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Positive Reviews For Nvidia' GeForce 6800 Ultra
Sander Sassen writes "Following months of heated discussion and rumors about the performance of Nvidia' new NV4x architecture, today their new graphics cards based on this architecture got an official introduction. Hardware Analysis posted their first looks at the new GeForce 6800 Ultra and takes it for a spin with all of the latest DirectX 9.0 game titles. The results speak for themselves, the GeForce 6800 Ultra is the new king of the hill, beating ATI's fastest by over 100% in almost every benchmark." Reader egarland adds "Revews are up on Firing Squad, Toms Hardware, Anandtech and Hot Hardware." Update: 04/14 16:54 GMT by T : Neophytus writes "HardOCP have their real life gameplay review available."
In a word, "Wow."
I mean, who'd have thunk it that the 6800 would still have life? Maybe ATI can counter with a Radeon All-In-Wonder Xtravaganza 6502!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Did anyone else notice the size of the die rivals even that of the Pentium 4 EE? This thing is frickin' huge!
They are comparing the latest nVidia GPU to the 9800XT, which is several months old. When ATI's next-gen chip comes out (two weeks?), only then will we be able to see who holds the GPU Speed crown.
It seems they forgot to take the card out of its case. Wait no thats just the huge fan/heatsink combo
I have a mini-pc you insensitive clod!
Okay so it's fast.. no question.. Amazing feature set as well..
but it requires a 480 watt power supply
and 2 power connections... And it also has what looks to be a vacuum cleaner tied to it..
I currently use a shuttle skn41g2 for my main box.. I love the sff pc's. This won't work in that.. It would make the includied power supply very sad.
My HTPC box uses an antec sonata with a fanless radeon 9000, and ultra quiet everything else.. Forget using this in a quiet pc as well
I don't care for nvidia's trend towards hideously loud, bulky, power hungry video cards.. They might perform well, but for normal use, i'd prefer something smaller and quieter.. and for god's sake, give me an external power supply.. heh
I am really quite impressed with the performance of the 6800. Across the board, the 6800 is nearly twice the performance of the current top of the line cards. Going from 4x2 pipes to 16x1 was definitely worth it for nVidia, as their shading performance is simply astounding! Halo actually runs incredibly well on the 6800, getting 2x-3x current performance.
:-)
Now, as DooM 3 is supposedly being released with the 6800, can we expect DooM in mid-may? This is truly an incredible day for PC gaming as we will have cinematic computing in the near future.
I'm giddy.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Ok this card has great specs etc etc etc. Did you look at the thing it's taking up at least 1 PCI slot for the fan and another for it's intake to the fan. This thing should have just come with water cooling out the back. Granted it's specs look great I do have to ask will it drive that IBM T221 LCD display that hits 204DPI at 22" thats about the only thing I can think of that realy would do the card justice.
No sir I dont like it.
0wn3d!
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Man .. There has been many generations of video cards now .. but the prices doesnt seem to come down that much ..
I must admit, after looking at the benchmarks from Tom's and Anand's earlier this morning, I am *very* impressed by the results of this chipset. I still have concerns about the cooling and power requirements, as well as the image quality, but that may be partly related to my newfound ATI fanboy-dom.
Speaking of which, I can't wait to see what the boys from Canada have coming next week. 16 pipelines? Mmmm....
People who can afford to buy these kind of things should give money to charity.
No seriously, this thing costs more than a new full fledged computer.
"
This thing requires a 480 watt power supply, minimum. That's too much. I am currently responsible for a large number of servers that don't have larger than 400 watt power supplies each.
It's not hard to see why the U.S. has to violently defend our oil interests when we have video cards wastefully burning through electricity like there's no tomorrow.
I'm all for advances in processor technology, just not when it comes with a high energy consumption price.
I once heard that by leaving a computer with a measely 150 watt power supply (minute by today's standards) on 24 hours a day like most people do, it consumes more energy than the common refrigerator.
From the article:
/., but how does this become "beating ATI's fastest by over 100% in almost every benchmark"??
To measure how well both cards perform with actual gameplay we used Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 and Halo and Far Cry. For both versions of Unreal Tournament we've used the built-in benchmark, which consists of a flyby and a botmatch. We've omitted the flyby scores as they doesn't tell us much about performance during actual gameplay, just how fast the graphics card is able to render the flyby. With UT2003 the lead the GeForce 6800 Ultra takes over the Radeon 9800 XT is less impressive, at a 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions it is only 6% faster. At 1600x1200 however the GeForce 6800 Ultra pulls away and clocks in 21% faster. With UT2004 the difference is much bigger, starting off at 10% at 1024x768 up to 65% faster at 1600x1200. What is also noteworthy is the fact that the performance of the Radeon 9800 XT drops at higher resolutions whereas that of the GeForce 6800 Ultra stays at about the same level.
I know this is
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
But where do I put this thing? That's not a heatsink, that's the kitchen sink!
ATI's next-gen offering is to be launched about the same time as nVidia's GeForce 6800, and we haven't seen reviews from it yet.
I'd wait until the Radeon X800 benchmarks are out before crowning a new king. For all we know ATI's new offering will beat the new GeForce.
I heard from a confidental source that the next NVidia card was going to be called the Super GEForce 95050++ Hyper-titanium Happy Extreme-platinum Ultra MK-II Enhanced V2.2 Omicron version. Keep your eyes open.
nVidia mine as well get into the case and CPU fan/heatsink business! Look at that thing!
Hell, with something that big they should just build freezer around the card.
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
all of the latest DirectX 9.0 game titles
;)
what, both of them?
Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'm here all week. Available for weddings, bahmitzvahs and light-hearted funerals.
i don't do sigs. oops.
... but what am I going to have to PAY for this beautiful monster?
It's big (2 slots), it probably runs VERY VERY hot, takes two power connectors... but it seems to trump EVERYTHING else so far, and not by small amounts!
I think the submitter must be something of an Nvidia fan. :) Most people wouldn't ridiculously compare a new next-gen card to today's months-old cards, not even mentioning that ATI has a new one due out in weeks. But he sure did mention an over 100% speed increase over those old cards, didn't he?
Personally I don't get the fanboy rivalries--I have a Radeon in my laptop and a Geforce in my desktop, and that's just what I happened to buy at the time, no fanboy adherism going on.
here.
those benchmarks don't look too impressive to me, and the hugeass heatsink/fan combo is still there! not to mention that it requires *two* molexes?
Nvidia is really starting to fall behind...
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
I'm curious as to whether or not this means there will be a new low-end NVIDIA card. Yeah, the 6800 is nice, but I'm more interested in the cards that I can actually afford.
Ahh! When did Tom's do away with the Q3 benchmarks?
It's still the only game that can push the hardware to its limits reliably. All those other games tend to have bottlenecks that are algorithm/code related rather than hardware related (like the scripting engine in UT).
Too bad, I found Quake3 to be one of the most accurate because it ran at such a low level and could pretty push the hardware. It's not like those other games are using the hardware shaders yet anyway (or are they?).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
in other news ID Software announce that DoomIII will
run at 30@fps on the new Nvidia 6800
Strong points of new Nvidia card:
:)
-Obscene performance boosts, on a scale I've never seen before
-fancy new effects
-massively improved image quality
-heatsink fan still pretty quiet
-basically free 4xFSAA and 8x ANISO
Weaker points of new Nvidia card:
-Expensive
-it seems that shader precision is still not as pretty as ATI's, though that may be fixed by game patches
-takes up 2 slots with the tall heatsink
-480W recommended PSU
-video processing engine isn't implemented in software yet
I don't really object to the power requirements. This thing is more complicated, bigger, and has more transistors than a P4 Extreme Edition. It consumes about 110W, of which 2/3 is the GPU die's power draw. It is certainly NOT unreasonable to require a big power supply with this thing. It seems as though ATI's solution will have a power supply recommendation as well. Simply put, if you're gonna improve performance by such a margin by means other than smaller manufacturing, you're going to increase power consumption. Get over it.
This thing isn't meant for SFF PCs or laptops, though I'm sure the architecture will be ported to a laptop chip eventually. As for the 2-slot size, well...It consumes 110W! To put this in perspective, it consumes more than any non-overclocked desktop CPU today! Think of how big your Athlon64/P4EE heatsink/fan is, then you'll realise that 2 slots aren't really that big of a problem.
My own personal reason for wanting this thing: It can play any current game at 1600x1200 with 4XFSAA and 8x anistropic filtering at a good framerate, and is the only card that can claim to do this right now
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
...so it's even sillier that the submitter would say that. But, hey, it's healthy fanboyism I guess.
Here's what the Register says:
ATI will ship its much-anticipated R420 chip later this month as the Radeon X800 Pro. The part's 26 April debut will be followed a month later by the Radeon X800 XT on 31 May.
So claims Anandtech, citing unnamed vendor sources and a glance at ATI's roadmap.
If the date is accurate, it puts ATI just 13 days behind Nvidia's NV40 launch on 13 April. NV40 will surface as the GeForce 6800 and is likely to form the basis for other series 6000 GeForce parts. Note the lack of the 'FX' branding - Nvidia has dropped it, Anandtech claims.
The X800 Pro will ship with 256MB of GDDR 3 graphics RAM across a 256-bit memory bus, but a revised version with 512MB of memory is expected later this year. The report also forecasts the arrival of an X800 SE, which supports 128MB of vanilla DDR SDRAM.
The R420 is an AGP 8x part - the native PCI Express version, the R423, will launch on 14 June, the report claims. It too will be offered as the Radeon X800. Both versions are expected to clock at around 500MHz with 1GHz memory clock frequencies. They feature eight-stage pipelines with six vertex shaders.
Expect to see Radeon X600 and X300 products in due course, we're told, as the RV380 and RV370 parts come on stream. These represent ATI's first 110nm parts.
Meanwhile, ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP is due for an update, apparently, in a few months' time. The revision, codenamed 'RS350', will support Intel's LGA775 CPU interface.
Further down the line, late in Q3, ATI will offer three new Pentium 4 chipsets, currently dubbed the RS400, RC400 and RU400. The first provides PCI Express graphics and non-graphics add-in card buses, along with a dual-channel memory controller. The other two will offer single-channel memory support, while the latter will not support external graphics cards.
AMD isn't being left out, courtesy of RS480 and RX480 chipsets, the first with integrated graphics the second without it. ®
Here's a little more info from Rage3d:
Only weeks before the release, ATI Technologies decided to boost performance of its next-generation code-named R420 processor by increasing the number of pixel pipelines inside the chip. Industry source told X-bit labs that the story is not about redesign, but about enabling "big guns" that were "hidden" inside the chip from the very beginning.
ATI Technologies' chip known as R420 will be called RADEON X800 PRO and is likely to be launched on the 26th of April, 2004. Higher-speed flavour of the R420 - the RADEON X800 XT - is expected to debut on the 31st of May, 2004, if the assumptions posted earlier this week are correct. PCI Express x16 solution powered by the R423 architecture will see the light of the day on the 14th of June. ATI on Tuesday began marketing campaign on its web-site to support the launch of the new graphics architecture.
I wish that people that pretend to be computer experts would do the teeniest bit of research.
How about this gem: First introduced in 1995, Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface (API) was designed to make life easier for developers by providing a standard platform for Windows-based PCs. Before the arrival of DirectX, developers had to program their software titles to take advantage of features found in individual hardware components. With the wealth of devices on the market, this could become a tedious, time-consuming process.
I'm glad he cleared that up for us. Because this little known company called SGI didn't develop OpenGL back in 1992. In fact, were it not for MS, we would still be in the computer graphics dark ages.
I'm not trying to troll here. I am just pissed that people pretend to be experts when they don't have a clues what they are talking about.
ATI is supposed to announce the 420 soon. They've had some time to redesign too. I switched to ATI in the last round of upgrades and was very happy. I'll need a good reason to switch back. So far I have good reason but ATI could take it away with a decent new product.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
There's a very limited number of gamers that will buy this card - you literally have to build a whole new PC around it considering the power requirements and the slot hoggishness. I wont be buying one. My 9500 Pro Oc'ed to 300/300 with a 3000+ AMD *STILL* plays anything without problems ( at least any I can see )
Even if ATi does come out with a card that beats it, I wont be buying one of those either. Gaming is only *part* of what I use computers for. These days at age 40 I cant compete with the twitchy youngsters anyways :D
I care a lot more these days about how well my data is protected and how good the whole experience is, not how many fps I get in some game.
Perhaps when these cards come out, i'll finally be able to afford a 9800XT (or similar Nvidia card - i'm an ATi guy).
Which actually brings me to a good question: Graphics cards have been improving in fast-3d-rendering performance, but are often not that great at crisp 2d rendering (compare an NVidia card to a Matrox and see what I mean).
How well does this one do at 2d rendering? I do play 3d games a lot but that doesn't mean I want my web-browsing and other non-3d activities to be sub-par
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Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
So does nvidia recommend any power supply brands to be used with this card? I would think they would almost have to recommend something as the power usage requirements might scare a lot of people away from buying the card just because they don't think (or know) if the one they have will work.
Maybe this'll force the price of all the other cards in the market down low enough to where I can soup up my computer on the cheap. Those 5900's are looking pretty nice right about now...
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I now fully expect to have to build my next PC around a video card, with the rest of the hardware being peripheral to the VPU and its board/heatsink.
Crazy.
I bet in a few generations more, home PCs will have fans so big, you'll be able to drive them around the house and mow the lawn, too!
"almost" means "many of, but not all."
Congratulations on finding the games section where it didn't womp the best ATI card until you get into the higher resolution ranges.
However, you'll notice on the preceeding pages, "over 100% better" was a very common occurance in areas like shaders and lighting and whatnot.
Pointing out areas where the GeForce doesn't beat the ATI at 100% does exactly nothing to diminish the point of the article submitter.
This is why he said "almost every" and not "all."
Ben
Work Safe Porn
When in doubt, mod +1 funny and pray
I see a lot of posts on the fact that the 6800 Ultra requires a 480W power supply. However, if you read Tech Report's review, you'll notice that the card's actual power consumption isn't much more than the previous generation of cards. In fact, its idle power consumption is actually lower than the 9800 XT.
The top-of-the-line card is always cool to drool over, and a few people with too much money will undoubtedly run out and buy this monster. However the mid-range and budget derivatives are generally much more interesting. (compare the number of GF5600/RA9600 cards sold to the number of GF5950/RA9800 sold)
They made this haul ass by doubling the number of pipes, but the first thing they are going to do when they put out a mid-range card is to halve, or quarter the number of pipes. How much has been done to refine this card, and how much impact will the new design have for those of us with $150 to spend on a video card?
I was one of the lucky 250 people that got to be at the GeForce 6800 release in San Francisco. They held a LAN party of 250 people, including some tournaments of UT2k4 and BF:Vietnam. I made the Quarterfinals (top 8) of the UT2k4 and got to actually play on the new video card. All I can say is - wow. I own a 9800 XT so I'm not too shabby, but I took this card to the next level - the ability this card has is just unthinkable in a lot of ways if you're a graphic programmer like me.
-Shader 3.0 Compatible (Farcry had a demo at the show of a patch they have coming out that will upgrade the game to Shader 3.0. It's by far the biggest improve in a game I've ever seen as I actually got to play it).
-14983 3DMARK SCORE! If you know anything about 3dmark, you'd scream in joy at that one.
-Other game companies were there like Everquest2, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth and of course, the new nvidia chick Nula with per-pixel lighted hair that has 2 million vectors rendered in real time...
All I have to say is wow.
(But wait for PCI express before you buy one)
That's my question. I doubt the answer will ever be positive, so I am not interested.
There you are, staring at me again.
Using the gpu as a second processor would definatly be awsome, but your comment about 100fps being a waste is silly.
Computer generated frames per second is a completely different thing than film frames per second. Most of your dvds are 23.9 frames per second and you can view even the biggest action scenes with no issues.
Try playing even quake2 multiplayer at 30fps and you will get a headache. It might be okay single player because there is much less action going on. But once you have 50-100 entities flying around think players blasting each other with various weapons that have visible paths, each visible bullet is an entity that needs its projectile path calculated and rendered, thats alot of work if have a card that can only draw at 30fps.
A video card only capabable of drawing at 30fps is limited to CALCULATING and rendering 30 frames every second with a given complexity. If you add more entities and exceed that complexity, you can't calculate 30fps anymore and movements won't be calculated and displayed quickly enough to gaurentee smooth gameplay.
The more fps you can calculate and render in a second the more complex of a scene you can render in real time. In unreal tournament 2003, if you have a card that can do 40fps when your in a game by yourself standing still and then you hop on a 30 player server, you will not have smooth gameplay, because 40fps just isn't good enough, because your framerate will drop considerably when the complexity increases.
Also, 30fps != 30hz, 60fps != 60hz, and lastly, 100fps != 100hz. The monitor refresh rate has absolutly nothing to do with the performance of your video card. It may affect how you see the results of your video card though.
I also concur with your guess as to what the target market is, the main target market is gamers who spend their life playing first person shooters who want the best and fastest gameplay. Other markets obviously include 3d modelers like you mentioned and many others.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
Hardcore gamers don't want to decrease detail to gain speed, they want a faster video card that can display the detail they want at the framerate they want.
The reason games look better at an average fps of 100 is that they can actually fully calculate and display the scene as it was ment to look and can handle the complexities of the scene while keeping the framerate at an average of 100fps instead of periodicly dropping below 30 and making the game run like shit.
Games are getting more and more complex. In order to combat increasing complexity you need a video card that can handle the complexity.
I would advise you to stop trolling about not needing new games, not needing 100fps, and not needing new video cards before you get schooled by someone who is way more advanced than I am in graphics.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
Neat, but at this point I think I'm going to wait for PCI-E to become common on motherboards before I upgrade. Bandwidth is starting to be an issue with just regular PCI, I'd prefer to get something that isn't going to be just a throw away item in a few short months.
So long as you have a quality graphics card, it really doesn't matter who's chipset is powering it. For example, even though NVidia has a poor rep, there are still high quality cards out there.
I was more concerned about whether Quake 2 would run at more than 1000 fps... anything less and the lag really pisses me off!
A $600 card that requires a 480 watt power supply? Can you say "overkill"?
Something in that will have to be redesigned before people will consider buying it.
While some hardcore gamers wouldn't mind throwing that kinda cash at a vid card right now, most people won't. Of course, these cards are intended for general consumers once they get about a year old or in the $100-$299 price range, but the 480 watt power supply is like $20 extra per month on your electric bill if you're using it a lot!
That'll be quite a shocker when people figure out that their brand new video card is spiking their elec. bill.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Ahh well this is nice to see - a new generation of graphics card that will now allow me to play practically any of my games at up to 1600x1200 without gameplay-affecting slowdown. So far, so good.
;)
I am genuinely happy that Nvidia have released a product that can perform 'significantly' better than their currently available flagship card. As ATi are going to retaliate with their own card, this can only be a good thing and I hope they do actually keep this large performance jump up for the next generation(s).
One thing to note in some benchmarks which I've seen so far, are that some of the results give the maximum framerate of a game. I'd be more happy reading either an average or Minimum framerate achievable, as in a frenetic multiplayer game you are going to be usually rendering a lot more stuff than in a single player. The minimum framerate is what I'll be watching out for as that is where the most frustration will come from - nothing quite so annoying as experiencing slowdown when something critical happens, or if you are in the middle of a hellishly large battle (which happens quite a bit in UT2004 Onslaught, for example).
Unfortunately I won't be able to use this card in my Shuttle. The card is too big and too power-hungry. As someone else says, noise isn't exactly a problem as you would generally get this card to play fancy loud games on anyway.
And recommending a 480w power supply? Hmm. Oh well, wish I was a hardware site journalist under NDA, I'd have had time to buy some shares in Enermax
Having 100fps at maximum complexity will give you some piece of mind that when someone comes running at you with a chainsaw your graphics card won't suddenly drop to 10fps. Its more likely to drop to 50-70fps instead.
Yes you do need pretty graphics to kill people. If you are shooting at a guy that is across a field and your in 640x480 with ultra minimum detail, all you will see is a block if your lucky, a little speck that looks like a rock if you are unlucky.
Proceed to bump the resolution up to 1280x1024 with max details and all of a suddon you will notice you can make out a figure across the field, you can probably even see where his head (or other vulnerable spot) is. You can take aim much easier than if you were saving fps and going to the rock bottom low of detail.
You are right about not being able to actually see more than 60fps on a 60hz monitor but you are still wrong in saying there is no reason to render the extra frames.
In your previous post it seemed you were claiming that 60hz is the exact same as 60fps generated by the video card. It isn't. Even though your eye isn't seeing those extra frames not being displayed, the likliness of a missed frame is very low if your videocard framerate is higher than your monitor refresh rate.
For example if your video card is putting out 60fps and your monitor is running at 60hz, there is a high liklihood that somewhere along the line your video card will drop below 60fps, and you will be displaying the same frame in more than one monitor refresh cycle, now THAT is wasteful.
Generating too many frames per second will make for smoother gameplay, generating not enough, well, you should know what happens.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
What you claim he said:
"All he said was that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows."
What he said:
"Before the arrival of DirectX, developers had to program their software titles to take advantage of features found in individual hardware components."
He didn't just say that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows, he said that before Microsoft provided their platform, developers had to write directly to the graphics drivers. This is untrue: although some programmers did write directly to hardware-specific interfaces like 3dfx's glide, they didn't have to. The availability of OpenGL for Windows predates DirectX, and the availability of OpenGL in general (remember, he said "developers", not "Windows developers") predates DirectX by years.
For a quick reference, check out this Byte article, which discusses both the already existing OpenGL, "available on Unix, Windows NT and 95, and the Mac", and the soon-to-be-released Direct3D, "scheduled to ship in the second quarter".
1. The power consumptions of the last generation nvidia and ati cards are indeed very similar. Please don't say ATI's cards consume less power
:(
Comparison 1
Comparison 2
2. The ATI Radeon X800s will require two power rails also. So stop dreaming about a "power efficient" part and buy a new PSU
ATI needs extra power too
That said, I'm no fanboy of nVidia or ATI though. The new GF 6800U is still occupying one extra PCI slot and blowing a whole lot of hot air inside the case. Imagine someone put another 100W+ Prescott next to it. I just feel uncomfortable for a GFX card to dissipate so much of heat right next to the CPU. But well... ATI is gonna do that too (except for the two-slot thing)
If there's any reason I'd look forward towards the X800s, I hope they won't require two slots - that is just inelegant. But based on the two molex connectors on the X800s, and the power consumption of their older parts, I won't hold any hope that ATI would "save power".
At least one of them. I've read/skimmed most, and several of them mention how (a) it's actually significantly *cooler* than the 5950 Ultra (the previous high end card); (b) it's not very loud (not silent, but not disturbing either); (c) it only draws 10-30W more than aforementioned 5950 Ultra (this figure varied from review to review).
Though you are right, using it in an SFF wouldn't be a great idea. Can't have everything.
(And several of the sites mention how it worked flawlessly with a 400W PSU, and the 480W is just there to be certain it'll work, as several PSU makers have a tendency to overrate them.)
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
They don't have an official driver for that combination yet, but you can get an unofficial one that will build on AMD64 with a 2.6 kernel here. I'm currently using it for a Tyan s2885 and it works quite nicely. The performance isn't what I'd expect, but hopefully that will be fixed with the upcoming Detonator/Forceware 6xxx.