals of your drivers - I just want the card to work. Here is an easy business plan for all hardware manufacturers:
Linux is coming, accept this and get ready to jump on the bandwagon.
Now they are putting out cards that apparently don't perform much better than their competition. This is a dangerous position to be in. Just one year ago, this would have been laughable - nVidia produced cards that were cheaper and better than everyone elses. Now... no one is blown away. This is a company that is on a downard slope.
Carpe Daemon
put that refrigeration unit that sits on top of the GeForceFX chip in my 9700 pro and I bet it shall beat out all their numbers.
Sapphiretech is able to build a state-of-the-art ATI Radeon 9700 Pro without any active cooling. Seems nearly unbelievable if you compare these to the new FX cooling monsters.
Check it out for yourself.
Combine these with a good, noise dampened case, Verax coolers and a Barracuda V and you should get a PC that is much more quiet than most of the PCs on the market and faster than these too.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Let's see:
-It's huge (eats a PCI-slot) and noisy
-It costs more than 9700
-It's not available yet
-It has inferior AA and AF
-When using AA and AF it usually loses to 9700
-According to Anandtech, it's minimun FPS is alot lower than 9700's (it even loses to non-pro 9700!)
So how exactly it's "better overall"?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I have a Geforce 2 MX400. It's fine for 2D. It's fine for 3D (Sure I can play UT2003 on it just about, but since it's not as fun as BZFlag, I don't). It also supports 2 monitors. Unfortunately, it only has a single 350MHz RAMDAC, and so I can't run my monitors at more than 1280x1024 if I want more than a 60Hz refresh rate. The Geforce4 MX (I know they're not as good as a GF3, but they're 50% faster than my current card, which is more than adequate) series has dual RAMDACs, so can run each monitor at silly resolutions, and so I'm tempted to upgrade. The problem? Very few manufacturers (none that I've found) actually install the second D-SUB connector on the board. This means that there is no graphics card availible that will actualy support dual display on 2 analogue monitors at the kind of resolutions I want to run (1600x1200@75 would be a nice start). Perhaps manufacturers could focus on broadening their feature set, rather than just putting more and more 3D speed into their cards.
(I know Matrox do some nice dual head cards, but their 3D performance is a joke).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You assume incorrectly, at least as far as stability under Windows. As a matter of fact I'd hazard to say that nVidia's drivers are a HUGE selling point under Windows. At least they are to me and most other people I know who use their home PC for more than word processing. nVidia's cards have been solid 3D performers since the TNT, but I like many others want a graphic card in my PC that just works. What other graphic card (or any other component manufacturer for that matter) has managed to increase performance by 40% with the driver alone?
I will agree the Linux binaries need help. Up until recently I ran a dual boot Mandrake/Win98SE install as my main rig. After upgrading to XP I have yet to reinstall a distro, though I'll get around to it. The nVidia drivers under Mandrake seemed almost as if they had come from a different company, given my favorable experiences under Windows.
Now that ATI not only has a product with comparable performance ~$100 cheaper than nVidia's latest but ALSO has stable drivers things are really starting to get interesting.
Don't write nVidia off yet though - far too many people did the same to ATI a few years ago.
It seems like any jackass can be a hardware review site nowadays. They just check the 3d Mark scores, notice how they're not that much faster than current ATi, and then say the card sucks. What the hell is up with that?
Another thing.. about the cooling system. Look, the cooler is just part of the reference design. Other manufacturers are no doubt going to come up with their own solutions to the cooling problem that aren't perhaps as loud. I have my watercooling system, so I don't have to worry about such things.
As for people complaining about the price, I didn't hear anybody whining when the 9700 pro/etc. came out with a hefty price tag. And I can bet within a month or two of the FX coming out the price will drop $50 or more, easily. And once manufacturers start making their own boards and designs, it will probably drop even more.
There's nVidia fan boys and there's ATi fan boys. I've always tried to be in the middle, but I've constantly been upset by ATi's horrible drivers. I have owned 4 ATi cards in my years of computing, and all 4 are now sitting in the closet as junk (including my all-in-wonder radeon 7500) because of their driver sets. Their new "Catalyst" drivers are a step in the right direction (nVidia got it right the first time) but they still have major issues.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Ask your average ford tempo owner if their car is "fast enough" and they will say "of course! It gets me around"
Now go tell a porsche owner "Hey by the way, a ford tempo is fast enough" and they will look at you like you are a drooling idiot.
Your video card may get you from A to B and maybe for your needs that is sufficient but no, a tempo is not comparable to porsche by ANY stretch of the imagination.
- Toby
Somewhere in Canada there is a lot of high-fiving going on today. Plans for reducing the price of the 9700Pro are being scrapped. Due to recent NVidia incompetence, the ATi profittaking is about to begin... which means we the customers lose.
Based on the 2 reviews, the Db level is much lower than that.
One reviewer said that it was 54 Db in 2D mode and 58 Db in 3D mode (opengl or DirectX) - Extreme Tech
The 2nd reviewer said that the noise was at 56Db in 2D mode and 60 Db in 3D mode. - HardOCP
Either way it's still way lower than 70Db, because every increase of 3 Db mean the sound is twice as loud (logarithmic scale). A GeForce FX is definitely not as loud as a compressor running at 70 Db, because that compressor would be actually 4 times louder than a GeForce FX.
2d performance might be "ok", but it is getting worse with each generation of graphics card, not better.
My company measures data points on a regular 2d grid and displays the results on screen as a colour bitmap. There is a function in the Windows API that will scale a bitmap so that it will fill a specified area. For example, if you want to display a 3x3 bitmap in a 300x300 pixel area on the screen, the driver will expand each input point to a 100x100 area, and then draw it.
Now every time I get an "upgraded" computer and graphics card, this operation gets slower. It has gotten to the point where it is faster to display large bitmaps than smaller ones. It is faster to run code that expands the 3x3 bitmap to 300x300 and provide that to the API call than to let the driver do it. This is a pretty sad state of affairs, especially since my first job for the company in 1985 was to speed up this exact operation (we used a $3000 card that could do 800x600 in 256 colours with no 2d, let alone 3d, acceleration!)
This sorry state of affairs shows the danger of benchmarks. No one measures how fast 2d operations are anymore, so no company puts any development time into features that aren't typically measured. If 2d performance is important to you, you'd better do your own benchmarks, because there seems to be no correlation between 2d and 3d speeds.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Well, given ATi's glaring advantage in Anisotrpoic Filtering and Anti-Aliasing, not to mention general 2d/3d image quality, the Nvidia advantage in floating point precision might close the gap somewhat.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya