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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."
This card costs $999 with 512MB DDR3, someone tell me how much the Xbox 360 comes with?
See where I'm going with this? Just how big of a loss are Sony and MS willing to take with their consoles this time around? I mean either way the consumer wins out big.
Even by the time winter rolls around you're not going to see this card or it's 256MB version for $50.
-- taking over the world, we are.
So for that price, I can buy 3 PS3s, or a PS3 with a large TV, or a PS3 with LOTS of titles.
I have a geforce4ti, and wonder why will I need more GPU power anyway. HL2 and doom3 run fine, and seem to need more memory and cpu bandwidths than triangle-pushers.
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.
Anyone care to comment where a card like this Geforce will be REQUIRED?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
From TFA it appears that you don't even get that much -- in many cases the 512MB card is slower than a considerably cheaper 256MB card.
... but that would be it.
It strike me that the 512MB card may be of use to someone (e.g. scientific visualization?) who can find a use for all the video RAM
I think the really interesting question is: Didn't FSAA come a little late to the scene, considering the ridiculous resolutions we can now play our game at?
Every where you go you'll see websites benchmarking at 1900x1200 4xFSAA 16-tap and I'll just go... what the hell?
Anti-Aliasing made a hell of a lot more sense to me back at 320x200 to 800x600... but maybe that's just me. I'm sure we'll have 16x FSAA at 8192x6160 too, and everyone will say it's da bomb! "How can you play without anti-aliasing? Don't you stop and look at the jaggies? <picks up magnifying glass to point them out>"
Oh, well... and don't get me started on the fact that none of the big sites regularly review cards between different generations. When I upgrade I want to know the difference from where I am now, not the 2-5fps different between cards with the same basic hardware but different logos stamped on.
Alright.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
> ...but that's not because of the extra RAM...which btw is useless.
/ 14
It's not useless. Apple and Microsoft are both persuing imaging models that heavily leverage GPU processors and VRAM to avoid pushing large numbers of bits through the bottleneck interfaces to video cards. These new imaging models maintain window backing stores, compositing buffers, cached font rastrizations, etc in VRAM. For details see:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
I thought entry models always underperform a bit, until they tweak it up with drivers and balance things out, and improve the logics. To eventually end up with the "better and newer" version.
When the first DirectX 9.0 Graca's came out they underperformed and were still 'evolving' (=buggy) compared to their matured DirectX 8.1 end-models. It's the way it goes.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
What do people not get? Seriously, it's not the amount of VRAM that is included in the card, but the speed of the GPU. I'd rather spend that grand on two equally powerful cards, or a dual GPU card.
except that you won't be able to "own" a ps3 (or xbox 360 /revolution).
you don't have the legal or technical authorization to program those "computers"
and this is one area where pc's completely wipe consoles off the face of the technological world.
imagine if ford / gm / toyota / etc made cars that you couldn't, legally or technically, alter (modify) in any way...
perhaps you ignorant folks can wake up before they
get away with this (yet again)...
this time they'll be much harder to hack... so you can't reassure yourself that you can just buy a "mod" chip.
don't mod this off-topic, this is intimately intertwined with the entire console industry and customer rights.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I've been suckered into buying a few expensive gaming graphics cards in the past, but never again, I think. I spent $300 on a Radeon 9800 around when Doom 3 came out, and since then I've played only two games: Doom 3 and Half Life 2.
PC gaming is dead, and I can't say I'm sad about it. Buying a $300 console every five years certainly beats blowing $1000 on PC upgrades every two years. Especially when the consoles have, from a somewhat objective point of view, many times the number of critically acclaimed titles released in a year that the PC has.
Additionally, because the reasons given above negate the main reason I've used x86 machines, I've decided to make my next computer a Mac. I wonder if Microsoft, in luring developers away from the PC and to the Xbox, is just going to make it easier for the geek population to move from Windows to Mac OS or Linux?
Without people paying that high of a price, then they wouldn't retail it at that price. Also, if nobody buys it at that price, then it'll drop substantially over a short amount of time. Also, you need to take into account the cost of R&D and production of the card itself. There's really nobody to 'blame' here. Still, as of this point in time, one thousand dollars for a graphics card is too much. Hell, I spent $150 on a 9700, and it's suting me very well. It's not top of the line, but it still makes the latest games pretty enough for me.
No, PCI express only helps the bottleneck, it absolutely does not remove it.
Consider the rate at which I can access data from memory on board. The latency involved is in the dozens of cycles.
Going across PCI express, the latency involved is in the hundreds of cycles.
This doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that I might be reading from up to 12 textures at the same time, the latency differences add up in a ridiculous hurry. Consider that I might invoke the fragment processor 200 million times in the same frame. If I'm doing 12 texture reads in each of those 200 million invocations, I'm looking at the difference between frames/second and seconds/frame.
What PCI express *is* really good for is (ab)using the GPU as a massively parallel general purpose processor. For more info, check out the developer site on nvidia.com. (For example, really cool effects like cloth simulation and water surface caustics that would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive).
The benefit of PCI express is its full duplex-ness. Now I can simulate data on the GPU *and* get it back in a reasonable timeframe.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I agree. I have never understood the artifical and illogical "acceptable" price for things. Hardly anyone scoffs at $30,000 for a car, but mention spending $5,000 for a comfortable bed you'll rest in 8 hours a night, the effects of which will last all day, and people would think you've lost your mind. They'll spend $2000 on the fastest CPU that will sit idle in Microsoft Word, but suggest $1100 for a 24" widescreen LCD and people think that's an astronomical amount of money to spend on a monitor. I don't really get it.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I had begged and whined and whined and begged for my parents to buy that for me, a 9 year old would-be 1337 h4xx04. So marks the first step in my disillusionment.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?