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512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra Reviewed
Timmus writes "If you thought the $500 GeForce 6800 Ultra and $550 Radeon X850 XT PE were excessive, wait until you see nVidia's GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB: it officially retails for $999.99! Firingsquad has a review of the card manufactured by BFG. They ran tests with 6 different configurations (including a pair of 512MB cards running in SLI) with widescreen benchmarks at 1980x1200 as well."
a complete waste of money. For an extra $500 you get maybe 1 or 2 fps. What I find strange is that firingsquad is split over whether or not readers should buy it. The whole review seems to be a better benchmark of how much of an industry shill firingsquad is than the graphics card itself.
Except for scientific aplications and video work, what can use this?
I seriously doubt that scientists would use these cards. The "performance" level drivers tend to intentionally make various minute errors to make things run as fast as possible. In most scientific applications, precision is a requirement.
As for video work, I'm not sure that anyone would bother with spending TOO much on a card. The drivers tend to be very one way, making the return of the image very slow. Since there's a hugh bottleneck in the AGP transfer rates, you might as well use the extra time to render a better quality image. No super-pricey card needed. Now if NVidia released a card with high AGP retrieval speed...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
$1000 is nothing, and these cards are only good for gaming. For scientific apps check NVIDIA's Quadro line, FX 4400 starts at $2258.
I read the article, the card didn't do that great against ASUS's 256mb card, and in fact, in most of the tests the Asus 256mb card did better. ATI got blown away in pretty much all the tests.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
It is very well possible that these GPUs have more processing power than any desktop CPU currently sold, although it is somewhat specialized. This power is one reason why Apple made a developer-accessible API that taps into GPU processing power for image and video manipulation.
So in order to make the "bling ding" cards attractive, they quietly drop support for "obsolete" hardware, that is, you don't see any bug fixes or software features being added in ATI's catylyst set for the 9x00 series anymore.
That's not new. ATI did this with their Mach64 cards around 1998, which is why I'll no longer use proprietary video card drivers. Unfortunately I still use ATI cards (9250 and below), since nVidia doesn't release any specs for 3D support and Matrox no longer releases any specs. Hopefully the Open Graphics project will change this.
Also, scientific (and other "technical") graphics cards aim to render images perfectly, instead of "as fast as possible with some unoticeable-at-1000fps glitches" as with consumer cards. High-end cards can cost tens of thousands, and are mostly useless for gaming.
That's how much graphics accelerator cards used to cost back in the mid 1980's - and they didn't even do texture-mapping or 3D.
Hercules Graphics Station Card = $750
+ 2Mbyte VRAM + PROM chips = $200
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The only reason I can justify buying a 512mb video card for gaming (the workstation benefits should be far greater, but this is not a workstation card) is to run Doom 3 at the ultra setting without SLI. The textures in ultra mode are larger than 256mb, so a card without that much memory gets drastic performance penalties. If firingsquad wanted to show off the capabilities of the card, they should have shown that in Doom 3, at ultra graphics settings, with one card, the performance gain for the 512mb card should actually be something to talk about.
Nonetheless, even if you justified buying the card on the grounds that you don't need SLI, chances are you still have to upgrade your motherboard to PCI-E, and you still spend $1000 on video cards without the gain in performance achieved with two graphics processors.
But hey, at least you're ready for Half-Life 3.
"Theres a major lackage of a physics processor right now. Given the nice placement of GPU cards... on a high bandwidth bus of the northbridge, I'd say put the physics chip on the video card. Otherwise on a PCIX card."
c sdedicatedhardwaresoon.shtml
Someone is developing something like this, it will be a seperate add-in card, but sounds interesting
http://www.megagames.com/news/html/hardware/physi
Although this article is a bit old, not sure if it is still in the works or not...
"I have a geforce4ti, and wonder why will I need more GPU power anyway. HL2 and doom3 run fine, "
My old rig had the same card (very good card btw) then i upgraded to a 6800 (non ultra or GT even) and it really made a difference in both of those games, on the order of 2x the frame rate (and I really seem to notice changes in frame rates up to 85+)
Take the $2000 and buy a CD from the bank. I'm not talking John Tesh plays the songs that kill dogs.
Or better, pay off part of your credit card. Saving 20% intrest works better than making 4% intrest. Ben Franklin's Credit card maxim.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Yes quite. Dual link is a single DVI cable which uses all 24 pins of the DVI spec. Single link, or standard DVI, uses only 12 of the 24 pins. Apple has made their dual link implementation handle a resolution in excess of the original DVI spec. This is true. It doesn't magically make a card that cannot handle the resolution capable of handling it. Your comment, in so far as it concerns the one-grand video card being able to drive an Apple 30-inch display at optimum resolution, is unsupported.
For further clarification, look at Apple's website and see that the 17-inch PowerBook which has a single DVI connector is perfectly capable of driving the 30-inch display. Furthermore, the Power Mac G5 with a single video card and two DVI ports can drive two 30-inch displays. Two ports and two displays equals one cable per 30-inch display.
This ain't rocket science. You're wrong.
The pipe between VRAM and RAM is still much smaller than the pipe between VRAM and GPU. Systems like the (disabled by default) "Quartz 2D Extreme" engine on MacOS X 10.4 send the (relatively small) drawing commands directly to the GPU instead of drawing to RAM in the first place. Even if current Macs implemented PCI Express, which they unfortunately don't, it is a huge net win to draw directly on the card to VRAM. And that probably means an extra frame buffer on the card, and thus more VRAM for better performance.
This is also the route that Longhorn, Java 1.6, and other hardware accelerated drawing and compositing GUI engines are going next year. While PCI Express certainly helps, even the fastest proposed PCI Express cards' link to RAM, at 4GBps, is about 7x slower than the VRAM-GPU path in a modern video card.
E pluribus unum
Taking two outputs and multiplexing them to form a larger image isn't dual-link dvi. I don't think it's SLI either (I thought that involved two graphics cards).
A GeForce 5200 is 60$ for a reason. That POS may support DX9 features in hardware, but the GeForce ti4400 will outperform it even when emulating those features via cool drivers. I want to get a GeForce 5900XT, because those guys should be roughly 150$ CDN right now. I'd love to buy a GeForce 4 Ti4800 or 4400, on the premise they'd be about 100$ CDN or 80$ CDN. The lowest priced card I can find that will perform better than a GeForce 5900XT or Ti4800 is a GeForce 6600GT. They are 300$ CDN for the AGP versions.
Everything lower than that, well, they don't perform as well. Yes, they have a checkbox that indicates they have the features, but when you benchmark them, you see that they don't push as many pixels, etc.
PC gaming, thanks to CPU pricing and performance ratios, is entirely about the video card. At this point, a GeForce 5900XT will do you for every game. You can run Doom 3 with decent quality settings on any PC, pretty much, that you can afford. For less that 1,000$ CDN, you can have an entire system that does this, plus more.
But you can't buy affordable cards that perform decently. The bare minimum you can buy is something like the 6600GT. There is nothing between 60$ and 300$ that will perform AT ALL.
(Yes, I'm discounting ATI; ATI does not have functioning drivers under Linux 64-bit, nor under the latest rev of the kernel 32-bit, nor do they work correctly on Windows! Don't make the mistake I did in buying a Radeon 8500 a few years back, get nVidia...)
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