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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 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/
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.
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.
It's only 1 AGP card. The Ultra version simply requires a PCI slot for the massive cooler the card needs.
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 ever spit (or put snow) on a hot stove?
Don't do this! I've been fired twice for doing that. Same thing happens when you spit in the chip frier, and even the hamburgers.
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.
>>> 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.
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
I believe the 2D acceleration is a moot point (already been conquered), but 2D image quality is another. Many NVidia OEM companies who build their own boards (geforce4 and earlier) are in total control with regards to the component selection. It's been proven that IQ suffers when companies purchase cheap surface mount filtering parts to cut costs and make their card look better than another's. Those cheap parts work just fine when the DAC is drawing a 1024x768 screen in a 3D game, but fail miserably when drawing desktops at 1600x1200 (and up!) due to the increased bandwidth.
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.
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.
/. 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...
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.
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.
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.