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."

Comments

And the ATI R520...

[daveschroeder]

...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.

Re:And the ATI R520...

[Enigma_Man]

So in that case, if the R520 (and its associated H.264) is aimed at low-to-midrange systems, why is the article saying that it'll possibly surpass the speed of the new NVidia offering? Is it going to both be fast and cheap? That'd be nice.

-Jesse

Re:And the ATI R520...

[TobyWong]

The R520 is going to be insanely expensive, just like the 7800GTX. These are bleeding edge enthusiast level cards not really intended for the mass market. The nutjobs aka early adopters spend $600+ USD to get the latest and greatest vid card and then a year later everyone else gets the same technology for $150.

I say this as one of the aforementioned nutjobs.

Re:And the ATI R520...

[DeadBugs]

Actually NVIDIA's old cards that have been out for over a year support H.264.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_16213.html

If you download The latest Windows Media Player and have a 6xxx series video card with "pure video" you can run hardware accelerated H.264 video.

Even the ultra-cheap 6200 line (which would work just fine in a mac-mini)can do this.

Re:And the ATI R520...

[GarfBond]

In that whole document H.264 is mentioned once, and only to say that PureVideo is "adaptable," which presumably means that it may support it in the future. From Anandtech:

NVIDIA has also said that the 7800 GTX should support H.264, but have said that the driver will not have support until near year's end. As we have already seen an H.264 demo from ATI, and the lack of anything tangible from NVIDIA at this point is disappointing. We are hesitant to even mention NVIDIA's claimed "support" before we see it running on actual hardware (especially after the lacking and late Purevideo support for initial NV40 parts). This time around, we can expect more support for alternate video players from NVIDIA as they are working with InterVideo and Cyberlink.

Re:And the ATI R520...

[Jozer99]

There is a lot of difference in power consumption and heat between the Radeon 9200 vs. the 6200. The 9200 is basically a Radeon 8500, but built on a smaller die size, to reduce heat and power, and underclocked compaired to the 8500. This leads to very little heat and power use. While the 6200 is not the glutton that the 6800s or x850s are, it still requires lots of power and a large heatsink.

Costs as much as a new low end PC or 2!

[mister_llah]

Hmm, $600?

I think I have a spare kidney. ...

Bastards.

Re:Costs as much as a new low end PC or 2!

[llZENll]

spending over $200 for any video card is just nuts to me, but if you stop and think about the transistor count and sheer power in todays cards the price is justified compared to a motherboard and cpu.

if they bundled a driver which emulated a x86 processor on the GPU and showed up as a normal cpu in Windows or Linux, so then you could run highly optimized vector and matrix math on it they might open a whole new market for these cards in the scientific communities.

Re:Costs as much as a new low end PC or 2!

[Mr_Matt]

Yeah, maybe. I don't know how FFXI works, but in every game I play, I just turn off some of the shiny, fancy features, maybe turn down the resolution, and get wicked framerates as a result. It's always a blast owning some n00b whose many-thousands-of-dollars system, running at 1600x1200x8x4x, couldn't line up the shot as fast as my $800 FrankenPuter running at 800x600 and 72fps.

For me at least, a lot of the chrome they put in games nowadays is a distraction from what I'm trying to do in-game, and I'd rather play without it. Yeah, I don't get bump-mapped anti-aliased 32bit color on my closeups of Lara Croft's guns (not those, the other ones) but I don't have to drop six c-notes everytime ATi/nVidia come up with the latest and greatest. Different strokes, I guess...

RSX

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this compare to the RSX planned for the PS3?

Re:RSX

[VAXcat]

It's a crime that the sacred letters RSX are being used for anything on the PS3, or on cars...RSX11M V3.2 forever!

Re:RSX

[The Kow]

I was at a presentation NVidia held here in San Francisco where they talked about it, and my vague understanding (they mentioned the PS3 mostly just to keep the crowd whipped up) was that the PS3 card was based on the 6800 model, though it would still support stuff like Shader Model 3.0, and possibly their High Dynamic Range rendering, too.

Wonderful

[WayneTheGoblin]

So now I can almost play Doom 3.

Brief moment in the limelight

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not limelight but the healthy green glow of a power supply pushed to the limit.

In the year 2025...

[It doesn't come easy]

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 R092064262670, which is suspected to come out within the next two minutes.

What about for laptops?

[Dancin_Santa]

In some respects, laptops will always lag behind desktops as it always takes longer to miniaturize than to develop in the first place. So I wonder what the best graphics chips are for laptops and how much of a time lag we can expect between the release of a new card and the time it takes to put it into a portable machine.

Desktops are very cumbersome and difficult to carry to LAN parties and elsewhere, which is why I prefer laptops (even desktop-replacement laptops are more portable than true desktop computer). Gaming is one aspect that suffers on laptops because of the lag between CPU/graphics card release and eventual laptop release.

Is there a general rule of thumb regarding how long this lag takes? Does either NVidia or ATI seem to keep this lag to a minimum?

I suppose it also makes sense to ask whether anyone bases their laptop purchases on what graphics chips are built into the machine.

Performance margin hardly worth it

[Bonzor]

So much money for a card that hardly performs all that much better than a 6800 Ultra. I'm an nVidia fan, but if R520 is as good as everyone says, I'm getting that...in a year or two of course...unless an IT job actually pays me good money... *runs to closet to cry*

Re:Performance margin hardly worth it

[slummy]

I'm an nVidia fan, but if R520 is as good as everyone says, I'm getting that

Stick with nVidia, especially if you're running an OS other than Windows. ATI drivers in Linux still stink.

unless an IT job actually pays me good money

So.. much.. pain.. felt.

Re:Performance margin hardly worth it

[ph43drus]

Some sort of non-gaming application that uses a graphics card. Having trouble thinking of one now, but I know they exist somewhere ;)

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

Tom's Hardware Review

[alstor]

Tom's also has a set of reviews and links available.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/200506221 /index.html/

er nvidia..

[DeathByDuke]

...why is this called Geforce 7? It behaves and performs more like a Geforce 6 refresh. It should've been a 6900.

On another note, is the price tag worth it? Theres a lot of geforce 6800 Ultra/Radeon x800XT/850 users who arent going to see nothing more than a 10fps increase in Doom3 at 1600x1200 4xFSAA.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trolling. I'm disappointed. I like many other doubtlessly are, are checking these reviews with a view in mind on maybe purchasing such a card in the future. I'm actually concerned R520 could hit a similar performance 'wall' now...

Or maybe we are just seeing the restrictions of CPU tying due to less than large increases in CPU performance and speeds in the last two years versus graphics. It'll be interesting to see a site test the 7800/R520 out on a FX57/59 etc or higher. Maybe when nvidia releases their multithreaded drivers, we may see some better gains.

Re:er nvidia..

[2megs]

On another note, is the price tag worth it? Theres a lot of geforce 6800 Ultra/Radeon x800XT/850 users who arent going to see nothing more than a 10fps increase in Doom3 at 1600x1200 4xFSAA.

If you already own one of those cards, prossibly not, but not everyone has bought a new video card in the last six months. To someone with, say, a Radeon 9800 XT, perhaps the jump in performance has now gone from "not worth it" for a 6800 Ultra to "hey, that's a big step up". Similarly, the X800 was a worthwhile upgrade to someone with a Radeon 8500, but possibly not to someone with a Radeon 9800 XT. People buy when there's enough of a performance difference to make it worthwhile to them, and with tech always advancing sooner or later your day will come.

Brand loyalty...

[Xugumad]

"...gamers and PC builders staunchly defend their favorite brands while throwing mud in the face of the other, treating anecdotal evidence as gospel"

Am I truly the only person willing to switch happily between Nvidia and ATi, depending on which best fits my needs at the time?

Re:Brand loyalty...

[crow]

I'll only buy nVidia because it's the only one with halfway decent drivers for Linux.

Re:Brand loyalty...

[Quince alPillan]

Usually the reason for this is because that person has been burned by one company or the other in the past and have switched. Or, they've had exceptionally good performance from one brand and see others having abysmal performance in the other.

Personally, I'm an ATI fan because back when I was upgrading my computer for the first time I saw how all the GeForce2s were the best cards on the market (at the time VooDoo who I'd used before was in its death throes). 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!

After kicking myself and eating the cost, I decided that I was never going to buy from a company that made nth generation cards that were worse than nth-1 generation cards.

I normally don't keep track of all the numbering schemes up until around the time that I decide I need a new card, so rather than being confused by marketing lingo, I've stuck with ATI. 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. A 9600 is worse than a 9700. A 9600 Pro is worse than a 9700. A 9700 Pro is worse than a 9800, etc.

It also helps when I'm recommending a card to someone. If I tell them to get something ATI and their latest cards are the X800 I can tell them to get an X800. 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) and less confusing when the clueless gamer (or the gamer's parents, which is more likely) goes to buy the card in question.

Re:Brand loyalty...

[default luser]

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?

pricing themselves out of reach

[gmknobl]

A few things:

a) They are pricing themselves beyond reason for even enthusiasts. Not too long ago, the top level for a graphics card was $400. That was expensive but within reach. I think they may be passing the point were even the enthusiast crowd will purhcase this.

b) Most people will wait until the next products come out from them and ATI. I mean, when you know that cheaper products will come out with most of the performance AND that better products will come out with better performance in this same series, why buy this? Just one example - remember ATI's 9700.

c) It's just for prestige anyway. That's the real reason this card has been released. They'll wait until ATI comes out with a reply card, wait a few months, and come out with something faster again and get good PR OR not have anything faster and suffer the consequences in bad PR.

Price Point Comment

[dannyitc]

Quoted from anandtech:

One of the most impressive aspects of this launch is that the part is available now. I mean right now. Order it today and plug it in tomorrow. That's right, not only has NVIDIA gotten the part to vendors, but vendors have gotten their product all the way to retailers. This is unprecedented for any graphics hardware launch in recent memory. In the midst of all the recent paper launches in the computer hardware industry, this move is a challenge to all other hardware design houses.

ATI is particularly on the spot after today. Their recent history of announcing products that don't see any significant volume in the retail market for months is disruptive in and of itself. Now that NVIDIA has made this move, ATI absolutely must follow suit. Over the past year, the public has been getting quite tired of failed assurances that product will be available "next week". This very refreshing blast of availability is long overdue. ATI cannot afford to have R520 availability "soon" after launch; ATI must have products available for retail purchase at launch.

I would assume one of the reasons the price point is higher is the fact that this card was pushed to retail much faster than either nvidia or ati has been able to do before. I would suspect that, given an amount of time comparable to the normal lag between launch and having the card available on shelves, the price will be more comparable to launch prices we're accustomed to seeing.

Re:WHAT?!?

[furry_wookie]

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

GLOOM 3

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

now you can play Doom 3 with the long awaited feature ingame_lights=1.

So you can have the whole scene rendered and lit too!

This is the PS3 GPU for sure

[rAiNsT0rm]

No doubt that this is the heart of the PS3, even the 302 million transistor comparisons were the same used at E3. We are seeing today what the GPU of the PS3 will be, and it is pretty darn impressive. However, even in volume the price point is very high... even a year down the road I can't see this bugger going lower than 300-400 retail.

Even at a loss the PS3 seems to be placing itself in the $400+ market as thought.

Re:This is the PS3 GPU for sure

[Pulzar]

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.

Re:This is the PS3 GPU for sure

[rAiNsT0rm]

I understand what you all are saying, but this is basically the heart of the PS3. It is what was running at E3, and no one would put that much effort into developing for a temporary vid card (especially the Unreal engine). Nothing major is going to be different between this and the RSX, just small tweaks... otherwise the transistor count wouldn't be similar nor the featureset.

Sony needs the price to be reasonable, these will be stable in production by then and even if there are slight differences in production the major core will be the same. The costs will be down and this will indeed be basically the heart of the PS3. HDR, transparency, AA/AF, all these will be what the PS3's new titles utilize. Any variation from the 7800GTX to the RSX will be minimal.

Re:This is the PS3 GPU for sure

[PixelSlut]

One interesting thing to note is the focus on generic shaders. In all previous generation GPUs from both NVIDIA and ATI, the drivers have done a runtime substitution for shaders, in order to optimize certain parts of very populate games for certain hardware.

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.

Need more power...

[Duncan3]

100 watts... joy.

Someone needs to build a card that draws single digit wattage and will drive 2048x1536 displays, and they will sell loads of them. I cannot be the only one sick of the jet engine noise and space heater performance.

Ya know, like an Mac Mini, only with high resolution.

Re:Need more power...

[tomstdenis]

It's called compromise.

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 ... but it's also only 100 bucks and doesn't make noise ;-)

Tom

Re:Need more power...

[Zed2K]

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.

Re:Need more power...

[radish]

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.

Death of PC gaming

[Snowbeam]

There has been some talk about the death of PC gaming. With video cards costing this much, it's cheaper to just buy a gaming console and get better effects out of that.

Summary:

[beef3k]

Your games will run about 15-20 fps faster, or a general 30% performance gain.

Conclusion: Spend your money on beer instead.

Re:WHAT?!?

[Richard_at_work]

This is the latest, greatest top of the range graphics card with lots of RAM, the newest GPU core, onboard decoders and other things. Show me the latest, greatest PC with a top of the range CPU, lots of fast RAM and a large disk. The price disparaty wont be as obvious.

Your cheap components are not current generation.

R520

[williamhooligan]

it may be short-lived once ATI comes out with their latest GPU technology, code-named R520

What a crap codename. If I was inventing what was going to be the fastest chip around, I'd have called it "Codename: BASTARDFIRE" or "SHITSTORM" or something. Let the marketing guys mod it down to R520 upon release.

Maybe the true purpose of the card is exposure

[LaserSamuraiHead]

While it's true that this doesn't seem to be much of an increase in speed especially compared to moving from the nvidia 5xxx FX series to the 6xxx series of videocards, the 7800 gtx does make it faster than ATI's current fastest card. This makes it so when a regular (non-nerd) person who plays the occasional computer game asks his/her computer nerd friend "hey, who makes the fastest video cards right now" the response will be Nvidia. That means that the non-nerd person will be more likely to buy the Nvidia card based on the "recommendation" from their computer nerd friend. So nvidia just needs to make this product available even though few people will buy it to make it worth it.

I don't suppose John Carmack is reading but...

[aendeuryu]

When all those articles were coming out about Doom 3 being such a sophisticated engine that current hardware couldn't take full advantage of it, I couldn't help but wonder, how do you know that? How do you test a claim regarding performance on non-existent hardware? So, that got me wondering, was Doom 3 tested on nvidia 7800 prototypes, or maybe 8800 (pretending it exists)? Further to the point, if Id has access to this avant garde stuff, what can we expect?

I'm not writing this as a skeptic. I'm honestly just curious.

Re:I don't suppose John Carmack is reading but...

[friedmud]

id does get new graphics cards _far_ in advance of their release... something like 6 months to a year in advance. Nvidia and ATI both keep in very close contact with John all the way through the development process. John has even talked about how he has helped them track down driver bugs for unreleased hardware before.

If you can, try to go to QuakeCon sometime. John's keynote is always enlightening (except that last year he gave it via a prerecorded DVD... which was kind of boring.... but I guess the birth of his child was a little more important ;-)

Friedmud

uh, BFD?

[ashpool7]

The 7800 has it too.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050622/ nvidia_7800_gtx-04.html

Re:uh, BFD?

[Slack3r78]

Are you really this unaware of how the GPU market works? There will be budget versions of the nVidia cards. Period.

In fact, nVidia is the choice of many enthusiasts right now specifically because they pulled through with a solidly performing mid-range card in the 6600 where ATI failed to do so. ATI's competitor to the 6600GT was supposed to be the X700XT - IE: the card that was paper launched and *NEVER* made it to market. So while ATI had a slight lead on the high end this time around, nVidia was the way to go for those of us who aren't comfortable spending $400 on a video card.

Whether ATI will repeat that mistake this generation remains to be seen, but nVidia getting a two month certainly won't help. While I doubt it'll be a GeForce FX fiasco, it's certainly going to be an uphill battle for them.

Stagnation is what we need!

[rAiNsT0rm]

This is precisely what is wrong, we need stagnation so that developers can actually focus on and utilize a video card. In the current state NONE of the features of current cards are being utilized properly.

Ever notice how it takes a year or so for console games to really begin to shine? This never happens because in 14 months 8-10 cards have come and gone. If there was some standardization and a slowdown the industry could focus on content rather than FPS in a two or three year old game that doesn't utilize ANY of the new cards features.

The FX line of cards had the ability to be great but needed to be programmed for directly, and because of trying to cover ATI and other vendors none of the cool features ever saw daylight (remember the cloth/trasparency demo's)

I know ATI and Nvidia will never try to standardize, nor will they slow the flow of cards with small increases in actual performance at high prices, but if they would PC's could actually get utilized to their fullest potential (hell this 7800gtx TURNS OFF TRANSISTORS to save power, just showing how under-utilized and un-needed they truly are)

Same for Game consoles, standardize, build them into consumer electronics... sell in quantity with less marketing, R&D, and loss and sell billions of games. It is a win/win for hardware manufacturers and developers... just as soon as people wake up.

Re:Stagnation is what we need!

[_Shorty-dammit]

um, Direct3D? OpenGL? Nobody, strictly speaking, targets any video card. They target specific APIs, and it's up to video card vendors to cater to those APIs. Just because NVIDIA is the only card today to support Shader Model 3.0 doesn't mean that vendors writing games for SM 3.0 are only supporting NVIDIA. Just means that ATI doesn't support SM 3.0 yet, but their next gen chip will, and then those games will run the same code as the NVIDIA cards do. :P

Nividia Solid

[augustz]

Lots of somewhat bogus postings.

The 7800 performs significantly better than 6800. In fact, reading through the (many) reviews that all popped up with NDA's expiring, in higher res / anti-aliasing a single 7800 is beating dual 6800's SLI. Of course, choice of benchmark affects these results, but it does look like a generational increase in speed.

In addition, it uses LESS POWER. No one seems to be mentioning this, but these cards suck up rediculous amounts of power. This bodes well for cheaper versions.

And cheaper versions are going to be coming, this release is for the insane gaming crowd that is already spending $1k on SLI setups. The price/value at this point is not the point, it is just about how fast you can go.

ATI feels like they are a generation behind to me. They are coming out with first gen SLI, first gen Shader 3, while Nvidia is already on their second spins.

The key of course is when they release their next gen part (and by this I mean actual retail volume, not a paper launch). In six months another cycle of cards will be coming through, so one has to be careful to compare apples to apples.

Plus of course there is the nice AMD64 and Linux support (not perfect, but good) from Nvidia. Bottom line, will wait to see the ATI part, and how available it actually is, before singing its praises.

Forget about ATI and NVIDIA !

[glMatrixMode]

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.

Re:Bleeding edge no more...

[The_Dougster]

600 bones for a vid card that is going to showcase what reveloutionry/evolutionary new game?

Exactly. I'm pretty bored with all my FPS shooters. HL2 and Doom3 were both pretty cool and all, but I just don't find myself spending much time playing them. I think they added too much frustration and realism and forgot to make the games fun.

I spend way more time playing NwN online or running classic old DOS games like Master of Orion using DOSBox than playing these latest and greatest offerings.

The most recent FPS game I have played which was actually FUN was Serious Sam 1. That game is just a howl in multiplayer co-op mode with unlimited ammo turned on and serious difficulty level. I haven't even played that for a year at least.

I'd say that this is one of those times where hardware has shot past the software in capabilities. Kind of like running Quake2 on your Voodoo2 card. I should probably try FarCry one of these days but I just can't get enthused about another shooter right now.

And For That Price

[crawling_chaos]

I can buy a PS3 and an Xbox 360, both of which will have games that aren't technology demos masquerading as entertainment (hi id!). Six hundred bucks for a video card is outrageous given the sorry state of PC games today. The kind of games that excel on the PC (RTS, MMORG, and other RPGs) don't really need that kind of processing power, particularly at that price point.

Anybody else think that this sort of thing just isn't sustainable?

Re:And For That Price

[Zed2K]

"I can buy a PS3 and an Xbox 360,"

Actually you can't because the PS3 and Xbox 360 don't exist yet and no pricing info has been officially announced for either new console.

" both of which will have games that aren't technology demos masquerading as entertainment (hi id!)."

But instead will have games that are repeats of games we've all played a million times over again.

2 Additional Reviews Worth Mentioning

[Vaystrem]

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.

http://www.beyond3d.com/previews/nvidia/g70/Beyond 3D as always has a fantastic writeup including information on: CPU Utilization for video decoding, noise, power consumption, etc.

Newest top end

[Craig Ringer]

Well ... the very newest, top-end cards may be out of reach of all but those who consider "quad opteron" a serious option for their next gaming box. Don't laugh, there are certain to be a few out there.

Thing is, it doesn't matter. Doing so:

• means they can still claim to have "the fastest card on the market" even if they can't afford to sell many (remember, at small yields it can cost MEGABUCKS to make these things);
• makes the other cards in their range look more reasonably priced by comparison
• makes the "mid range" look higher - again, probably helps push up what people will consider buying;
• helps make sure they have reviews of the production part published, games listing support for them, etc by the time production volumes rise and prices on the card are dropped to saner levels; and
• Probably doesn't cost them much anyway; they may as well try to get megabucks for a few cards while ramping up volumes.

Re:Still going to buy the 6600GT

[gothfox]

Nope. Strictly speaking, best bang for the buck (if you're feeling lucky) is 6800LE which pipelines can be software unblocked practically up to 6800GT if you are very lucky and up to vanilla 6800 usually.

Of course, if you are afraid of all this nerdy-hacky shit and don't plan on using anti aliasing and higher levels of anisotropy (128bit memory bus craps out on AA), 6600GT seems like a very nice and reasonably priced card.

Note that I'm only talking about single card systems, not SLI.