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Nvidia Launches New Affordable GPU
mikemuch writes "Today Nvidia unveiled a new low-cost, high-power graphics processor SKU. ExtremeTech's Jason Cross has done all the benchmarking, and concludes ' This makes for an impressive bargain and a huge step up from the generic GeForce 6800. The big question: How will this fare against ATI's similarly priced X1000 series card, the Radeon X1600 XT?'"
Pretty decent review here I read earlier:
nVidia 6800GS
The real sweet spot for graphics is in the $250 to $300 price range.
We have no idea what the heck is going on here.
The big question: How will this fare against ATI's similarly priced X1000 series card, the Radeon X1600 XT? In short, we don't know.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
http://theinquirer.net/?article=27493
Nice of them to cut the price. I would like them to keep the SKU so I didn't have to keep up with anotherone: Although I suppose if they hadn't rebadged it, everyone who bought the 6800 would be pissed at the price cut.
We are often asked "Which video card should I buy?" We always answer with "well how much do you want to spend?" The inevitable reply is that everyone wants to run all the latest graphics-heavy games at high resolutions with all the features enabled, but they only want to spend $100 to $150 to do so. Sorry to say, but that's just not going to happen. The real sweet spot for graphics is in the $250 to $300 price range.
I cannot express how frustrating this is. People, please do not spend more than $150 on video card. This is just insane. I guess we do need people like this to keep the graphics market hot by paying $300 for a card. I just hope game manufactures don't think that their games should require $300 cards.
Granted this is a rough approximation, but it seems that GPUs are destined to waste all the power [watts] modern CPUs are saving.
I wish video card makers would be more CLEAR when they decide on names for their cards.
We are one step away from having "Nvidia Model 8912347892389110".
For lay men like myself who buy a new video card every few years, it is hard knowing what is what in the video card market since the names are very confusing i.e. 6800 GS vs. X800XL vs. 6800 GT.
Discuss.
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Nvidia is really the only way to go for 3D in linux. If you really only need 2D, I've heard good things about the old Matrox cards, but good luck finding one.
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You can probably get that previously $400 GeForce 4 card now for around $80. Probably would be more than enough for most people.
$250 makes for "a new low-cost, high-power graphics processor"?
Review of GeForce 6800 GS and ATI Radeon X1600 XT
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODgy
I don't think your graphicscard is the problem. My testmachine has an ATI Rage Pro 4MB PCI graphicscard and it runs perfectly with the latest X. So I doubt that an ATI Rage 128 isn't good enough.
Your CPU or the amount of RAM is the most probable cause of the slow performance.
...because no other standard-model human being would consider a $250 video card to be "affordable". Hint: for non-powergamers (including most geeks) "low cost" GPUs stop in the vicinity of $100.
Is there a technolgical reason why multiple GPUs can't be put on a card? I freely admit I know very little about graphics cards but it seems like it might be a cheap way to make a very powerful card. I seem to remember there was a card with two processors on that failed dismally because basically twice the price. What about a card with 4 or 8 cheap processors? Ok the power consumption would be silly but as long as it could be throttled so that when not playing a game only 1 GPU was used it might work. Just thought I'd share that with you all :o)
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
$250 is a new breakthrough in affordability?
I was naively waiting to read about a $100 gpu that performed well enough to play today's games at lcd resolutions.
When you can build a very fast system with everything sans gpu for $400-$500 spending more than half the system cost on a single component sounds fucking stupid.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Why do this I wondered? The problem was in government contracts. After you'd paid back the design costs addition computers could be pumped out at a cheaper price while still both making a profit and remaining competitive. The fly in this ointment is that the government, who often bought quantities of the earlier models where cost was not the first concern (when has cost ever been a concern to governments spending tax money?). I was told that the government contracts stipulated that if you ever lower the price on something you've sold them you have to rebate them the entire difference on every system delivered. Of course that would bankrupt any company, so they resorted to this rather transparent subterfuge.
Perhaps some form of that's what's happening here as well.
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Disclaimer: I make extensive use of both nvidia and ati hardware under GNU/Linux.
Nvidia is really the only way to go for 3D in linux. If you really only need 2D, I've heard good things about the old Matrox cards, but good luck finding one.
Not true. The proprietary ATI drivers (currently version 8.18.8) work as well as the nvidia drivers on both my amd64 and x86 boxes. Nvidia works fine (except for incessent flickering at 1920x1200 on one machine), as does ATI (but no flicker on that one machine). ATI works better ati 1920x1200@60Hz, but nvidia draws specular hilights on a celestia-rendered hi-res Earth better that ATI. In short, its a wash, with each manufacturer/driver having strengths and weaknesses the other does not.
The choice these days is one of personal preference. Your comment is at least a year behind the current state of the art, at least in the GNU/Linux world.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The AC is correct. The fastest, last AGP card from ATI was the X850 XT PE. If you want anything faster or new, it's only offered in PCI-E. To be frank, this pisses me off. There is a whole market with people running fast CPUs and DDR 3200 memory that do NOT want to swap out their motherboard. I cannot imagine why in the hell the current crop of video chipset cannot handle the bandwidth provided by AGP 8x. I mean, clearly there is a market for AGP cards.
I'm sorry, but I will not swap out my CPU and motherboard just so I can install faster cards only available in PCI-E.
Life is not for the lazy.
I bought a 6600 PCI-E for 179$. Why did I buy a 6600 PCI-E for 179$?
... But if that's what it takes to make the game "fun" we're obviously not playing the same games.
... you need a few moments of education :-)
It was the cheapest "non-crap" PCI-E from nvidia I could find. And you know what? It plays Far Cry, Thief3, Battlefield2 and the others JUST fine.
This bullshit article about "needing a 6800GT to enjoy the games" is just that. Bullshit. Sure the game may look shinier at 1600x1200 with 200fps and a billion texels/sec or whatever
Point is this article is all about selling the latest bullshit cards you don't need. A 6600 will do you just fine if you're an average gamer [e.g. you have REAL work to do the rest of the day], it can play games at 1024 and 1280 reasonable well [very well at the former].
If you're on a budget and you think you need to spend 250$ USD [keep in mind 179$ I'm talking about is Canadian not USD] to enjoy games
This is just a press release disguised on a 30 page article [chalk full of ads no less] to sell the latest and greatest...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
GeForce 6800 GT - $266, according to PriceGrabber.
The cheaper model has 12 instead of 16 pixel shaders, and 5 instead of 6 vertex shaders. They probably use the same chip. The benchmarks are close. $17 cheaper. Big deal.
In terms of price/performance, Via is probably the leader. They've just introduced some new S3 Chrome boards that are roughly comparable to the GEForce 6800 line, but are priced around $150. That technology will probably be in Via's motherboard chipsets soon, at an even lower price.
Notice that it has less pixel pipes. There are 4 blocks of 4 on a 6800 series chip, and one of those is disabled. However, the chip is clocked faster. My guess is they have found that they are still having a number of chips that one of the four blocks will fail on, espically at higher speeds. Ok so just make a new line of cards that only has three active at a higher speed and sell it. Gamers are happy, and you get to use more of your production capacity.
Dude, that chart is terrible. You forget that the GPU is least important piece of hardware, and their are other components utilizing the power supply. Using 200 of 300 watts is decent, but it isn't going to cut it. What about the CPU, case fans, and the cdrom that now ALL games require. How about they rework the way the GPU functions - something similar to what intel did to make the Pentium M.
Look at this website to get another look at power consumption.
I've been tracking video card reviews for years. Typically the performance of a GPU doesn't change much subsequent to its introduction. What would be the value in doing a subsequent review?
Most of the top review sites keep a generation or two of older chips in their comparisons. Some even compile regular guides on value and midstream priced parts. If you can't find information on cheaper video cards then you aren't looking hard enough.
They also currently win in GPU volumes (and revenue). Intel is the largest GPU manufactuer followed by ATI, and NVIDIA in a close third. Thing is ATI and INTEL currently have greater OEM/Integrated market penetration than NVIDIA. So while INTEL is the biggest know anyone who actually can game on one of those integrated decellerators?
I'm sorry, but I will not swap out my CPU and motherboard just so I can install faster cards only available in PCI-E.
You will eventually. ATI just decided to stop supporting our shrinking market segment.
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The 6600 isn't a bad card, and if you're on a budget I'd totally recommend it. On the other hand, you can get significantly better performance for more money.
Now, I'm not saying that these games aren't fun at 1024x768 with dynamic lighting turned off, blob shadows, and "medium" resolution textures, but it's still like the difference between watching a movie on an old television versus seeing it in a theater.
If you have the money, you can make your games look significantly better for the price of two games. Why *wouldn't* you do it?
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Ah, but enjoyment is relative, isn't it? I average about 30 minutes per day of Battlefield 2, and occasionally will play through another game (I'm on interval 2 of FEAR right now). My previous system was an Athlon XP 2500+ w/ a gig of RAM and a 6600GT AGP. While it ran the game at 1280 (my LCD's native resolution), when involved in firefights my minimum framerate typically dropped to below 10 frames per second. It just got too frustrating for me to be continually killed, not because I lacked the skills (trust me, that happens often enough), but because my system couldn't handle it. Along with many other things (a flash website I'm forced to use maxing my CPU and causing winamp to skip, Eclipse taking 20+ seconds to start for my development work, etc.), I upgraded to a Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 gigs of fast RAM, and a X800XT All-in-Wonder AGP. Let's assume I'll use this computer for 3 years, and upgrade the video card once during that time:
Amount I spent on the computer: $1061 + $257, including shipping.
New video card in 1.5 years: $250
A total cost over 3 years of $1568.
That means, to increase my minimum framerates to 60fps now and 30fps over the entire duriation, I spending an average of $1.43 per day on my computer (this is assuming that the computer becomes completely worthless to me after 3 years, which is absurd, but let's go with it). Let's further assume that my developer time is worth $25 per hour (actually considerably more), and that I start Eclipse 5 times per day, 5 days per week (probably an underestimate). The new computer (it comes with a faster hard drive, too) starts Eclipse in about 4 seconds. I save an average of $0.55 per day from that enhancement alone. Assume that my total productivity is in Eclipse, and that's the only benefit I get from the new computer besides gaming (it's much quieter, it comes with far better warranties, it's less then a third of the weight of my previous computer, is smaller, and comes with a TV tuner allowing me to save desk space). I'm still paying only $0.88 per day on gaming (not including the price of games). You may have done this analysis on your own and determined that it wasn't worth $0.88 per day for your enjoyment. Personally, I find that an emminently resonable amount to spend on entertainment. It's less then I would spend on cable; less then I would spend on seeing a movie a week at the local cineplex.
It took more keystrokes to insult you with a post about number of keystrokes than to inform you... (irony?)