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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/
He probably means javascript rollovers instead of java effects..
-- signed for your pleasure --
The Graphics card that breaks the 10,000 product number will take up two PCI slots as well as the AGP one, need an IDE channel all to itself, and may or may not require you to sell your first born.
:-P
They probably wont go with the last one though. Who is going to have both children AND a next-gen graphics card?
-Mark
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.
It seems such a short time ago that TNT2 was a chipset to be proud of... [sigh]
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.
"Buy the new Geforce FX - not only will your games run smoother than ever before but you'll ALSO receive a free heater and vacuum cleaner built in!"
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Not only that, but the number of games which actually utilise a Geforce 3's features (let alone a Geforce 4) are few and far between.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
I always wanted to put a vapor-phase cooling system in my computer. I have always decided against this due to the noise the compressor makes. Now we finally have a video card the is louder than a compressor when its 3-d pipeline is running (73db). I am going to have to install it this summer. For now my room is cold, and I may run a heat pipe from the card in front of my feet.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
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....
I got my 9700 in the last week of August, and I simply can't believe that as of Jan 2003, NVidia has no compelling response.
Extremetech even points to the 9700 AS BEING FASTER when the eye candy is ramped at the high resolutions.
I can only imagine the puckered rectums and sleepless nights of Nvidia's engineering crew when the 9700 first came out. They must have really been caught by surprise. I suspect the last months have been spent furiously tuning their drivers to remain competitive. Which they have done - barely.
I've been telling the fence-sitters to stop waiting and jump on ATI. No reason to wait anymore, even for an Nvidia fanboy.
A month ago, I did something I hadn't done in years. I bought a new gaming console system. This is the first console system I've bought since my Colecovision. I have been, for the past twenty years or so, a die hard PC gamer. I turned my nose up at consoles.
For the last month, I've been having a blast. I picked up a few games, and all of them have been fun. I haven't touched a computer game in a month, other than nethack and zangband.
I'm now of the opinion that computer gaming is just a waste. Are there some good computer games? Yes. Do the very best computer games have better graphics than consoles, if you have good hardware? Yes. No console is beating out unreal tournament 2003 at 1600x1200 resolution. The console systems do have very nice graphics, though. More than good enough. And more importantly...
For the first time in 20 years I don't have to worry about whether my hardware is good enough to run the game I just bought.
PC gaming hardware is getting completely insane. $400 for a new 3d card? You can buy *two* console gaming systems for that! And a year from now, there will be a new $400 video card out, with endless articles about how it makes the $400 card you just bought last year look like garbage.
Who needs it? I'm enjoying gaming again more than I have for a long time. I don't have to run an OS I don't like by a company I don't like just to play some game that won't work under winex and doesn't have a Linux port. I don't have to mess around with installing anything. I don't have to sit in a stupid office chair at a desk. Just pop the game in, turn the console on, chill on the couch, and have fun.
I'm set til 2005 or 2006 when the new consoles com e out. Upgrading every 4 or 5 years to a new console, and then not having to sweat it again, is looking really nice.And the computer I currently have will be more than powerful enough to read web pages, send email, and write code on for a long, long time.
Anyone else think this name really sucks? The average Joe is going to think FX sounds a little too much like MX to be the new top-of-the-line model. I read that they got the name because this is the first card to use technology from the purchase of 3DFX. Anyway, regardless of where it came from, it's a bad name. Especially since the GeForce4 MX line is horrible, even worse than a GeForce3...
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
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.
New motherboard: $117
New CPU: $105
Radeon 9700 Pro: $320
Finding out that nVidia's upcoming card will cost more, offers little to no performance increase, and will be loud and hot: Priceless
e to the i pi equals negative one
Instead of buying a bad game, try renting it first.
Get a free ipod.
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.
>>> 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. <<<
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
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
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.
I was planning on upgrading my system when Doom III becomes available to cope with it's hardware spec, and an FX was definitely looking like being the card. The test results are so disappointing tho I might as well opt for an Radeon 9700 Pro and pocket the change. Maybe the NV30 range will be out by then, and maybe they will be better, but honestly it looks like NVidia has clearly lost it's crown. All hail the new leader ATI! (and in next years surprise news Tseng Labs make a comeback and claim the crown of fastest video card).
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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.
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.
The problem I had the ATI and thier drivers was that they would always drop support for a card once they released something new, and for that reason I would take a long, long time before I will look at one of thier products again.
If nvidia was doing as ATI does(or maybe did if they have improved) with the announcement of the FX they would have dropped support for all cards below the GeForce 4.
/. seems to have become the home of a bunch of pansies. "My iMac doesn't have a fan!" "The fan noise is too loud!" "My ears are bleeding!" Bah. You're all sissies. I'm an Inspiron 8200 owner. It burns my lap and punctures my eardrums with fan noise! I have to turn my 400-watt Klipschs all the way up just to hear music! And I *like* it that way! This new GPU fan isn't so bad. I've got a 7000 RPM fan on my Athlon back home, and not only can I hear the jet-turbine noise in another room, I can hear it on another floor! And I *like* it that way! So bring it on NVIDIA! It's not like I can hear the damn thing anyway!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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.
First, as mentioned the last time the FX came up, manufacturers can put any kind of cooling they want on the FX. I've heard there are production models that look just like any other graphics card.
. pd f
And this card is ALL finesse and no brute force. That is why it loses in traditional tests. PROGRAMMABLE PIXEL SHADERS. The Radeon 9700 can only do a tiny fraction per pass that the FX can do per pass. This is what most of their R&D was spent on. Look it up
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/lo/2413/SUPP/Shaders
It will vastly improve the effects possible in consumer graphics.
It's kinda useless to speculate on what their next-gen cards can do. Let's face it, we haven't really even seen what the 9700 and FX can do yet. I am starting to feel like Rodney King while reading all the posts here, though. I just keep thinking to myself "can't we all just get along?!?!"
I never understood why people get so up-in-arms about graphics cards. I mean, I have my preference in cards, but that's based on feature set and power. I think a lot of ATi's technology will be adopted by game makers (because it's just so damned neato... just look at the demos), and a lot of nVidia's technology will too (because nVidia still holds the crown and you always program toward the common standard).
That said... unless I get a huge influx of cash, I'm sticking with my Radeon AIW. Y'know... that first powerful card ATi put out that's compatible with roughly 85% of games.
But that's the risk you take when you buy computer hardware. Sometimes you have to guess based on the specs (I bought it because it outperformed the GeForces on low-end PC test-beds, which was a lot more similar to my comptuer than 1.5+ GHz testbeds where the GeForces shine). If it's not so compatable, meh, deal with it.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
1. ISDN card
;)
:D
2. Sound blaster AUDIGY
3. Wireless D-Link 22mbs card
4. Intel Pro 10/100 card
5. Adaptec 2940 SCSI card
6. BlueTooth card
I use all these cards at some time. OK, I could rationalise the network cards as I only use 1 at a time, but I don't really like opening up my case and swapping cards and stuff when I goto a LAN party (ethernet) or visit my parents (ISDN connection) and go back home (wifi).
Also, I dont use the bluetooth card all the time - it's mainly to connx to my Palm and transfer pictures rarely to my phone for caller pictures
Even rarer I use my SCSI card as I'm now using IDE disks and CDR for backup. But I may need to plug in my external DDS-2 tape drive for an old file.
I like all the cards there when I need em and dont want to be messing about changing them.
So, yeah, I use all 6 slots. Guess I'll be sticking with my 9700 Pro
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.
"So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price."
What?
Anandtech said of the FX, "A card that is several months late, that is able to outperform the Radeon 9700 Pro by 10% at best but in most cases manages to fall behind by a factor much greater than that."
And I like Tom's hardware comparing the card to the Voodoo 6000. True, he was referring to the snazzy looks of the card, but I suspect there was a bit of a dig in there as well. After all, that was one of the last cards 3dfx made before they went under...
1600 AMD XP GeForce 3 Ti200 512 MB DDR RAM XP Home I run Quake III @ 90 fps and UT 2K3 @ 80 fps at 1024x768. I can't imagine needing a faster machine for today's games. Running the Doom III Demo, I got a whopping 5 fps. Now, when that comes out, I may decide to upgrade to a 4200. But, I simply refuse to drop $300+ on a freakin video card. That's simply ridiculous.
Ok everyone do me a favor, after you've read the Tom's review PLEASE read the Anandtech review.
I started to feel sick to my stomach when I realized how sloppy and shallow Tom's review was done. Anand truly is "the wonderboy"; he reveals some highly critical issues and has some sweet rollovers comparing the antialiasing and anistropic filtering of each card. He reveals that at the same visual quality settings, the 9700 Pro tops the FX in almost all the benchmarks. "NVIDIA takes the crown! No question about it..." Oh paaleease Tom, research the product before you post! Kudos to Anandtech.
This statement is false.
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