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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
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
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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....
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.
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.
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.
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" ----------
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.
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!
huh? the prices _do_ come down.
the prices of _new_ cards are always at the maximum that somebody would pay for them.
if you want a cheap card, buy a cheap card(that same cheap card would have cost hundreds of dollars few years back).
the way i see it there's few categories that have been for years: 1. ultra cheaps at 30-50$ 2. entry level gaming cards at 100$ 3. medium level gaming cards 200-300 and then the 4. high end gaming cards at insane 400-500$. all that changes over the years is which speed cards belong where.
there comes new cheap cards occasionally, but usually they base heavily on yesterdays high end chips.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"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
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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)
It's not like those other games are using the hardware shaders yet anyway (or are they?).
They are -- FarCry is probably the most intensive game out there right now, fully utilizing DX9 specs. Halo is no slouch either, although a lot of its speed issues are from wanting to use hardware that simply isn't present (on PCs -- it is on the Xbox; why they didn't port away from this is beyond me).
Aquanox 2, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, Painkiller, UT2k4, BF: Vietnam, and several others utilize DX9 to varying lengths as well. And there's the upcoming games -- Half Life 2, STALKER, Soldner (with an umlaut on the o), World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and numerous others.
Quake 3 simply isn't a reliable benchmark anymore. It utterly fails to excercise the newer features of the cards -- which are really the only features to bother upgrading for. If all you're going to do is play Q3-era games then a GeForce2 is more than sufficient. If you want to run games already out, and those coming out in the next year, with all the graphical options turned up and at high-res then you'll be best served by either the latest nVidia or (probably) ATI card.
And (most importantly to me, and many others) if you want to get a card that can run new games at reasonable resolutions with most of the graphical bells and whistles on, but at a reasonable price... well, those $400 cards are going to be sub-$200 very quickly now, and the $200 cards are going to drop to around $100.
Perhaps the survey you are referring to was measuring energy consumption of a mini-fridge for a single 12 oz.can of beer (served ice cold), but the common refridgerator, and I mean modern, not the one's from the 70s and 80s, as they improve with time, but the modern fridge draws about 700 - 750W. This is about double that of a computer loaded with hardware doing average browsing or word processing. The ratio is less when UT2004 is activated (W00T).
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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.
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
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".