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Nvidia 6600 Series Examined
DrunkenTerror writes "Yesterday at QuakeCon, Nvidia debuted their new affordable GPU mentioned a few days ago on Slashdot. Dubbed the GeForce 6600 and 6600 GT, they differ from their higher-end brethren by having only 8 pixel pipes (unlike the 12 & 16 of the 6800 line), and appear to be limited to 128MB of RAM. Both GPUs support Shader Model 3.0. The 6600 GT sports fast GDDR3 RAM, while the 6600 appears to use plain-jane DDR. The GT also supports the oft-recently-discussed SLI, which could 'enable millions of users to experience the power of two GPUs in their system.' The best part, however, may be the price/performance. With a suggested street price of US$199, the 6600 GT runs at a steady 42 FPS in Doom 3, at high-quality 1600*1200." Reader aceh0 adds a few links: "Nvidia is announcing their NV4x Sub $200 Level graphics hardware today with the GeForce 6600 Series. The 6600 Series is feature complete with the 6800s and the differences come in the number of pipelines and memory configuration. SLI has trickled down to the 6600GT as well. Coverage is available at Neoseeker, Tech Report and PC Perspective as well as other sites."
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/2004080 6105201.html
"GeForce 6600 GT cards come with a 500 MHz clock and memory rate, 128-bit (GDDR3, 128 MB) and will cost $200-230, GeForce 6600 with 128-bit bus (GDDR, 128 MB) will cost $150. According to preliminary results and unconfirmed tests GeForce 6600 GT performs 20% better than RADEON 9800XT. "
TruePunk | Games
Pfft. That's nothing.
...right? Thats what the guy at the store told me... ;)
My all-powerful Geforce FX 5200 is far better.
Now we just need a motherboard with 2 PCIe 16X slots. Some of Intel's new server-class motherboards have it but they cost around $500.
It is limited to 256MB, but most manufactures will be shipping 128mb versions.
That's when you get all the drools at the hardware pages. SLI plus double the ram should up the highest of the benchmarks.
-I am an elective eunuch.
I.E. I noticed a bigger jump in performance by upgrading my mainboard, cpu, and memory while retaining my relatively mediocre (but fully DirectX 9 compliant) graphics card, whereas my friend who had a similar configuration spent his cash on the latest Nvidia and didn't seem to come out significantly ahead.
If you can afford all of the above, I suppose this is the card for you (hell get two and run them together). But too often gamers focus on the graphics to the overall detriment of their performance.
http://www.finclockers.com/uutiskuvat/GeForce6600. pdf
Just in case anyone wants to check it out.
TruePunk | Games
which will need to have a true GPU in order to run it's rendering engine much like Mac. If NVIDIA doesn't have a low end GPU it wouldn't get as big a part of the market.
First it's the 6600.
Then it'll be the 6660.
Then they'll make some MX cards and it'll be the 666! Save your souls! Don't buy these cards!
US$199, the 6600 GT runs at a steady 42 FPS in Doom 3, at high-quality 1600*1200
In the end, regardless of what memory is being used, and what technologies, if I can play the newest game at its highest level of graphics at 42fps, then I'm a happy gamer, especially when the price is under $200 (USD).
version before the more ubiquitous AGP.
Now if only they would write some firmware for the mac, I could finally have a half decent video card for my g5 that didn't cost me an arm and a leg.
It should be noted that these cards will initially only arrive with PCI Express support. Given the fact that most people have only AGP ports, this is a barrier to adoption. It has been reported that AGP versions will follow.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Seems like I wasted a huge $300 on my ATI Radeon 9800 128mb a while back. I can't even get 30FPS at 640x480 consistently in Doom III. Now I just don't know what to do?
Dump the ATI and get an Nvidia? Doom III is just sitting at home collecting dust, and it performs so shitty. I don't expect anything better for the catalyst 3.9 either.
Great. We've got a dozen different hardware sites reciting press releases, specifications and mfgr's performance promises, all the while speculating about what the hardware may be capable of. Until somebody can actually say "I've been playing with one of these and they're pretty nifty", we might as well just have links point to pressrealease.nvidia.com.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
OK glad I got that off my chest. Now, I run Linux and the only real gaming I do is in NeveWinter Nights. Maybe because I do not do any First Person Shooter / Real time gaming I do not notice a problem, but all my computers run the $49.00 special, Geforce card. I really like Geforce Cards. I love Nvidias support for Linux. I appreciate all you hard core gamers buying the new cards so they keep dropping the price on the other cards. I just can't get enthusiastic over a new video card when the ones I have a perofrming adequately.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Can you point me to a single reviewer who has one of these cards?
I don't get the need for SLI support in the low-end card series. It's not like the old days when these cards were thin PCI-based and had, at most, a heat sink bolted to it...
I say that this looks pretty cool, and yes there are budget gamers, whilst some spend $500 on a video card, others spend ~$600 on a whole system with reasonable results. It looks like a solid card for doom 3 and that is really all that matters for gamers today.
This is going to be a very interesting comparison when the 6600 series comes out. Up until now, one could assume, at least in part, that a lot of the performance gains in the new NVidia 68xx series of hardware comes from the additional pipelines. I'd like very much to see how the 6600 series stack up against their older 8-pipeline brethren and ATI's 8-pipeline cards, such as the Radeon 97xx/98xx models.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
I'm running Linux with the latest nvidia-kernel with a Geforce 4ti. Since this is by nvidia, could I just swap out my cards for the 6600 and keep going on my merry way? Or should I wait for new drivers to come out?
Just wondering...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Faster cards for gamers may be nice, but what I'm really interested in is a better card for my MythTV box. My main concern is having MPEG decoding for HDTV output and minimal heat output (no fans).
I seem to recall nVidia promising better MPEG/HDTV support in there upcoming cards. Will the low-end of this generation be fanless?
2x6600 card: $400
New Pci express motherboard: $150
New case (cause you know your old pc will just be termed a "server"): $100
New faster 1GB ram: $200
New cpu because you're buying the other stuff anyway: $250
Bigger sata 300 GB HD because bittorents are all about sharing: $200
Wife cutting off your broadband connection: priceless
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
That is going to be on the very best other components of the system. In the slow spots on the demo, the CPU will make it go very fast, averaging out with a higher FPS. I really doubt that's a "steady" figure. Look at the minimum FPS figures.
-I am an elective eunuch.
As nifty as the card sounds, the hype of SLI might be just that - as the Tech Report preview points out, there aren't any sub-$500 motherboards currently the sport dual PCI-Express slots. For people looking to incrementally upgrade, they'll have to factor in needed a new motherboard as well. We can only hope an "nForce3.5" chipset with dual PCI-Express slots and a sane price point shows up in tandem with the new cards...
Please learn about current computer technologies before posting on Slashdot again. Please. You look like a complete retard with that posting.
FYI PCI Express has 8GB/s of bandwidth to the graphics card.
Apple has a special version of the 6800 called the Dual Dual Link that can be doubled up to stack two of their new 30 inch monitors. In total this would give you 8.2 million pixels.
A ppleStore.woa/71801/wo/Xh3MfiiL68pu26PtlpU8CzA3csU /0.0.9.1.0.6.21.1.2.1.3.0.0.1.0
Does anyone know if this $600 card will work on Windows?
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
These are supposed to be in volume in September, and as of half-way into August, not a single card could be provided to be independently reviewed? This reeks as a PR only release to soothe scared investors after that dismal quarter they reported.
at 1600x1200!
Too bad the rest of my computer is 5 years too old for the game...and it's only 3 years old.
Any recommendations on what I should get? Especially since I don't want to blow a fortune on a card. Is this one something I should look at, or do you recommend anything else?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
If the price of the 6800GT part goes much higher than $199 it will cannibalize sales of the vanilla 6800 series. Man, it is such a challenge buying a video card these days. It's really difficult to find the "sweet spot" of price versus performance. For example, I can walk across the street to a retailer who will charge me $450 for a 9800XT at this very moment.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
PCI Express is not PCI. The bandwidth is completely different. PCI is 133MB/s. PCI Express is 200MB/s per x1. PCI Express graphics cards can be x16. Check the ASUS P5AD4 Premium motherboard for a look at some of the new connectors. Thunder
No
I'm almost 100% positive that they mean PCI Express. PCI Express =! the PCI that ships in most PCs today
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
I'll have Nintendo get right on it. ;-)
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
The chip is native PCI Express. NVidia apparently is betting on the success of a second chip that they made for AGPPCI Express translation. The chip can operate in both directions and thus older GPUs can use this chip to work with PCI Express boards and this new 6600 GPU can use this same chip in the other direction to work with AGP boards. I wonder how much of a slowdown this chip brings though.
Morphing Software
I wonder if a pair of 6600 GT's SLI'd would perform better than a 6800 Ultra? If so you could get more performance for a lot less $. Of course you would need a mobo with dual 16x PCI Express slots, which from searching NewEgg doesn't exist (or is so rare they don't carry it). Btw how DO they expect you to run SLI if you can't find a board with two PCI Express x16 slots?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
...because I want to play all the latest games on my MACINTOSH.
Not to take points away from the article, but if you're looking to get a graphics card, take a peek at Nvidia's 6800 GT.
s .html
16 pipelines AND it can *easily* be overclocked from it's 350Mhz core / 1000 Mhz memory to the 425/1100 speeds of a 6800 Ultra (which is $150 more).
Compare benchmarks: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_doom3_benchmark
ATI's X800 Pro has 12 pipelines.
I dunno, if you're gonna spend money on a graphics card, might as well go balls-out with this one. Best deal I've seen on a card in quite some time.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
You know, pretty soon there are going to be more versions of the GeForce than Street Fighter.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
> version before the more ubiquitous AGP.
They're probably more interested in showing what the card/chip CAN do that worry about the people who can't run it. If you'd done a last gen card for both AGP and PCI you'd want to release/boast about the AGP one first for similar reasons.
And I'll bet they cost pennies less to make than the higher-end chips. Translation: the higher-end chips should cost pennies -- not hundreds of $$$s -- more to buy.
Think about it. How much has it cost Nvidia to engineer this new chip? Either it is a crippled version of their existing chip, or they had to re-engineer it, make new masks, and setup a new, qualified production line at quite high costs.
Wouldn't we -- and they -- have been better off if they just punched out larger quanitites of the higher-end chips at less cost?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'd hate to end up with the right chip-set on an otherwise buggy or crap card.
Thanks.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Does anyone remember the scandle a little while ago when Half-Life2 came out and the NVidia cards were doing all sorts of crazy things to show misleading frame rates (like special optimizations only for HL2 framerate tests, etc). I imagine that thiese are real frame rates, but I wonder.
..........FULL STOP.
So I was looking at the specs of the 6600 and the 6800, it looks like the 6600 has half the specs of the 6800 (128mb of ram, 128 mb bus, 8 pixel pipelines instead of 16, etc etc...) so what would the point be of SLIing 2 6600s?!?!
Surely by the time you "could" SLI 2 6600s together (technology become affordable (see motherboards) and drivers work and such) wouldn't a 6800 be cheaper anyway?
and even if it was the same price.. why buy 2 cards when you can just buy one and with less hassle have the same performance?!
And how many people are disturbed by this on their 85Hz to 110Hz vertical refresh monitors? More than should be, I'll bet.
Standard movies only run at 24fps, and American television is only a true 30fps (1/2 of the interlaced frame is written every 1/60 of a second). Demanding frame rates much above those seems an absurd form of posturing.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
my question is this: if one has an agp 4x slot, will there be a noticible preformence increase? I'm using a geforce 4 ti4600 on my agp 4x and it runs doom 3 fine at medium detail and 800x600, but would upgrading to one of these babies really give that much of an increase in preformence?
thankyou.
do many games actually make full use of this much or more ram? and what is the real world performance hit for not having stuff in the onboard ram when needed?
It may seem absurd, but there are legitimate reasons why 3D cards need a higher framerate to represent the same smooth motion of 24fps movies.
I've explained this before, and I'll do it again. Television and video have motion blur-- the effect of the capture device essentially "averaging" the motion that occurred across the duration of capturing that frame.
Video cards generate a crisp, instantaneous frame that represents only the precise instant the frame was rendered, not the whole time the "shutter" was open.
At a *bare minimum* producing motion that looks as smooth as blurred 24fps requires double that. (You have to have two frames for your eye to blur between) To do it as well as a film camera requires even more, since their motion blur is effectively an infinite number of samples averaged together over the duration the shutter was open. I'd guess you could get a reasonable approximation at 3x the framerate.
TV and Movies are also filmed with the 24fps limitation in mind-- good cinematographers are well aware of the limits and know how to avoid situations that would result in jerky movement.
Of course, ATI can't write an OpenGL ICD to save their lives. Actually, their drivers are buggy in general.
I'll admit that ATI seems to have better technology. But drivers are everything. EVERYTHING. And Nvidia wins that battle, hands down.
There is a significant chance that the 6600 is a way of salvaging "reject" 6800s in which one or more of the pipelines failed QA. (Possibly because of a dust speck or other such problems - Even in the cleanest of clean rooms there are still contaminants, which is why IC yield is NEVER 100% and is typically lower the larger the chip is.)
Solution: Rather than just junk the entire chip, disable the pipelines that don't work and sell the chip as a lower-performance one with the pipelines that do.
It was once discovered that one of the ATI cards with only 4 pipelines could be converted to 8 with only minor hardware/software modifications.
But over 50% of cards "converted" in this manner failed to work because the remaining pipelines were disabled for reasons other than pure profit. In many cases the damage was permanent.
I think even Intel did this back in the 486 days. The 486SX chip was a 486DX with a defective FPU. Instead of junking the chip, they disabled the FPU and sold it as a low-end chip.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Your experiences with ATI/NV drivers are the exact opposite of mine.
I have so far encountered ONE bug directly attributable to NVidia's drivers. (An issue with XMMS and OpenGL vis plugins, which APPEARS to be drivers, but is exacerbated by something else on the system, as it affects my Gentoo box but not my ancient RH 7.3 box despite identical NV drivers.)
Compare, on the other hand, to the crashfest known as ATI drivers... I used to own an ATI card, NEVER AGAIN. And I keep on hearing horror stories about their drivers even now. (e.g. you need Catalyst 3.x for this game, but to play game foo you need to downgrade. For game bar neither will work, you need Catalyst 2.y.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Ok, this seems pretty lame to be asking about hardware for doom3 here, but I haven't found it anywhere else. And since we're talking about where the bottleneck is...
I got my athlonXP 2200+ w/ my 512 meg of ram and my gf5200. I've been getting about 8 fps. Needless to say I haven't bothered playing much.
My understanding of things is that my intended upgrade to GF5700ultra should set things right. (would love to go for the 6600, but no PCIe for me and I think the 6600agp is too far out to wait for) Everything I've seen / heard indicates this is the way to go, so I'm not really expecting to hear differently here.
Does anyone have any reference to bottleneck articles about doom3? I've totally looked around but haven't tracked down anything apart from video board benchmarks. All the reviews are either
1) check out the performance on this crappy/midlevel/rad system, no we didn't mix up the hardware levels.
2) Check out all these different video boards on our 64bit athlon zillion Ghz.
Nobody seems to want to investigate the difference 512->1024->2048 meg ram makes or the various CPUs. Maybe it's because the results are uninteresting after a certain level (which hopefully includes my athXP-2200+ !). Or maybe it's because switching around 3 amounts of RAM, maybe 5 video boards, and maybe 3-5 cpus would be a big PITA for benchmarking. But Damn, Tom always seems to be willing to run 30 different benchmarks on anything with a transistor so I was sorta expecting to see it... somewhere...
BUT WHAT ABOUT NVIDEA'S ANIMAL TESTING PROCEDURE?!?!?!
WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE _PUPPIES_ ?!?!
Lameness filter -
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Yes, it's exactly like yelling. The post was supposed to be yelling. Oh for fuck's sake now this won't be funny at all.
I have motherboards that are limited to 128 MB, you spoiled punks!
This has already been done for the 6800 series!
Wonder if it's been tested on the 6600 yet?
Pipeline mod app
Then I guess I need to file a bug report with them if they're so responsive.
...
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
You know, if my GF4 Ti4200 had SLI capabilities that would make my life much easier right now. i could step up the whole level of graphics performance in my system by a VERY noticeable margin. i look forward to these new cards because it means by the time my $200 video card is going the way of the dodo I can shel out $75 or whatever and add a second one and viola, extended life.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
.. so the super blatant obvious question is: where are the nForce dual-PCIe x16 monsters?
;)
(or quad-x16s, since everything is onboard these days? meesa want a home cave
There are Quadro cards that use very old Nvidia chipset architectures. No amount of additional memory is going to make an NV25 (Geforce4 - 4x2 texel pipelines @ 300Mhz, ~10GB/s memory bandwidth, DX8 features) perform like an NV40 (Geforce6800 - 16 pixel pipelines @ 400Mhz, ~35GB/s memory bandwidth, DX9 compatible). Newer chips have more pipelines, more memory bandwidth, more advanced geometry engines, and run at higher speeds.
work with the 2.6 kernel :-) and will it make doom 3 run on my pIII 400
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I have a Athlon XP (Thorton) 2400+ (2ghz) overclocked to 2385 (159fsb x 15), Mushkin blue 2 x 256 MB PC3200 (underclocked to match fsb), Seagate SATA 80gb HDD (forget the model), Radeon 9500 (128mb version, 276 mhz core/270 mhz memory overclocked to 360 mhz core/280 mhz memory though I have some mem heatsinks otw). And no, the card can't be turned into a Radeon 9700. It won't boot when I try to apply the softmod.
I know my performance would of course be best (and possibly only) boosted significantly by upgrading my video card, but what card would be best to match the other components? I'd love to get another Radeon card, but I want to be able to play OpenGL games (especially in Linux) so of course that throws Radeons out of the window, performance-wise.
"steady 42 FPS" is still average. you can no doubt get enough stuff on the screen at once, or certain GPU intensive scenes, where that frame rate may drop considerably. this can be irritating for people who are serious gamers.
Also, 30 frames per second = 33.3ms lag between frames, whereas 120fps drives that down to 8.3ms. If you're an avid online gamer, how important it is to have low latency an all aspects of your hardware and connectivity so maximize your ability to react and the computer receive those reactions.
Now, the clueless people that are FPS tweaking--because other people do it too and it seems cool to them and/or it's a hobby of theirs--and try to squeeze an extra 3 fps so they can get 78 fps instead of 75 fps in their favorite game, well, that is just an "absurd form of posturing."
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
I have my griefs with nVidia, but their drivers are excellent (for Windows and Linux), and now they're releasing some killer hardware at a great price. I mean, a top-of-the-line GFX card was $300 6 months ago, now you can better performance... for 100 bucks less. Price/peformance just keeps improving.
My next card *will* be an nVidia. Still, i want to see what ATi comes with next.
I've got an ATI X600 (PCI Express) in my system at home, but there's no PCI Express support for it, so no 3D acceleration. 2D works fine. Do nvidia's drivers actually support all the stuff you'd need for 3D acceleration in Linux on a PCIE system?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've been told that you really can't discern any difference above 60 fps. In my experience playing games, things seem choppy and I seem to start dying more when my framerates drop below 45, so that may be about right. The other interesting part of the trivia was the claim that it is an American case. Our eyes are used to lights running at 60 Hz, which is why some visitors countries running on 50 Hz may think the lights flicker constantly for the first couple of days. Of course, I've never done any testing or further research on this.
...you do not need this card to play photoshop on your Mac. Isn't that great?!?
http://ucguides.savagehelp.com/Doom3/displaydriver s.htm
It's not a wealth of information, but it's at least a start.
#SickNotWeak
I agree. Just look at Doom3.
A much older Geforce 4 TI beats an ATI Radeon 9800 in most of the benchmark tests. Whats up with that?
I have a Geforce FX 5600 Ultra and Doom3 runs like a dream =)
I have a 2Ghz, 512MB Ram and a GEFORCE 2 GTS and I can run Doom III! :p
FPS is not great but it *is* playable. I don't understand how come the minimum requirement for the game was a GeForce 3... Is my card supposed to support the game? Why then didn't id lower the minimum specs. then?
Then why not sell it at a reduced price as a 15- or 11-pipeline chip, rather than cutting it back to 8? Promise someone they get at least 8 pipelines, and some may get lucky getting more. Why kill perfectly good pipelines just for marketing? Think about it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
i know doom3 is the big thing these days but i really just want to improve my doom 2 framerate on my 486
sup
So to produce an AGP version of a PCIe-native GPU like the GeForce 6600, all NVIDIA needs to do (theoretically) is turn the HSI the other way. Since NVIDIA has stated that AGP versions will follow "shortly afterwards" (according to this Gamespot article), I don't think the PCIe/AGP issue will be a barrier to adoption.
Here's a nice, simple Anandtech article on HSI: NV45 Preview: On Package HSI
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Quake 3 had used a physics model that did the calculations per-frame on the client side. To save CPU, this stuff isn't terribly precise, so there's some rounding error. Because of that, there were some "ideal framerates" where the rounding errors added up in your favor, resulting in the ability jump farther or run faster-- which is why the true nutcases built systems that could run at a framerate never below 125 (or whatever they believed/calculated the max to be), and then *locked* the framerate there.
p s. html
http://ucguides.savagehelp.com/Quake3/FAQFPSJum
has more info, along with a chart of where the best spots to lock your framerate are.
I'm not 100% sure, but I vaguely remember there being talk of a 60fps framerate lock in Doom III to prevent this sort of cheating.
People in every game work to get high framerates for other reasons, though-- really high *average* framerate means fairly high *minimum* framerate. And of course, minimums come right when you need it to be smooth-- like when 16 guys in jeeps, tanks, and airplanes all come down on you at once in BF1942.
i was at the keynote where they announced the 6600 and one of the coolest things about it was the deinterlacing of video. it was very very impressive to say the least. this is on my list to buy for sure!
I've only had 2 issues with ATI drivers to date. And they were both resolved within a week. I've had more NVIDIA problems than I can count on all my fingers and toes. And admitedly they have fixed a few of the problems, somehow I think my bug reports ignored. If you can't speak from the developers stand point, then don't respond to this post. And certainly don't mark my post down. It was quite valid and did raise a concern when purchasing NVIDIA hardware.
That's not the developer relations addr. And their Linux drivers are great now.
If you become a registered devleoper, they'll give you the developer relations E-Mail.
Simple. 15 isn't a power of two. 11 isn't either.
8 is. Having 11 or 15 pipelines would make memory management (esp. cache management) pure hell.
Adding in the ability to disable half the pipelines as a big chunk is easy - The ability to disable individual pipelines is much more difficult and would significantly increase transistor count. (thus increasing costs)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?