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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."
Then buy a PS3.
A grand for a video card? A grand? All I can say is some folks have more dollars than sense, but that's just MHO.
A mirror of the print version is here and a mirror of the full article is here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
hahahahahahaha
Well for Longhorn and Quake4 I think this is now the minimum? Or is it 2 of these in an SLI setup?
I'm still saving up for the 4way multi-core CPU minimum requirement =/
That means it's only $2000 for the _graphics cards_ in a top of the line SLI rig... this month.
The price tags just dont justify what you get in return. 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.
On top of that, those "obsolete" cards haven't gotten any cheaper as new products usurp them. The 9800 I saw on the shelf last weekend still cost as much as when I bought mine a year ago.
So far all signs point to the next gen of consoles being pretty much on par, visually, with the greatest crap that ATI and nVidia churn out.
It's really hard to see the point of PC gaming anymore. What's it got that consoles dont? Online gaming with annoying mouthy 14 year olds? Check. Overpriced titles, and half-baked content delivery mechanisms? Check. Half finished products that require patches and updates to work correctly? Check.
For what this card costs, I could get a jillion-inch widescreen high-def DLP set to hook my PS3 and XBox 360's up to.
Just posting to keep the "pc gamer" vs "console gamer" wars going strong. It's fun to watch dweebs and simps fight.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The idea is that anyone with enough money to buy one or two of these 512MB cards is also planning to use a nice display. Thankfully, BFG had the foresight to employ two, dual-link DVI connectors, each of which supports resolutions up to 2048x1536 at 85Hz. You'll get away with up to 1920x 1080 at 60 Hz using the single-link port featured on 256MB Ultra cards. But if you really want to go big, Apple's 30-inch Cinema HD display, for instance, requires a dual-link DVI output for operation (BFG's product manager makes the clarification that the 30-inch Cinema HD is not supported in SLI mode, though). Previously, this was a feature only available on high-end Quadro cards, so including it with the GeForce 6800 Ultra is a big deal for graphics professionals.
I don't think the 30-inch Cinema HD display is supported in this over-priced cards dual-link mode either. According to Apple, the optimum resolution of the 30-inch HD display is 2560 x 1600 pixels. The let's-drop-a-grand card supports a maximum of 2048 x 1536 (according to the article). Do the people who spend the money on these things expect blurriness?
It's not 1000 dollars! It's only $999.99!
.99 marketing trick actually work on anyone anymore? I'd love to stop seeing .99 on price tags.
Does that goofy
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Game Developers.
If you are starting a new, state of the art game now: by the time you get it out the door, this level of video card will be standard built into motherboards. Almost Every PC game company in the world will need a few of these for testing, if nothing else.
Now, I drive a big block Chevy. I understand the need for more power and performance than sanity admits. But, with this card, are you actually getting more performance? I know I am with my engine mods. Or is this just a big dick exercise in marketing?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Overpriced Titles? Perhaps on games with monthly fees, but compare any brand new FPS or Strategy game with stuff on consoles. They're generally $40-$50 instead of $60-$70 (canadian currency).
As for the hardware behind it. You just gotta be smart about what you buy & when. You say the 9800 you saw last weekend cost as much as when you bought it a year ago? Don't you think that's a good indicator of the quality of the card. You hit the sweet spot in the market. Why aren't you happy about that? Buying one now may not be the best idea, nor would going out & buying this $999 behemoth. In 6 months though, you'll probably find another gem to last you ages at a good price.
Well, the hardware does have a smidgen of future-proofing in it, since you can be fairly sure that 512MB will be enough memory to run games for at least a couple of years, and games that need the full 512MB WILL run worse on the much cheaper 256MB card.
Of course you could probably buy the 256MB card now and upgrade to a 512MB in a couple of years and end up paying less for both cards combined than you will for this card alone. $1,000 really doesn't make much sense, except that the price will undoubtedly come down quite a bit as time goes on.
I read the internet for the articles.
From TFA:
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
This new card is for a small market segment I like to call "suckers". ATI, nVidia, and the publishers of games know this. New games are and will continue to be accessable to anyone who's willing to spend about $1000 every 2 years on computer parts. Why not put out a card for those with more money than sense?
PC gaming may die off, but it'll be cheap off the shelf PC equivilents that resemble the PS3 or 360 that'll kill it. All they need is MS Office 360 edition and the like. Next gen systems are a software DVD and some compatible usb mice and keyboards away from being home computers anyway.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
You can pay an extra $500 for the card, and there is ZERO performance advantage WHATSOEVER.
None.
Zero, zilch, nada.
Their only note is "well, with all that RAM, perhaps tomorrow's games will take advantage of it!"
Thing is, in 1 year, you'll be able to get a card with 512 MB of RAM, which is 2x as fast as this card, for $399. In 2 years, that same card will be $199. So there is ZERO advantage to getting it now, because nothing can use it, and by the time technology *can* use it, it will be old hat.
82% Rating? These guys are on the take.
Right, they're killing it... Sure. Whatever you say.
It might be a pain on the wallet if any titles actually required anything that expensive. But they don't and never will, because, well, a game wouldn't sell if most people couldn't afford the hardware to run it.
No, what they're doing is capitalizing on the people that for one reason or another just absolutely must have the latest, greatest, and most (expensive), despite all sensibility.
This is the same type that buys Rolexes, when a Timex would do just about as well... Do you accuse Rolex, Ferrari, and other luxury manufactuers of killing their respective markets? No, that would be stupid. If anything, the advancements made by high end stuff will eventually trickle down to regular bums.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
The people writing the games for the 512 MB cards tomorrow need the 512 MB cards today.
"On top of that, those "obsolete" cards haven't gotten any cheaper as new products usurp them. The 9800 I saw on the shelf last weekend still cost as much as when I bought mine a year ago.
"
I've got a Riva TNT2 that still runs the latest drivers as this new $1k card. Still gets performance enhancements from newer drivers too. Not as often, but its not uncommon to see a few more fps after the occasional driver upgrade.
As for prices coming down, Nvidea GeForce FX 5200 AGP8X 128MB DDR is $60 on froogle. I'd say thats came down.
As for PC > Console argument, I'll ignore the HIGHLY important input argument (hrm, 80hz badly shaped ps2 controller whos battery life is unknown, or wired 8 button mouse that updates at 1000hz. Wonder which will be more precise. Alright fine, I didn't ignore it, I can't help myself.)
More importantly though, What about custom content? I can think of only two games that have ever dominated the player market. QuakeWorld Team Fortress, and HalfLife CounterStrike. Neither would be possible on a console that assumes the end user is too stupid to make his own content (Game logic(mods), Sounds, Graphics, etc. All stuff customized regularly in a pc game).
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Hell, my cell phone has more memory the hard drive on my first computer. The first hard drives were around 5 MB. And I remember thinking at the time "When the hell am I going to need that much memory?"
Enter... Porn.
All I can say is some folks have more dollars than sense, but that's just MHO.
I remember when the "high end" cards were priced around $200, and that wasn't very long ago at all.
From the article:
It employs the same six-pin power input you'd expect on any other high-end PCI Express graphics card, and the board sports a very similar active cooler for its graphics processor.
I also remember when graphics cards didn't require a loud, whining fan to keep from catching on fire, not to mention a secondary power connector direct from the PSU.
What really gets me, though, is how normal firingsquad tries to make it sound. It employs the same six pin power connector and "active cooler" you'd expect. No, I don't expect that. It's bizarre. It's wrong.
Gaming isn't about faster and faster hardware performance. It's about games.
As far as I can tell, the only way out of this mess is to buy used hardware and games two or three years after they're released. By that time, the bugs are ironed out and your friends have already emptied their wallets figuring out what's worth playing.
How about a keyboard and a mouse? and how about the ability to download and play any game you like without the need for a modchip.
How about the ability for the rest of the family to watch tv whilst you play your video games?
The industry will charge based on what the market will bear.
No one needs a PC running at 1Ghz just for word processing, e-mail, and web browsing. But, the dirty little secret that people are afraid to admit is this... It's the gamming industry that is pushing the home PC market in regards to technology!!! Don't be surprised to see a 3 grand video card in the future.
PC gaming is like Golf. Its membership ranges from the casual player to the richest of wealthy elites. Thus, expect the market to price equipment (hardware) accordingly.
Life is not for the lazy.
There are many gaming areas in which the PC still wipes the floor with consoles. Currently, anything requiring a mouse is inaccessible on a console: RPGs (the D&D kind, not the interactive story-book kind) and real-time strategies come to mind. I also find playing any FPS on a console painful at best, and I know I'm not the only one (I couldn't really stand Halo until I played it on the PC).
In addition, other people here have noted that anything with user-created content won't work very well on consoles, at least as they currently are. Counter Strike, for example, lets you customize all sorts of aspects of the game. Another example is Neverwinter Nights: the included campaigns are all right, but where it really shines is in the custom content community.
I could see consoles overcoming the former limitation, but not the latter.
And incidentally, I can still play most new games on my 4 year old PC (Doom 3 being a possible exception---I haven't tried. I can play Half Life 2).
So you can tow the "consoles have replaced PC gaming" line, as many people here do, but the fact is, the PC still beats the pants off of the console in a few key markets. Your opinion on the subject merely reflects which sorts of games you're interested in (in fact, I have no real desire for any console, and wouldn't want to go without my PC for gaming).
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Why can't your wife play games on Yahoo while you're fragging away on your console?
Because playing first-person shooters with a console controller sucks?
Once you reach a certain point in just about any product category, you're usually paying two or three times as much money for a product only a few percent better. The performance difference between a $100,000 sports car and a $300,000 sports car isn't that great, certainly not 3x as much. When people have that much money to pay, they're almost always doing it to impress people. A $1,000 graphics card isn't for people who need more processing, it's for people who want to brag about having a $1,000 graphics card
Well lets see, if I were using floating point textures, that would be 4 bytes per channel, if I have 4 channels that's 16 bytes per pixel, so now the 512 MB becomes, 32 Mpixels, double buffer that and that's 16 Mpixels, maximum addressable size of a texture is 4096 in any dimension, so that would be 2 full size textures, or maybe we should say a reasonable sized fluid dynamics system, plus say some HDR textures, might want to do some multipass effects compositing the result into the double buffered frame buffer (including Z depth buffer) or what if I was doing stereo imageing or two monitors.
I don't think 512MB is much when you start trying to use the GPU as a processing engine. A large amount of time is lost transfering data back and forth from main memory in some situations, in those cases more RAM on card gives you a bigger cache to play with.
Cards like this are made for a few reasons. The first is that they're making the chips that will be in the consumer level systems in a year or two. This lets them build and test the product and drivers now instead of waiting until it's cheap.
The second, and most important, is that development houses need the hardware of the future. They don't care if it needs a small bar fridge attached to make it work - the consumer product will cost $200 in a year and will be what their customers will buy.
Then there's PR. It's why car companies sponsor Rally teams who use their cars. It says something that the fastest video card in the world is an nVidia, even if only for a week until ATI claims it, and so on.
I think you'll find that these cards are loss leaders - 512MB of the fastest ram, a smoking GPU, etc, likely cost much more than $1000. When the timing isn't as critical and any ram can be used - and likely comes on 1/4 as many chips, and when the GPU yields are better than the single-digits everything starts at, the card will start to sell, but as an already known product line that has stable (we hope) drivers and games written for them.