Slashdot Mirror
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS For AGP Launched
Spinnerbait writes "Although new system sales with AGP slots are almost non-existent these days
in the consumer desktop space, there is a still a fair aftermarket demand for
upgrades in the retail area where AGP enabled motherboards abound. Although PCI
Express is the mainstay interface for most new cards from graphics giants like
NVIDIA and ATI,
NVIDIA unwrapped a fairly high end card dubbed the
GeForce 7800 GS, in an AGP variant. 16 pixel shaders engines and DX9
SM3.0 graphics compliant hardware in the latest GPU architecture from NVIDIA now
available in AGP."
You know, an actual competing product instead of an older product from the same company...
Say, like, the one at Anandtech.
Amazing how different a part can come across in two different review/tests... I mean, Anand still shows it worthy, on the strength of being a little cheaper than the x850, but it is in perspective. The review linked makes it look like an AGP renaissance...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
And here I was thinkin I needa go build a new machine...no longer!
You can probably check for Linux/BSD/Solaris drivers from Nvidia's website. The drivers you can find here: http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp
Currently they only have Windows XP/2000 drivers for it, but I would imagine that the Linux etc. drivers will be available soon.
My sig is permanently on strike.
One interesting thing that I noted in those two reviews is that both of them use AMD processors... it looks like AMD has replaced Intel as the highend gaming CPU. A more complete benchmark will include a test with two similar systems with different processors (equivalent).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Well my 18 month old Asus A8V board supports the the latest AMD Dual Core processors (AMD64 4800+), does Dual Channel DDR RAM and has a AGP port. Does this mean it's not as powerful as the latest PCIe system? I think more likely, PCIe was introduced to make the fools with more money than sense go and buy new Mobos and graphics cards....
You're assuming only three and four year old machines have AGP slots?
For a great number of reasons my most recent PC ended up with an AGP slot, it's less than 12 months old. This kind of card may just be a worth addition.
Hell, out of a dozen or so associates I can only name one that has a PCIE graphics setup.
Anandtech
Techreport
Neoseeker
They are already out
Nvidia has always been good about getting Linux drivers out for desktop parts.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
It's an improvement over AGP in many ways. PCI-E is a fast bi-directional point-to-point bus, so that enables neat things like multi-card SLI (multiple graphics cards rendering different parts of the same image for increased performance; they can talk to each other over the bus without having to go through the chipset first). Also, from what I understand, PCI-E is much easier to implement electrically than parallel protocols like AGP & PCI; therefore, it's cheaper for both card makers and motherboard makers to implement. Finally, the PCI-E graphics card slot can deliver a good deal more wattage through the connector than AGP can.
Basically this is a ho-hum card at a high price. You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350. The 7800GT is a 20 pipeline / 16 ROP card, while the 7800 GS is a 16/8. Its no contest which is faster. You can use your old DDR and CPU with the new MB making it a no brainer to avoid the 7800GS.
On the other side though, what about the remainder of us who already have (I'm not one of them) decent systems, but don't have PCI-E expansion slots. Consider the entire group of pre-64 bit users with beefy systems that have been left without an upgrade path for their video card.
I agree that newer GPU will continue to require larger and beefier systems to push the data to them (after all gameplay is still handled by the CPU), but you should not discredit them for providing a product that is quite viable.
What I would like to see, is more motherboard manufacturer's offering modern CPU systems, but still with support for the AGP video cards. Ideally, I'd like to see a system with both an AGP and a PCI-E expansion port. Video is not the only card we'll ever get that could take advantage of the PCI-E slot, or atleast I hope its not. I'd really like to see drive controllers and other potential devices take advantage of the port, and I really hope that this port doesn't turn into just another video slot, like the AGP was.
just my 2cents
harryk
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
I originally switched to ATI products because their overlay controls were more intuitive and had a more vibrant overlay.
I hear that nVidias overlay IQ is much better these days, but it'd be nice to know whether their overlay controls had been redesigned.
This looks like a great card for someone with a AGP slot and a decent cpu to team up with the card, but if i did get this card it would be going in my game machine at the office. Just a AMD XP3000 which now has just a 5900 in it. All ive been doing is Guild Wars lately (when im working of course)and the game plays great on what ive got. This card will most likely be put into systems with slower CPU's and older motherboards and chipsets. Would be interesting to see a review that maybe showed how the card scales with a wide range of older and recent processors (didnt check any other reviews other than the HH link). Lets say from the XP2000 on up to recent chips (on the AMD side). Just som people know that they wont be wasting there money by tossing this card in there older machine.
I thought the increase was in bus bandwidth, and that was only used when tranferring large textures that are too big for the graphics card's onboard memory, so the main memory can be used. Seing as most GPU's of this calibre are 256MB, I think a 25% performance increase is only likely if your handling large (>256MB textures). Again, I may be totally wrong, but does anyone know? I suppose the question is. Given 2 cards, 1xAGP implementation, 1xPCIe implmentation, with the same GPU, and asusming that they are handling textures less than the maximum amount of onboard memory, will they perform the same? Does PCIe increases bandwidth only benefit when larger textures are used?? Anyone know for sure?
Welcome to 2 years ago. The Athlon 64 is the best desktop chip available.
But these days desktops are only about 50% of the market, and AMD really has nothing to compete with in the portable market. It's starting to shape up as AMD = desktops and servers; Intel = compact desktops (iMac) and laptops.
The only reason Intel has a presence in the desktop market is Dell. Just wait until Dell gives in; AMD is currently building their new corporate HQ in Austin about 10 miles down the freeway from Dell's in Round Rock (RR is a suburb of Austin.) It's only a matter of time.
These high end cards seriously need dual DVI support. This 7800 comes with DVI and DSUB connectors. This is useless in my opinion for the amount of money it costs.
The best way, I find, as a casual gamer that doesn't need to pay the games at the highest possible resolution, etc. Is to just buy a 100-200 dollar video card every 2-3 years. A mediocre video card can usually play modern games just fine, and in that span you've upgraded all your other hardware to match the capability of the card. I don't need 60fps in the newest game at 1600x1400 to be happy, so this approach works fine for me.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
The bi-directional nature of PCIe is particularly useful for general purpose GPU operations, where reading the results back over AGP is currently a bottleneck. Another nice thing about PCIe is that it is designed you can have more than one slot in a system (AGP is limited to one card), which means that it can be used for other things than graphics. Some people here may remember that PCI was originally just (or, at least, mainly) for graphics, but fairly quickly the bandwidth requirements of other things increased to the point where 16-bit ISA was not enough. It's cheaper to make a motherboard with only PCIe slots than one with PCI and AGP slots (although, in the short term, you will get PCI and PCIe, just as you had PCI and ISA for a while), because you only need one set of electronics for everything.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, I personally consider Doom3 to be a pretty highend game. Plus, I've gotten games working through Wine that ended up using the Linux drivers provided by Nvidia.
While I would agree there's an inverse function of CPU to graphic card power, it's not as bleak as that!
:o)
I have an "antique" 700Mhz Athlon machine with an AGP slot...which was "new technology" when I bought/built the machine. It originally had a VooDoo 3 AGP card, then an Nvidia 4200. Has a Radeon 9600XT now. While it's mostly used as an iTunes server these days, I still play Wolfenstein, America's Army, and a ton of other games on it. I get pretty darn good frame rates.
My main box is a "beefy" Athlon 64, 2GB of RAM, fast drives, and....a Radeon 9600XT. I got the pair for the price of one, so it was a no-brainer. With the obvious exceptions of Doom3 and Far Cry, most games play about the same on the two machines. The gating factor is the Radeon card for the most part. I should point out that I am a tuning freak, so my boxes scream and have only the bare necessities running. In other words, I don't rip DVDs while running PhotoShop and playing Call of Duty 2.
That said, I most likely will get a 7800 GS for the A64, but leave the mothball machine alone. At that point, I'm sure I would be CPU bound and wasting horsepower. Plus, the power supply in the old box won't handle much more! A new card like the 7800 would probably keep it from POSTing.
The point is that I am real happy to see an AGP part with some horsepower from Nvidia. I like the Radeons I have, but I usually have less grief with NV parts. I don't plan on building another box until some really mature dual-core parts are available from AMD. So, no PCIe slots until then. That makes a fast(er) AGP part a nice stopgap purchase.
And I think I will be seeing a buttload more than 5-6 fps.
I am my own gestalt.
AMD is slightly behind, only because they didn't jump to 65nm as fast as Intel. When they do (shortly) by all accounts they should jump right past Intel.
The idea that AMD doesn't have good mobile processors was from 5+ years ago, and wasn't completely true back then anyhow.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Since there are no such games available for linux, bsd, and soloairs
Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal in its various versions, America's Army are all available for Linux, and, by extension, for FreeBSD at least.
Are there any graphics applications under linux that would take advantage of it?
Blender, Maya come to mind; surely there are others.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Its frustrating to see a 350$ card with only one DVI connector on it. (Please ship cards with two and an analog adapter.)
People wanting to run two flat panels on their (AGP) system are going to have one less-than-crisp display, or run a 6600GT.
I'd really like to upgrade off my Ti4800SE, but I want dual DVI.
Maybe not in CPU speeds, but in performance testing and battery life, Intel still has a pretty good advantage.
In desktop gaming AMD generally beats the snot out of Intel - you can see that by reading the CPU testing here, so it's no surprise (to me, at least) that high end gamer rigs prefer AMD.
I think it depends on the games you play too. Its similar to video card choice. If you buy games from a company that favors AMD or reacts quickly to whats popular, then AMD chips would be the best choice. If you play a few year old games, or from a vendor that favors intel its more logical to buy intel. Likewise, some companies optimize for ATI and others nVidia.
The other factor is what operating systems you intend to use and the motherboard chipset. Gamer rigs are often custom built and therefore gamers can pick known stable chipsets. If you walk into best buy and pick up a machine, its bound to have a cheap chipset. I prefer intel chips because I know the intel based chipsets will have working usb, agp (or pciE), etc. AMD processors are great, but the chipsets to go with them often suck.
I suspect intel will need to work on speedy chips after they get their power usage under control. Soon software will be optimzied for AMD chips and intel will have to play catch up. The more popular AMD gets, the more reliable the motherboards will become (i hope).
Just as a side note, i have a dual xeon 2.0ghz and an amd sempron 2300+ (nforce2). WIth a non SMP kernel in linux or freebsd 6 I noticed that the two systems run about the same speed. They seem very comparable. The AMD machine even has a slower bus speed. And both have different disk subsystems (xeon has a u160 scsi disk and the amd box has a sata raid 1 array). I just find it interesting that cpu bound operations are similar for an intel workstation class chip and a low end amd thats rated only 300 mhz faster. On freebsd, this is with custom kernels and userland recompiled for the chips. Generic performance is worse on the amd machine.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
The difference between 24 frames per second (FPS) and 60 FPS is enormous, and easily visible. The difference between 60 FPS and 80 FPS (usually corresponding to the monitor's refresh rate) is also noticable if you play enough games. Even if vertical refresh limited, FPS is noticible past 60. Past around 80 fps, the lag becomes indistinguishable for everyone; however, newer games will bring the average gamer's video card and CPU to their knees and back in the 20-40 fps range.
I'm using 60Hz for my CRT monitor's refresh rate right now. I can easily see waves of darkness flicker on the screen while typing this post. At 75hz, the flickering disappears.
The misconception that 24 fps is all we need comes from film. There's differences between film and other media, though.
To not have an older, usable, nVidia card as a comparison makes the review worthless.
A couple years back I invested quite a bit of money in a high-end gaming rig. At the time, I bought a GF4ti4600, which was about the top end (4800 was not announced yet). Since then, I've not had much need to upgrade. The processor is a 2.26Ghz P4 on the 533FSB, 1GB DDR RAM (I forget the RAM speed off the top of my head). Even now, with the system 3ish years old, most of the upgrades for it would be incrimental. Yes, I could move to a faster FSB and faster RAM, but it wouldn't be enough of a performance gain to justify the cost. I'm also willing to play at less than maximum resolution.
Recently, I wanted to try BF2, but could not because it requires a full DX9 card, which the GF4 line is not. My problem was, that I only have an AGP slot. And I'm not willing to do the whole mobo/proc upgrade for one game. It's nice to see that Nvidia is still willing to support those of use who don't want to replace everything constantly. When I build myself a new machine, I always try to build-in an upgrade path, so that I can streach my investment out over a longer period.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
How is a 7800 an overkill for a AMD +3200, nForce2 MB, and 2GB of ram? Currently I have a FX 5600 which just can't hack the new games at the res's I've become acustomed to. The APG 7800 is a god send, even if I don't end up buying it, the cost of the 6800 Ultra is significatly reduced.
Some people have such a narrow mind set.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?