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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
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!
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Is it considered "safe" to buy any of the Nvidia chipset motherboards, or are they still pretty sketchy?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
To hell with the die size, check out the power requirements. There's two, TWO! power connectors for that thing. Damn, they've created a monster. I wonder how fast it can run GPGPU apps...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra: $600
800 Watt Powersupply: $250
MMORPG: $10/mo.
The look on your face when you get your next powerbill: Priceless
There are some things in life your measley paycheck can cover, for everything else there's Massivecharge.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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!
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[...] but they weren't the champ for being slow on your feet.
What are they doing with my feet? Give 'em back!
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
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.
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".