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NVIDIA Gives Details On New GeForce 6
An anonymous reader writes "According to Firingsquad, NVIDIA will be announcing a new GeForce 6 card for the mainstream market at Quakecon this week. Like GeForce 6800, this new card will support shader model 3.0 and SLI (on PCI Express cards), so you can connect two $199 cards together for double the performance. NVIDIA will also be producing AGP versions of this card as well."
If there are as many people out there with fresh copies of Doom 3 in their hands or winging their way to them as I suspect, then this will be slashdotted veerrryy soon.
i cker=NVDA&script=2100 ), NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang confirmed reports that NVIDIA would be launching a new shader model 3.0 mainstream card shortly: "In a few days we're going to turn up the heat another notch. At Quakecon in Texas, a mecca for gamers and truly a phenomenon to witness, we will officially unveil our newest mainstream member of the GeForce 6 family".
So here's the content:
In last week's conference call ( http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?t
Jen Hsun went on to say:
This mainstream GeForce 6 will be the only shader model 3.0 GPU in its class and deliver performance well beyond that of the competition. PCI Express support is native and AGP support will be provided through HSI, once again showing the versatility of the HSI strategy...sampling started in June, production is in full steam on TSMC's 110 nanometer process, with shipments to OEMs soon.
Price points and product names weren't discussed, but Jen Hsun also confirmed SLI support for this upcoming card, and also mentioned by the end of the year NVIDIA will have a top-to-bottom family of shader model 3.0 cards. In fact, he mentions "we're ramping 110 on two GeForce 6 families right now at TSMC, and very shortly we'll start a third...and this quarter we'll have five GeForce 6 GPUs in production, and that ought to cover us from top to bottom."
Is there a point where graphics cards get so advanced that humans can't even tell the difference anymore? Or is that virtual reality?
Only $200?
This should be interesting to see and good for competition to say the least.
This is nice and all, but it's kind of ridiculous to only be able to link two video cards together. What of one of them dies? Then you're back to single speed performance until you can get a replacement. I would much rather get a RAIVC-5 array of, say, five to ten video cards. Then if any one dies, no big deal; the others can handle the load. And does anyone know if these new NVidia cards will be hot-swappable?
I might need to dust off my textbook from "Parallel and Distributed Computing", but I'm pretty sure that getting double the performance from two cards is about as likely as getting double the performance from two processors. It's just not likely unless the graphics routines can split up jobs perfectly and not suffer from any overhead for communication. I imagine there will be a noticeable performance increase from 2 cards working in parallel since graphics algorithms do have a tendency to be very parallelizable, but claiming double performance in naive at best and dishonest at worst.
...when you see the phrase "connect two $199 cards together" and say to yourself "Hey, that's a good value!".
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
I'm all for advancing technology, but when it comes to video cards, it's all a matter of who can keep up with Microsoft's DirectX demands the best.
Meanwhile, OpenGL, the industry standard graphics library, is getting left behind because every video chip maker wants to show off how well it supports GlibFlobber() DirectX 27 API.
Won't someone please think of the industry standard instead of the proprietary (and very small market) "standards" of Windows?
PCIe is a switched network on your motherboard. If you're technically inclined, read this article for further details.
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so you can connect two $199 cards together for double the performance.
Much like you can duct-tape two cars together for double the performance (but certainly not double the speed).
the SLI implementation allows sharing of texture memory. thats why there is a bridge chip connecting the two cards. it effectively makes 2 cards 1 super card.
DirectX is Microsofts' standart to abstract software from the hardware (not only graphics, it also covers audio, controllers, networking, and so) as much as possible. Direct3D is DirectXs` 3D rendering part.
The thing with DX is that it's aimed mostly to games, and, while full-featured, it's incompatible with everything else. OpenGL, much like D3D, is dedicated exclusively to graphics but can be ported much more easily, and it's (IMHO) overall a cleaner implementation. Both can coexist in a single machine (if you have a modern videocard, that's most likely the case), but are independent, requiering separate drivers and so.
Since when is directx the industry standard? I had the belief that openGL is, whereas directx is the microsoft standart.
They might concentrate on getting their CURRENT high end card (6800 Ultra) on the retail shelves instead of "pre-announcing" crap in the pipeline.
I was hosting a LAN party at my place about a year or so ago. One of my coworkers showed up with his computer and another 512MB DIMM that he planned on installing before we got started.
We balked. There's an unspoken rule that no hardware changes during the LAN unless necessary. Murphy's law simply looms too large. He ignored it.
The case was a smaller mid-tower that he uses for LANs, and with a couple of hard drives and the associated cabling it gets pretty tight. As he's sliding the RAM into place, we hear a "plink." Shit. The RAM's in place, so he steps back to survey the situation. There's a capacitor sitting on the floor of the case. "Um, maybe it's one of those capacitors that's, you know, for show..." The computer throws a video error at post.
We pull the card. Murphy's law has struck; it's a GeForce 5800 Ultra (the old dustbuster model), and a cap has sheared right off the card. I don't have a soldering iron in my apartment, so the coworker is prepaing for an evening of staring over shoulders. That's when we break out the electrical tape. We give the card a good hard wrap with the tape to hold the cap in place, and...
It works spedtacularly. No crashs, no video glitches, no problem. In fact, it works for another month while he waits for the 5900 Ultra to release before exchanging the card. It led us to praise NVidia for the Unified ELectrical TApe architecture (ELTA), which we theorized could provided bootleg performance maintenance across the entire NVidia line, from the TNT2 up.
NVDA has just reported a HORRIBLE quarter. Many are wonder what the F is going on with that company. This is a PR release. They need to say these things. They need to say they have native PCIe despite not a SINGLE OEM design win. They need to say 6800 volume will ramp up and product will be driven down to the low end. Will this actually happen? I have no idea, but this is the least I would expect NVDA to say on this horrible week for NVDA longs. ATI has really put the hurt on. This next 12 months should be pivotal for NVDA's future.
"In a few days we're going to turn up the heat another notch."
;)
Translation: my computer's electricity bill and my winter heating bill just became synonymous.