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Reviews Arrive For nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP
bhtooefr writes "The Tech Report got their hands on a reference board of the nV 6600GT AGP, and did some benchmarks. Interestingly, even with a slower memory clock on the AGP card, it was FASTER in some benchmarks than the PCI-E card. Tests performed were: Doom 3, CS:Source, Far Cry, 3DMark05, Rome: Total War, and Xpand Rally (the last two tested with FRAPS)."
pacmanfan contributes links to more reviews at
Extreme Tech, Hard OCP and PC Perspective.
Actually a 9800pro runs about $200 which is about what the 6600 costs. And the 9800 was not keeping up with the 6600.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
On the other hand Extremetech's review find the PCIe version much faster
Not true. Extremetech concludes "You can get nearly all of the 6600 GT goodness in an AGP package, and leave very little on the table."
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
On the other hand on some of the benchmarks I have seen that card is being run with 4x or even 1x PCIe bus, without any serious performance degradation, so, rather logically, this isn't the issue jet.
The lack of PCIe lanes to accomodate a lot of cards without tricks and headaches, yet is. But this is configuration issue, not bandwidth.
IIRC, the Xbox uses a slightly detuned GeForce3 GPU. Go find some GeForce3 benchmarks and see how they compare, and I bet the performance gap between the GF3 and the slowest card there is much larger than between any of the cards they tested.
There's no way the Xbox could run any of those games at the high (1024x768+) resolutions that they use in these tests...the relatively slow CPU would be a problem as well. If you want higher quality, a PC is the way to go.
that's one of the main reasons, but it's not the main reason. the biggest reason that PCI Express is a lot cheaper to produce, which everyone loves (PCI Express is serial, AGP is parallel, AGP requires more connections between the card and the chipset on the motherboard, making it a lot more expensive than PCI Express for motherboard manufacturers). second of all, 3D hardware manufacturers love it because it isn't a bidirectional bus like AGP, where you have a single bus that typically moves data in a single direction but can move it in the opposite direction with a huge performance penalty. PCI Express is two unidirectional buses, so there's no penalty for reading from the video card. this means you can do all sorts of nutty effects and use the GPU as an extra processor in some applications a lot more effectively than you can with AGP.
your logic doesn't hold up, considering the Athlon64 has no PCI Express motherboard quite yet. sure, they've been announced, but they do not have any in retail. PCI Express was an Intel-led push, along with DDR2 and BTX (although we haven't really seen the last yet). it is simply much cheaper and much easier to manufacture than AGP. I mean, SLI was theoretically possible with AGP3.0 (introduced AGP8x, but it also had support for multiple AGP devices on a single motherboard). there were absolutely no motherboards, to my knowledge, that supported multiple AGP cards, certainly not in the consumer space. given NVIDIA's recent SLI push and ATI's forthcoming SLI chipsets, both would have hopped on AGP-based SLI if it were available. I'd guess that it was simply too expensive to make motherboards with multiple AGP slots more than anything else. with PCI Express, this limitation is gone.
Quick response:
- 250 fps average would mean that even under heavy load the frame rate would be acceptable.
- When new cards are released, older cards generally drop in price.
- TV runs at 30 fps (actually it's something like 29.97), not 25.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Your other points are valid, but this only holds true in NTSC-land AFAIK. PAL uses 25/50iHz. Besides, you should have pointed out that most of the time, you don't play games on the TV but on the PC monitor which should be set to at least 75Hz everywhere (unless you got a TFT/LCD in which case 60Hz is good enough for everyone).
Money for nothing, pix for free
To an extent, that's true. I have a Geforce FX5200 and i can still play Doom 3 (of course, not at the highest setting). But c'mon, nobody ever said the latest and greatest graphics card is a necessity.
OTOH, I used to have a TNT2 and palyed Warcraft III on it. It ran rather smoothly, and I thought all was good. Until I upgraded to the Geforce FX5200. The difference was pleasantly surprising. Hell, even the text in the chat-screen was so much more cripser and clearer.
So I guess for most users, it really isn't that big of a deal to get the latest card. But when you're gaming, it makes all the difference. Truly, how many of us do intensive graphics programming as a hobby anyway? They have specialized cards for professional use (CAD, etc..)...
TV in the US (NTSC) is at 59.94 fields per second interlaced, so it is equivalent to 29.97 frames per second. However, in Europe TV (PAL) is 50 fields per second interlaced, or 25 frames per second. The reason for the difference is the difference in the mains AC frequency on opposite sides of the pond. (The 60/59.94 disparity is due to a complication of colour TV). This has annoying consequences when transferring video, as conversion is required (also in terms of number of lines). Cinema film tends to run at 24 full frames per second, just to make things a little more complicated. Here is a comparison of TV formats.
Actually, I believe the way we percieve frames on TV, and on a PC screen are completely different. On a typical TV frame, the frame records motion. If you extract just one frame and look at it, you can see that the moving objects are blurred. 24-25 frames is actually what most *film* is recorded at. Movie films, I think, are still recorded at 24fps, that number was chosen because of a very old trade-off between running the film at high speed to get more frames, and running it at a low enough speed to stop the film from tearing.
On computers, you can most definitely tell the difference between, say 60fps and 100fps, because a frame does not record motion. One frame is just a statically rendered shot. But above that, you wouldn't notice too much difference.
That said, the actual reasons for upgrading your card wont be the FPS. It will usually be running it at a decent FPS while still keeping the newer features like Antialiasing, Pixelshading, etc turned on. Many newer games (DX 9.0+) rely on stuff like this to get anything done. Notice the detailed dynamic shadows in the D3 screens? Your GF4MX420 can't handle those very well I suppose?
But hey, I own a GF4MX440SE, and between putting up with the high costs of a new card and all the people who say I've actually bought a hidden GF2GTS, I'd choose the cheaper alternative any day.
StrayByte.Net
I have an athlon 2600+ which was a great purchase.
We all know that more cpu power isn't really needed right now. Because of this the idea of buying a new system to upgrade a graphics board seems silly, I have a 9000 pro which still runs everything quite well but could use an upgrade.
So my options are to spend $300 cnd on a 9800 pro or 6800? Not the greatest options.
I have the money but I'd rather not, plus if I'm going to buy such a high end card it really sucks I won't be able to put it into my next system.
Most people are probably looking at the 939 platform as their next upgrade.
As far as CPU's go, dual core is hitting in about a year. That's a significant upgrade, coupled with 64bit.
So I mainly need a card to ease my current system out but which will have linux compatibility once it becomes my server, for that Nvidia is the best and a high end card won't do.
Basically for anyone who wants to put another card in their computer this is the way to go. This is the perfect card and the fact that it was pciE only really really sucked.
On the other hand both ATI and Nvidia should be looking at a new product cycle in febuary-april so you might want to hold out. But I get the feeling it'll be a 5800-5900 9800 pro to xt type cycle not a 8500 to 9700 type cycle.
Partially due to no new technology like AA or DX9 coming out in the near future.
The 8 pixel pipelines kinda hurts whereas the 6800 can have all 16 unlocked but that doesn't make these cards any less powerful and there should be plenty of power here till a pciE upgrade is required.
If you don't care about gaming, then buy a Radeon 7000 for $30 and be happy. 2-D hasn't been a concern for, gosh, at least six or so years now. DVD playback isn't a concern anymore either. The only new non-gaming feature I can even think of is the MPEG-2 HDTV encoder/decoder on the Geforce 6x00 series.
The 6600 cards are pretty reasonably priced, so picking up two of them and getting 180% performance of a single 6600GT AGP is pretty attractive...
No, it isn't. According to reputable benchmarks, dual 6600 GTs ($200 x 2) typically perform slightly worse than a single 6800 GT ($400 x 1).
Why would you accept the undoubtedly higher power consumption of dual 6600 GTs versus a single 6800 GT, when the price is about the same?
Those who can afford a new motherboard (and probably a new CPU) just for the SLI capability won't be stooping to 6600 GTs; they'll opt for something better.
Erlang.org: wow
That's PCI Express not PCI-X.
The parent is spot-on. Current AGP 8x bandwidth is 8x(266*8, 2128MB/sec), but the performance difference between 4x(266*4, 1064MB/sec) and 8x is negligable(around a percent, within experimental error). Considering that x1 PCIe is 250MB/sec, PCIe and AGP are effectively running at the same speed given the same multiplier. If you take in to consideration that we just said that we aren't making use of anything past AGP 4x yet, it's a logical assumption that PCIe x4 should also be enough, and that x8 would be enough for the next generation of cards that would somehow need the doubled bandwidth.
But getting back to the point, the current PCIe graphics standard is x16, which at 4GB/sec(and this is each way, BTW - PCIe is full duplex, AGP is half) is far more than we need. The current solution of dividing up the 16 lanes from that single slot in to 2 groups of 8 lanes for 2 PCIe x8 slots(though using an x16 connector for power issues) still results in each card recieving more bandwidth than it can effectively use. With a single x16 slot, PCIe is future-proof enough that bandwidth won't be an issue for some long period of time, and than the x8 SLI solution won't be bandwidth limited for some shorter, but still long enough period of time that it's not going to be a realistic issue until at least the 3rd or 4th generation PCIe motherboard chipsets are released, at which point they can be built with more lanes.
Pricewatch is listing the 256MB 6600 for around $150
1 68 &f=1
http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=37&a=143
Also.. I have a 9800 Pro and am disappointed with the quality of the drivers. Lots of quirks and the latest version crashed my machine in the middle of gameplay. Never so many issues with all the Nvidia cards I had before.
I got that exact card last week. I read several reviews on it and got one built by MSI for about $200 from newegg. With WHQL drivers, I run Doom3 on high wih no hiccups, Desert Combat final runs great on high, Far Cry demo looks good. I run 3dmark, Aquamark, etc once or twice for curiosity's sakes, but numbers don't mean as much to me as smooth gameplay on the titles I own. This card certianly does, and should hopefully keep me happy for the next couple of years.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Actually, if you read the article, you would see that the NV43 chipset that the 6600 uses is a native PCI Express chip, and they use a bridge chip to make an AGP version of the card. This is why PCI-E versions of the 6600 have been out for a while, but the AGP version just became available today.
From the first page of the article:
"The NV43, however, already has a built-in PCI Express interface, so for the AGP version of the GeForce 6600 GT, NVIDIA is turning the HSI chip around and using it to bridge between the PCI-E graphics chip and an AGP motherboard."