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GeForce 7800 GTX Review
ThinSkin writes "ExtremeTech has the first review of nVidia's latest GPU architecture, the Geforce 7800 GTX. Benchmarked against nVidia's previous 6800 Ultra and ATI's latest Radeon X850 XT PE, the 7800 GTX comes out as the fastest video card to date. The unit ships today with a price tag of $599. While nVidia may enjoy this brief moment in the limelight with the fastest card, it may be short-lived once ATI comes out with their latest GPU technology, code-named R520, which is suspected to come out within the next two months."
...has hardware H.264 codec support.
And this technology is, in part, targeted at low- to mid-range systems and laptops, meaning it's not going to be part of video chipsets that only cost $599...further meaning that it wouldn't be beyond the realm of comprehension, since Apple is already an ATI customer, for Apple to use something like this in a Mac mini-type product, answering the questions of "how could the Mac mini possibly play back HD?" in the Mac-mini-as-HD-media-center Mac-mini-as-iTunes-HD-Movie-Store-player scenarios.
Off-topic? No, the R520 is mentioned directly in the submission, and one of its primary features is H.264 hardware acceleration. This is huge.
Tom's also has a set of reviews and links available.
1 /index.html/
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050622
From the Urban Dictionary:
1. scrilla
Money, One who spends a lot of money
"Yo, shes got mad scrilla, we're gonna rock the mall later."
"Scrilla in Manila, shlong in Hong Kong"
Source: studtaco, Feb 25, 2003
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
It's called compromise.
... but it's also only 100 bucks and doesn't make noise ;-)
An MSI FX5200 has no moving parts, gets ~30-45FPS at 800x600 or so [1024x768x16bpp works fine too] in games like UT2K4.
Yeah, sure it isn't 1600x1200 with 16xAA and 78-bit colour
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
No doubt that this is the heart of the PS3.
Don't be silly. PS3 is coming out in a year, there's no way Sony will be buying a chip that has been out in mass market for a year for their new flagship entertainment product. On top of that, this GPU is the same as the previous one from nVidia, with extra pipelines -- it's hardly impressive!
IMO, the PS3 will be using the next-generation GPU that will most likely be available for PC at about the same time as the PS3.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
The 7800 has it too.
/ nvidia_7800_gtx-04.html
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050622
As far as noise goes I was also tired of it with my 6800 ultra. I picked up a zalman cooler for these cards. Yes the one with the massive heatsink and fan. And it is amazing. Not only do I run about 20 degrees cooler but it is silent even at the fastest fan rate. I liked it so much I just ordered their CPU cooler for my 3.4Ghz P4 now that that has turned into a turbine under load.
They fail to deliver useful drivers for *nix. X.Org developers should be able to implement all what they want, and for that they need better-documented hardware. Only then will we have a real eyecandy, hardware-accelerated desktop à la Quartz Extreme.
This is why the Open Graphics Project is so important.
The project has already been mentionned twice on Slashdot, but since then it has made a lot of progress. Skimming through their mailing list archives shows that they're even creating their own company to produce the graphics card. The company's name is "Traversal Technology". A website is coming soon.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
The 7800 is relying upon having a really robust general-purpose shader engine. For example, they recognized that the MADD instruction is being used a lot so they've got it supported in multiple ALUs rather than one.
This is important for the PS3, for obvious reasons. They don't have the luxury of being able to release drivers that perform these optimizations for the most popular games. It's also obviously not as necessary on the console, because the developers only have one piece of hardware that they need to develop against; PCs are a beast for developers who need to test against several generations of hardware from NVIDIA and ATI.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2451 Anandtech has an excellent review which includes power consumption information and a good overview of technology in the new chip.
d 3D as always has a fantastic writeup including information on: CPU Utilization for video decoding, noise, power consumption, etc.
http://www.beyond3d.com/previews/nvidia/g70/Beyon
The problem isn't the GPU, it's the cooler. It's amusing to me that you pay $600 for a video card and get a $5 fan on it that sounds like a leaf blower. Solution: replace the cooler. I switched the POS on my 6800 with a Zalman cooler and it's wonderful. Took 10 minutes and $25 and now it's (virtually) silent, cooler, better looking (if that matters to you), and more stable. There are also some Gigabyte cards out there based on 6800 chipsets with passive (heatpipe) cooling. Haven't tried one myself, but those would obviously be totally silent.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Thing is, it doesn't matter. Doing so:
I saved my pennies and bought a GeForce2...MX...and found out what a horrible decision that was. That card was actually worse than the card I already had AND the GeForce 1 Ultras
This was standard practice well before Nvidia released the GeForce 2 MX. Nvidia already pissed off the world by releasing the TNT2 M64, which performed worse than the original Riva TNT.
Your venerated 3DFX is also guilty of such actions, by releasing the Banshee six months after the Voodoo 2. This single-pipe combo card performed worse than a single Voodoo 2, and offered no SLI upgrade path.
You'll get no condolences from me. Price normally relects performance in this market. The GeForce 2 MX was actually a steal at the time it was released; it was one of the best-performing budget cards ever. It bested the previous generation GeForce SDR in performance, something you wouldn't expect from a budget card. It was, however, beaten in performance by the GeForce DDR...and the later breakdown into the models 200 (64-bit) and 400 (128-bit) only cheapened the MX brand.
As far as I know (as in, this might not be the case in the recent past with the new PCI-X cards) ATI's numbering scheme is straightforward.
Actually, ATI has been the WORST offender in this category, especially in the 9xx0 series of cards. For a simple example, the Radeon 9000, 9100, 9200 and 9250 are all DirectX 8.1 cards, and are all actually slower revamps of the Radeon 8500. This is contrary to the "9000" series numbering, which at the very least would imply these cards would have *some* defining new features.
But let's look at your examples, thay have issues too...
A 9600 is worse than a 9700. A 9600 Pro is worse than a 9700.
True, but is a 9600 XT faster than a 9700? The performance is closer than you'd think. IS there really a need for the 9600 XT when the 9700 already exists? ATI sure thought so.
A 9700 Pro is worse than a 9800, etc.
Not true.
9700 Pro: 325Mhz Core, 620MHz DDR memory.
9800: 310MHz Core, 580Mhz DDR memory.
There was little change in the core between 9700 and 9800, so the clock speeds can be directly compared.
This, of course, ignores the extremely annoying lower cost "128-bit" Radeon 9800 cards (which are not well marked), 9600 SE cards that are barely as capable in performance as a 9200, the 9550 series (introduced well after the 9500 was replaced by the 9600).
Its much easier than trying to explain to them "Oh, get the 7800GT, not the 7800LT" (or whatever their latest business-class card is for that generation)
While Nvidia is just as guilty as ATI of playing the name game and causing ludicrous overlap (Nvidia FX series especially), they have really cleaned up their act with the 6000 series.
This is the entire lineup:
6200 TC, 6200
6600, 6600 GT
6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra
That's it. Compared to ATI's xXX0 PCIe lineup numbers, this is a walk in the park. Furthermore, there is no overlap between series (except say, overlap created by companies like BFG Tech who sell overclocked parts, but that's out of Nvidia's hands).
The 6200 is slower than the 6600.
The 6600 GT is slower than the 6800.
And now, the 7800 is faster than the 6800 Ultra.
What's so confusing here?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
For those that work in the chip industry, like myself, can tell you it probably won't be the same chip, the reason being, it's probably the first fully functional version of the processor, but still has some bugs and is probably larger than it needs to be.
That said, they'll relayout the design, shrinking it as much as possible given what they know about the current design. Remove metal layers if possible, again, from the informtion on the first run, and fix whatever remaining logic bugs they have.
This will allow them to sell it for cheaper because of reworking a lowcost version. Almost all chip manufacters of high volume parts do this.
Oh, try things like BRL-CAD, Maya, Custom VR applications (eg, built using things like Maverik). There are a lot of other apps. Go cruise freshmeat for them. Some F/OSS, some not, but the reason nVidia puts a decent amount of effort into their Linux drivers is they want to be the 3D solution for GNU/Linux workstations.
I, personally, am learning BRL-CAD, and I've used Maverik and OpenGL to make physics visualization software (personal use, I never got any of it to release quality).
Many of these don't use the whiz-bang new features on the newer cards, but the cards are clocked faster and are still improvements over the older cards even for simple OpenGL based apps. Some of the stuff can make use of the new features.
I do all my gaming under Linux, and I get my fix just fine (admittedly, I like (and play exclusively) gun-fu FPS games, with Id Software having written all my favorite engines, so I've never had compatibility problems, because I don't care about games written only for Windows).
Speaking of games, the parent missed an important one, Tenebrae, a modification of the original Quake engine which adds pixel shaders to the renderer (among other things). It's gorgeous. Someone also just started a similar project for the Quake2 engine, here.
To boot, X.org 6.8.1+ have support for true transparency, which needs hardware acceleration. Again, newer cards are not strictly necessary for this, but they help. You can get some pretty impressive eye candy on the latest X.org releases (if you're willing to tinker, but you're using GNU/Linux, so I assume you are. If you aren't, you'll have to wait for the Longhorn/DNF super-bundle to come out, or just buy a Mac).
I've been using Slackware GNU/Linux for 3D work for a while now, and I've been very happy with it.
Jeff
Actually, Gigabyte and XFX both have passively cooled solutions (including GeForce 6600's and 6800's) that are getting some decent reviews from the mini-pc and "silence is golden" communities. I'm looking at a passively cooled GeForce 6600 for my ShuttleX machine as a matter of fact.
I'm glad somebody is finally paying attention to this market.