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The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 Series
An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has posted their evaluation of the new GeForce 7900 technology. They fully cover widescreen gaming this time around too. 'NVIDIA has worked hard to try and produce a more powerful, albeit power-efficient GPU in the 7900 GTX and GT, and they've succeeded. They run cooler; are smaller, have less transistors, and they don't make you stuff cotton in your ears. The 7900 GTX and GT are just more efficient while being lightning fast.'"
i bet with the SLI i can still cook two eggs at once. :)
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
NVIDIA is now offering a quad-SLI solution which can bake 2 biscuits to accompany those eggs.
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=listarticles&secid=13
7
i dias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=271
http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/326/
http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=213
http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/9529
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nv
And yet another graphics card is released. Is it worth my money to upgrade my dual 6800 XTs? Let's find out by reading the review.
Unfortunately, I can't. I'm better off going to NVidia and trusting their product sheets. Why? Because I'm not looking to play Need for Speed Most Wanted or Quake Four or Half Life Two, I'm looking to do some actual graphics processing with an SLI setup. Yes, brace yourselves, I don't actually use these beasts for gaming.
If you read the reviews, it may look like these cards have no purpose other than to play the higher end games.
It is my responsibility to make a kind of "Google Earth on Steroids" for my employer. And this requires that five (yes, five) terabytes of mapping data be available for a multi-monitor (and by "multi" I mean many) display. What's my current choke point? Simply data bandwidth into the card.
Where does this review leave me? I now know intimately how high I can get my frame rate up in a first person shooter. Huzzah!
I know there are product sheets that tell me what kind of bandwidth I have but I'm more interested in what a non-interested third party has to say about it. Where are the real benchmarking tests? What about a simple program that loads up the card with as much data as possible as quickly as possible? I'm not even sure if the choking point is on the card or at the interface level with the motherboard (PCIe 16x).
Why can I not find objective reviews that aim to look at cold hard numbers?
My work here is dung.
PCs already surpass the XBox 360 in graphics. It's just the nature of the console beast. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to be able to afford a 360 myself, but in terms of raw power, computers win every time. Now, simplicity and ease of use...
The biggest news (for me at least) is that the MSRP of the 7900GT is $299. Considering the 7900GT performs on par with the 7800GTX, which is about $100 more, the 7900GT is starting to look like a bargain.
If any of you bleeding-edge gamers want to sell off your "old" 7800GTX for $250 or so, drop me a line
Where as the main character looked like this before (screenshot below):
@
Now on this new video card it looks like this:
@
best 500 bucks I have ever spent
To combat the new GeForce 7600 GT and GeForce 7900 GT, ATI just launched the new Radeon X1800 GTO. The only review I can find so far is at Hot Hardware.
Fewer is used for things you can count one by one (things that are numbered). Less is used for amounts that can be measured but not counted. There are fewer cars on the street. There is less gin in my glass.
Except on slashhdot, where the two words are interchangeable.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
PCs have had better graphics than the XBox 360 for several years. Consoles always lag.
hmmm I wonder if these cards will be HDCP compatible?
In English, the word you use depends on whether the thing you are describing is countable or uncountable. If English isn't your first language, that is the best way to think about it. Native speakers, of course, don't stop to think about it (and often get it wrong, for that matter :-) )
Some examples:
Countable:
A cow
"I have three cows"
You can see individual cows; you can't divide a single cow into other cows.
Uncountable:
Water is uncountable*
You don't say "I have waters" (unless you are being strangely poetic)
instead, you say "I have some water."
If you divide up some water, each piece is still just "water".
How does this affect language?
"I have many cows, and I have much water."
"I have few cows. I have little water."
"I have fewer cows than Michael. I have less water than Michael"
Hope that helps.
*Water itself is uncountable, but you can count the quantities it is in.
"I much water" vs. "I have many litres of water"
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
63/64 FPS Max in Q4... Did they even bother to remove the vsync?
Your eyes are full of hate. That's good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.
While I agree with the other respondant - that simplicity is inversely correlated with featureset - I was turned off by the Xbox 360 demo I saw at the store. It went something like this:
Click the game I wanted to see...
Wait...
Get the developer logos...
Wait...
Get the instructions...
Wait...
Select character...
Wait...
Watc^H^H^H^H Skip intro movie...
Wait...
After 45 seconds of waiting for the game to load, I forgot why I was even playing.
I mean, UT2004 didn't take that long to get me into a game on a 600MHz laptop.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Namely, the Quadro. The GeForce series are their gamer cards. That's their target market, well at least with the higher end ones. Hence, they send them to gamer sites and they get reviewed for gamers. nVidia's professional line of cards are the Quadros. They are the same chips as the GeForces, but use different drivers, certified for pro apps, and have features available not found on consumer cards like HDSDI output.
Now if you feel like saving money by getting the gamer card instead of the pro one, I don't have a problem with that, however don't get angry that everyone else taks about it and reviews it as though it were a gamer card since, in fact, it is. If you want a card taht's treated like a pro card, look at a Quadro.
I get tired of the constant barrage of newer and faster video cards on a 6 month cycle. Most people can't afford $700 for the latest video card, so its like 12 months before these video cards become feasible for the average user to consider in their new system, and by then a newer faster $700 video card has already come out.
The problem is, with each generation of video card, full of hype and claims of high performance, wait 6 months and a video game is usually released where it cripples the card. I have an x700 video card and, while not the x800, it was still in a generation of video cards that can play the newest games at the highest resolutions with the best quality settings. Playing F.E.A.R I can barely get 30 fps out of the card with minimum to medium quality settings, that on a video card not more then a year old.
Video cards are one of those products that are sold for way too much money when it is first released. I mean, nVidia and ATI may think it is necessary to jack up the cost to cover R&D investment, but how much R&D is really going on? With the 7900, nVidia just looked to shrink some of the components and optimize existing architecture, something they have been doing consistently with the Geforce lineup. Are they spending billions in R&D, or just millions? Do they need to sell new cards for $700, or perhaps can we start seeing a price war that will drive down costs of new products to reasonable prices.
In any case, so what, nVidia has a new lineup of video cards. Add that to the list of literally hundreds of available video cards on the market, with 16 versions of every model and generation by 16 different companies, the video card market has become muddy and overly complicated and I just don't care when something new enters the market now because it won't run the games well that I want to play 6 months from now, and I don't have $700 burning a hole in my pocket every 6 months to buy the next latest and greatest.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It says the price is $449 for a 7800 GT.. but thats off by some 150 dollars... newegg has these cards priced at $285 to $350!
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
that in itself is a touchy subject - the common designations nVidia gives are
Ultra and GT - better than the standard card
LE, GS - low end/discount version (GS is sometimes better, depending on age of the original card) of the original card.
x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.
you may also see TC, which stands for Turbo Cache. You'll find that on low end cards.
You will sometimes see GS cards that are more expensive than GT cards, but I've never seen a GS card that is better than a GT card, so I suspect that's a volume issue (pricewatch has some 7800GTs that are cheaper than GS's). It may be onboard memory, but I doubt it. The GTs are usually the same card as the GS, however (so you may be able to unlock the features nVidia shuts off).
I'd love to read some general purpose GPU type benchmarks for these cards. I'm really curious how they perform compared to say the original Nvidia 6800 card. It might be fun to graph the performance and see what the curve looks like compared to CPU performance graphs.
Generally, the bigger the number and the more letters it has the better it is (GT, GS, and anything with an X or the word ULTRA in it are the best). It gets confusing because sometimes the high-end of one generation are better than the low-end of a newer generation. Basically if you just compare the clock speeds between them higher is almost always going to be better. If the choice is between a 256mb card with a lower speed vs. a 128mb card with a higher speed it's a safe bet to go with the higher speed. If you wanted to stick with AGP a 6800GS or a 6600GT is about the best you can get, I think there is going to be a 7600 that runs on AGP but that's probably the end of the line for AGP right there. Personally I'm going to buy a 6600GT soon (~$140) and wait another year or two before I switch over to PCI-E - by then I should be able to afford a 7800GS or whatever the hell is under $150 by then, they all fall down to the sub-$200 price range eventually.
Have you ever played Battlefield 2?
NON-skippable EA splash logo.
...and then there's like 3 skippable movies.
NON-skippable DICE logo
I don't like spam in emails, I don't like obnoxious ads on web pages. What makes them think I want to sit there and endure a company's spam when I just want to hop in for a quick game.
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
On the PC version all you need to do is rename all those movie files in the correct directory, another reason I will never own a console. (Mods being the main reason)
Fewwwweeeeeerrrrrrrrr.........
Just because you THINK there is some purpose in Nvidia's naming scheme doesn't mean there actually IS any purpose.
Take the GeForce 6 series, for example:
Within the first six months of release, Nvidia had laid-out a very simple set of cards (in performance order):
6800 Ultra
6800 GT
6800
6600 GT
6600
6200
6200 TC
Now, they had this great arrangement of performance levels, where all the cards within a lower numbered range were slower than the cards in the next higher numbered range. but like any company they had to deal with inefficiencies in their production processes, and try to keep their brands fresh. Thus, many cards were added to fit small but profitible niche or OEM markets.
So, by the end of 2005, you had a whole mess of cards. Some of them were added to compete with ATI, others were added to deal with yields (and had disabled pipes), while still others were introduced to replace a product that was "old" with something easier to make.
The mapping, in true performance, of all GeForce 6 chips, end of 2005:
6800 Ultra
6800 GT
6800 GS (Added as a reduced-cost replacement to 6800 GT)
6800 GTO (Added in response to ATI's x800 GTO)
6800
6600 GT
6800 XT
6800 LE
6600 DDR2
6600
6500
6600 LE
6200
6200 TC
See how confusing that became? It's just a natural progression, and ATI does the same thing. The 7 series is already beginning to see the effects of the naming scheme madness. Once Nvidia transitions fully over to the 7 series, expect the same product fragmentation to occur.
Oh, and I must correct you on this:
x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.
Do you mean PCIe?
Incorrect. The FX series (GeForce 5) was entirely AGP. Board makers later released versions of the FX series with PCI-e bridge chips so they could dump their stock as "PCIe" cards.
The 7800 GTX is the only card EVER MADE by Nvidia to wear the "GTX" monkier. The 7800 GTX is PCIe, but so is the 7800 GT...see the problem with your assertion?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
If you need a single-slot cooler (i.e. doesn't overlap the adjacent pci slot) then about your only choice with the grunt for HDTV is the nvidia 6600 passive (i.e. fanless); it comes as both AGP and PCI-E versions from club, xfx or gigabyte. With a reasonable specc'd CPU and a scythe ninja cooler, and of course a quiet or passively cooled PSU and a mechanically decoupled hard-drive, you should be able to build a PC that is only cooled by a single low-speed 120mm fan - effectively silent (I can't hear mine from more than a couple of feet away, and most of the noise is the hard-drives). If you want to cut the noise even further, use a 2.5" laptop hard-drive.
:)
If your HTPC case is big enough to allow a dual-slot cooler for the GPU, you can buy pre-fitted or post-fit a zalman vf700-cu or arctic cooler to pretty much any high-spec GPU, that will keep it cool and run really quiet - the zalman on my 7800gt in my gaming rig is on a fan-controller, at 50%, and is quieter than either the CPU fan or the PSU fan - and both of them are ultra-quiet.
For air-cooling kit, I'd recommend silentpcreview.com for starters, they have some great reviews on what 'quiet' kit is actually quiet.
Your final option, if you have the money, is water cooling. You can cool the entire system with one or two low-speed 120mm fans and a big radiator, and still have ninja specs for the PC, if you wanted a dual-purpose gaming and DVR rig.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by HDVD's - blueray and HD-DVD aren't out yet, and either way, the copy-restrictions will stop you ripping them for now. The real advantage of HTPC's with say, mythtv, is fitting multiple TV tuners, whatever drive-sizes you like, and being able to play music and DVD rips off the hard-drive. With the flexibility comes the problems of retro-fitting PC hardware to run passively. If you want small passive kit that 'just works', I strongly recommend a Tivo (or similar prebuilt kit) and decent DVD player, as mythtv or windows MCE definitely needs a little sweat to get working fully.
BTW - I just invested in a 5.1 speaker setup, and WOW is it better than 2 speakers. I know you didn't ask, but I had to tell someone
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
You got it.
As of March 2006 here are your choices (using the newest technology available in each category, and cards are ranged in order of typical performance in their category):
Budget (ie: you really shouldn't spend this little):
GeForce 6200 256MB ($49)
Radeon x300 256MB ($55)
Upper budget (cards that will actually play new games):
Radeon x1300 Pro 256MB ($95)
GeForce 6600 256MB ($85)
Lower-midrange gamer:
GeForce 6600 GT 128MB ($120)
Radeon x1600 Pro 256MB ($125)
Upper-midrange gamer:
GeForce 6800 GS 256MB ($185)
Radeon x1600 XT 256MB ($200)
The 7600 GT 256MB card should be in this price range,
and should have slightly better performance than the 6800 GS.
Lower-hardcore gamer:
Radeon x1800 XL ($350)
GeForce 7800 GT ($285)
The 7900 GT should be in this price range,
and if it is it will be the fastest card under $300
Upper-hardcore gamer:
Radeon x1900 XT 512MB ($496)
Radeon x1800 XT 512MB ($479)
GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB ($415)
The 7900 GTX should be in this price range
Crazy gamer:
Radeon x1900 XTX 512MB ($575)
ATI has responded to the ultra-low prices of the 7900 series by bringing down prices across the board, something they should have done for a long time. Already in only 6 months of life, ATI has cut $100 or more off their upper-midrange (x1600 XT) and lower-hardcore (x1800 XL) parts, just scambling to keep up with Nvidia.
It might take a few weeks to filter through the channel, but those price cuts would make ATI a whole lot more competitive on the mid to high-end.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
The short answer is they could.
The long answer is that it's not a linear ratio of price to sales, and there are way more factors that go into pricing than you've probably ever thought of. First of all, you want to get the most money for your product, but eveyone has a different idea of what they're willing to pay. Some would pay $1000. Some would pay $500. Some would pay $25. Obviously the best thing would be to just ask them how much they're willing to pay and then charge them that, but in practice it's not that easy. So you can build a chart, find out how many people would pay X, and find the perfect price point, but there are still more factors. You're missing potential sales from people who would pay less, and potential profits from people who would pay more. So what's the solution? Different product lines. Charge the rich guy Z, the average guy Y, and the budget guy X.
Second, when you charge more, people feel that they're getting more.If you're selling shirts for $1, and the guy across the street is selling shirts for $250, the expensive ones must be better, right? They have to be, otherwise how could he charge $250? Because people will pay it. And if they feel they're getting something for their money, then they are.. at least, according to many economists. If they enjoy the goods received at the price they paid, then it was a fair price.
I'm too sleepy to keep writing, but as long as Nvidia is selling their chips and turning a profit, they must be doing ok.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere