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Nvidia Launches 8800 Series, First of the DirectX 10 Cards
mikemuch writes "The new top-end GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS from Nvidia launched today, and Loyd Case at ExtremeTech has done two articles: an analysis of the new GPU's architecture, and a benchmark article on PNY's 8800 GTX. The GPU uses a unified scalar-based hardware architecture rather than dedicated pixel pipelines, and the card sets the bar higher yet again for PC graphics." Relatedly an anonymous reader writes "The world and his dog has been reviewing the NVIDIA 8800 series of graphics cards. There is coverage over at bit-tech, which has some really in-depth gameplay evaluations; TrustedReviews, which has a take on the card for the slightly less technical reader; and TechReport, which is insanely detailed on the architecture. The verdict: superfast, but don't bother if you have less than a 24" display."
It's actually pretty surprising that the DX10-compatible 8800 runs $450-$600 given it's brand new and has huge performance gains over NVidia's current cards. I don't understand why someone would say only buy it if you have a 24" monitor though ... it seems like buying a single 8800 would be just as good (and cheaper) than buying a couple 7800's ...
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
I heard somewhere that this will be one of the only supported video cards in Duke Nukem Forever.
*ducks*
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Hot Hardware has another review
NVIDIA has officially launched their new high-end 3D Graphics card that has full support for DX10 and Shader Model 4.0. The GeForce 8800 series is fully tested and showcased at HotHardware and its performance is nothing short of impressive. With up to 128 Stream Processors under its hood, up to 86GB/s of memory bandwidth at its disposal and comprised of a whopping 681 million transistors, it's no wonder the new GPU rips up the benchmarks like no tomorrow. NVIDIA is also launching a new enthusiast line of motherboard chipsets in support of Intel's Core 2 Duo/Quad and AMD Athlon 64 processors. NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI and nForce 680a SLI motherboard chipsets will also allow a pair of these monster graphics cards to run in tandem for nearly double the performance and the new chipset offers a ton of integrated features, like Gigabit Ethernet Link Teaming etc.
... you can get reasonable framerates with NeverWinter Nights? :)
meh
enough power ot run Windows Vista and DNF at the same time
... does it run Linux?
Seriously... when are the Linux drivers expected?
Ignore this signature. By order.
So this will benefit my 13' projected monitor running at 1024 x 768 resolution (60 Hz refresh), and not my 20" CRT running at 1600 x 1200 resolution (100 Hz refresh)?
You don't say...
Now we need Duke Nukem Forever to really put this baby to work.
Seriously.. last i checked certification for logo testing and DX 10 required DRM... not just DRM but enough lockdown to get hollywood to sign off on it.
They kept changing the standards over and over.. so the question is exactly what is required in terms of integrated DRM.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
What they're saying is that if you're only ever going to go up to 1600x1200, this is just going to waste drawing more frames than your monitor can ever display. Right now it looks like the only thing that could strain this card is one of those huge Apple LCDs.
...something that can run Vista Aero with 5 stars!!!
And the driving need for a couple of 7800's are? I have a 24" and I'm fairly happy with the 6800GTO I have driving it. The only reason I'd look to upgrade is to reduce the fan noise...
7800gtx and dual AMD Opterons.
Modern games still dont run at optimal frame rates at 1280x1024 with max graphics settings. Most recent of these is Neverwinter Nights 2, I get around 20fps which is enough, but I wouldn't mind it being a bit smoother.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The folks at Boot Daily take a peek at MSI's GeForce 8800GTX and run it through quite a few benchmarks and discuss its visual qualities.
"NVIDIA is also launching a new enthusiast line of motherboard chipsets in support of Intel's Core 2 Duo/Quad and AMD Athlon 64 processors. NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI and nForce 680a SLI motherboard chipsets will also allow a pair of these monster graphics cards to run in tandem for nearly double the performance and the new chipset offers a ton of integrated features, like Gigabit Ethernet Link Teaming etc."
Binary drivers all the way. Or do we get documentation for the ethernet this time?
TFA didn't seem to mention anything about this though. Can anyone comment?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI xOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
0 0/
1 ,00.asp
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/08/geforce_88
Although the toms article is pretty worthless as most benches are cpu bound with a fx64 cpu.
my favorite has to be this page, 8800 GTX SLI/3.80GHz Core 2 Duo SLI
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,205379
Any coincidence that they launch the first DX10 card the same day that Vista goes gold?
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS
I found their review to be of typical [H] quality, which I think is pretty decent (when compared to other H/W review sites, that is
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Wi-Fizzle Research
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
DirectX 10 will require Windows Vista: $150 (basic version)
New processor/motherboard or RAM to deal with Vista requirements: $800
And lets not forge the usual HDCP/Windows EULA: Your soul
Just play Ultima IX on 1028x768 mode without any of the fixes or patches. I do believe the 8800 will have met its match. (never met a configuration that could run it over 10fps, except my friends old 650Mhz PIII with some VooDoo card or another, ran it at 19fps)
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Is this SLI capable? Not that I would be able to pay for even one of the cards...
But if you are doing general purpose computing that requires considerable floating-point performance (FFT signal processing, dynamic systems), then you won't be restricted by the refresh rate of the monitor. Both DirectX and OpenGL support floating-point framebuffers. However, for some simulations, you may have less than four floating-point variables per pixel. So just by using three out of four pixel channels, you are just wasting 25% or more of your processsing time. Having scalar processors would seem to be the way to solve this problem.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
...the original, that is.
At least the Xbox 360 was released before it was obsolete. The PS3 graphics processor is similar to the 7800 GTX if I remember correctly. When the PS3 releases people won't be saying "Buy the PS3 for the greatest graphical experience", instead they'll say "Buy the PS3 for the greatest graphical experience, expect for the PC you could have bought last week". The PS3 will probably be about as powerful as the 8600 when it's released.
I know I sound very offtopic bringing this up, but many PC gamers also play console games. They will want to compare console graphics to PC graphics.
now we can finally watch pr0n at over 1000fps!
Stop that.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=3 19
e rt&pid=5
This review looks at gaming and such too, but also touches on the NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), that NVIDIA is hoping will get super computing into mainstream pricing. What thermal dynamics programmer would love to access 128 1.35 GHz processors for $600?
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=319&type=exp
Hrmm, well running a pair of 7900gt cards atm, and on company of heroes, all settings maxed at 1902x1200 (dell 24") things get a little chunky, so yes, other than apple there are screens that need these.... mines pre-ordered btw :)
...
"DirectX 10 Cards" sounds as silly as saying "Vista compatible PC BIOS". WTF?
Method of processing duck feet
The only reason I'd look to upgrade is to reduce the fan noise...
Just remove the fan and smear hear-absorbing paste all over your video card! Works wonders!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Apparently Neverwinter Nights 2 has some sort of problem in it is *very* slow for some people with reasonably fast PCs. I've tried it and it also runs almost unbearably slow with things set to medium everything and a couple of lows (1024, no AA) on a 7800.
:)
20fps with your 7800GTX in NWN2 is certainly not acceptable
You know, I remember being impressed that Duke Nukem 3d ran at 640x480. The point where you need 1902x1200 AND anti-aliasing is the point where you're just doing it to make fun of the people without a Geforce 8800.
It's been a long time.
Is anyone testing these video cards in 3840x1024 yet?
Seriously, where have you been for the last 10-15 years, and were you somehow under the impression all this time that OpenGL, DirectX 3-9 and their predecessors were "hardware API standards"? The only difference in this respect between DirectX10 and earlier versions is that DX10 doesn't attempt to provide backward compatability for older hardware, so you'll need an explictly DX10-compatible card in order to take advantage of DX10 rendering paths.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Forget the review; what catches my eye here is the term "DirectX 10 Card." The very idea that it's categorized by limited software compatibility, rather than categorized by the type of hardware slot that it uses, is a new idea to me.
I can see a huge upside to it, though. As a time-saver, I would love for the amount of "closedness" to be how hardware gets categorized, so that I could just shop from the "open and compatible with everything" category instead of having to do research along the lines of "is this usable? Is that?"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It depends on the game. In the [H]ardOCP review, this appears to be the first card that can do Oblivion with maxed in-game settings (the grass has been the problem area in the past, even with top-of-the-line cards) at very high resolutions and high AA settings while retaining solid framerates - the settings they considered ideal in their testing were 8x AA at 1600x1200 and 4x AA at 1920x1200. That would be impressive for a SLI setup, let alone a single card.
:)
How worthwhile that is depends, of course, on just how killer a person wants their gaming rig to be (I can't imagine ever buying a $600 graphics card myself). But, given that the performance seems to exceed that of any other graphics card (or any two, for that matter), it's pretty clearly the card to get to ensure maximum gaming PC penis size.
Hmmm... I get mostly 30fps (vsynced, occasionally drops to 20 if the area gets intensive) at that resolution on that game with just a plain vanilla 6800 (and single 3GHz P4 HT) and the shadow options turned down to non-insanity. Can't see it makes much difference visually.
However, there doesn't seem to be an option for AA. Also my screen is 1600x1200 native; fortunately it's 20", so running 1280x1024 centred non-scaled works OK.
I want one of these beasties... the cheapest model I could find from a UK retailer was the equivalent of €550. I am sort of in the market for a graphics card update (Oblivion for example I have to run at 1024x768, and that doesn't look so great scaled up to 1600x1200) but my budget is more like €300. I'm not happy with the increase an X1900PRO or a 7950GT would get me (doubtful that the insanity that is Bethesda's creation runs on those at 1600x1200 high settings).
Just need to keep waiting I guess. Tests the patience though; I could afford to even get an 8800 series right now if I was completely and utterly foolish with my money. I suspect I may end up holding off a whole year more. Took that long when I was price/value-watching for a laptop (heh, the thing manages to run NWN2 800x600 on an X1400 Mobility at 20fps - with high textures and the filtering which are the important things for me!).
(Especially as I find Sony a bunch of asshats), but...
An 8800 GTX is how much, exactly? A PS3 is 550$ CDN. How many PC games will use DX10? 10 games? AFAIK, Halo 1, Half-Life 2, etc, aren't magically DX 10 games since they were written for previous versions of the DX API.
Will SquareEnix be writing PC versions of Final Fantasy XII? X-2?
Cost wise, these cards and the PS3 are close. Game wise, I suspect the PS3 will have more games out than there will be DX10 games. The DX10-Vista lock in is another dis-incentive to go and get a raging boner over an 8800.
I find my Nintendo DS to be a very enjoyable game platform, despite the fact that it doesn't require a 450W power supply, or other conmensurate upgrades, to get the same picture as my PC.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Sun GDM-5410"
HorizSync 30-122
VertRefresh 48-160
Modeline "2048x1536@72" 472.89 2048 2080 3872 3904 1536 1565 1584 1613
EndSection
'The old that is strong does not wither' :)
is this what i need to be able to run vista?
Why UNIX?
Actually, I think the point they were making is that until your max out your resolution to above 1920x1200 both the nVidia and the the ATI it was being compared to are so fast that the bottleneck is always the CPU and not the GPU.
I am planning to buy a GeForce 7600GT, a card that gives me the framerates and resolutions I want with a very small price compared with the high end cards. Also because a more expensive card would be bottlenecked by my CPU so it would be a waste.
However I now want to get a card of the same price and watts requirements of the 7600GT but with the G80 chipset (the one inside this beasts), just because of the better anisotropic filtering and antialiasing.
So... how long until we have the mid end versions of this card ???
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
The article left an impression that backwards compatibility with DX9 should theoretically be possible. Back in reality I still use a nice high-end AGP card which lets me play my flight simulator online with others. My gaming experience would not yet benefit from this VGA card. According to the article, and my assumptions, I would get more bang for my buck by investing in a multi-core CPU since my current VGA card demands more from the CPU.
Where's the 0xBEEF
Where the heck is the reviews for the 8800GTS, its like that card doesn't exist for reviewers but yet.... ugh
Indeed.
640K should be enough for anyone.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
You know i was impressed by it too. But then, i was very much impressed when i bought my 400$ Voodoo 2 card and played Quake 2 at 800*600! You can't stop this! Somehow, graphics improvements are good too in games. My guess is that you need to upgrade, but you can't.
Anyone using qbasic, yes.
These are just video games. At some point, you're seriously facing diminishing returns for your $1200USD SLI 8800 rig.
It's been a long time.
|| VooDoo
|
| Stop that.
| --
| Hail Eris, full of mischief...
You just earned yourself one Greyface cursing.
FUCK-ASS. Consider your banal ass cursed.
Actually, I reserved a new video card this week. I decided on something with a bit less oomph than this though. Between my Geforce MXes and my super high end video cards, I've found that it's better to buy the cheap video card that'll last you maybe a year or two than to go all-out and get maybe a year or two out of it. (Hey, it's not raw power that neccessitates upgrades, it's Pixel Shaders 4.1, right around the corner!)
It's been a long time.
Dual power connectors, yeeeha! Video card manufacturers really aren't doing much about idle power consumption. 66 watts at idle just to display a static frame buffer. I can't imagine what will happen running Vista w/ Aero glass. I bet people's power consumption numbers will double.
Holy crud! I misread that: It is 220 WATTS AT IDLE! The idle TEMPERATURE in deg C is the 66.
I wonder what the ATi's will be like...
Is this the first DirectX that can use display lists? Because I was reading the DX10 explanation on Tom's Hardware and it seems that they are either referring to that or the new Geometry shaders? If they are talking about display lists, OpenGL has had those for quite a while.
Just wait until us Beryl developers get ahold of one ^-^
for anyone that wants to know more about G80's architecture (not just the same pr material every website publish again and again) have a look at this in depth analysis from Beyond3d.com:
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/nvidia/g80-arch/
Wow. I haven't seen Modelines since Xfree86 x-servers. Not that there is a rule against it. Does that tweak it? Do you notice a difference or is it out of habit?
I know nvidia has already had HDMI supported video cards with the full rez decryption/audio stuff on board...
I'v been googleing for at least an hour and haven't been able to find anything about the geforce 8 series cards with full HDMI support...
Maybe im not looking in the right places but from what i have found i don't think HDMI geforce 8 cards are going to come anytime soon.
Even better... *3* 7950 GX2s...OoooOOOOOOoooooo...
That even possible? I've seen quad-SLI boxes in the mod magazines, but I'm not sure what limits the hardware and various OSes have on the number of displays they can support...
Anyone?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
huge Apple LCDs.
Well of course only an "Apple" monitor could ever have these HIGH levels of capabilities...
Is everyone here AppleStupid? - Or maybe the term is MacInTard?
My freaking laptop has a 1920x1200 LCD, and it is at the bottom of the list of displays in my HOME let alone at my office. Even my old 2002 Toshiba Laptop has a 1600x1200 LCD display.
I suppose people are going to go all crazy and start saying that they play games on PCs above 1024x768 next. Oh my, the insanity, how could this be possible?
Geesh.
Indeed!
:-P
7 7248
With 768MB of RAM you might actually be able to run Beryl and open up _10_ windows before they start going black!
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about look here:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=
My workstation at school is a turbo-cache Quadro card with ony 128MB of RAM... which means I can only open a couple of windows before they start going black... sigh.
Friedmud
Don't forget general-purpose GPU computing. For those highly parallelizable applications that do not need to conform to the full IEEE-754 floating point specs, this card is a dream come true.
Ooooh k...I'm sorry if this somehow ends up a clone.. but my original reply somehow got lost in the void through some odd bug.. it's technically still "there" but does not show up on the page.
Aaaaanyway.....It's been some months since I last saw the relevant articles (they were on the EFF's Trusted Computing repository and in places like freedom to tinker), but I'll try to bring what stuck in my mind here:
AACS copy protection on the new generation HD video media has invasively strict requirements, such as encryption of the video path within the system itself to prevent "sniffing" attacks, which means either the hardware itself or the drivers constitute a form of DRM. Any way I look at that encrypted media path requirement I wonder exactly how a set of linux drivers would not be challenged as a "circumvention device", and at the very least the authentication process within the system for this encryption will impose a toll on video performance.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
It's actually pretty surprising that the DX10-compatible 8800 runs $450-$600 given it's brand new and has huge performance gains over NVidia's current cards.
It's not surprising at all. Every single time a new generation of cards comes out, it has "huge performance gains" over the last generation and has a huge price tag. It's like how there are thousands and thousands of old CPU reviews out there that say "This may be the fastest CPU yet." Duh!
It's the fastest because it's the newest. Wait a little while and there will be another card that makes the 8800 look like a GeForce 4 MX.
Generally speaking DirectX and new graphics hardware are closely tied. MS works with the card makers to find out what they are planning with next gen hardware and to let them know what DirectX will demand. Cards are built around that. So the DirectX version of a card becomes a useful way of talking about it's features. For example DX7 cards had hardware T&L units, DX8 card programmable T&L units and pixel shaders, 9 cards fully programmable shaders (among other changes).
Well DirectX 10 makes more changes and thus there'll be a new generation of hardware to deal with it.
Now please note none of this means it won't support OpenGL, nVidia has strong OpenGL support. The reason OpenGL isn't referenced is because it doesn't keep up. The GL specs are slow, so new features are implemented as vendor specific extensions. This card is capable of things beyond 2.0, but then so were the 7000 series.
Looks like DirectX 10 functionality - unified (geometry) shader and like will be available in in the NVIDIA drivers very soon. Seems the entry points for new OpenGL extensions are already present in the driver nvoglnt.dll (96.89), includinga tebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=014831
GL_NV_geometry_shader4
GL_NV_gpu_program4
GL_NV_gpu_shader4
and new Cg profiles
All we need now is header file
Chances are, for OpenGL directX 10-like functionality will be here before VISTA. Another one for swith to OpenGL from DirectX. Also it will be at least couple of years before majority of the gamers switch to VISTA, but with OpenGL developers can utilize latest GPU to their full potential on the Windows XP.
More about it in this thread form OpenGL.org:
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubb/ultim
Overclocking preview
...
Neat, it took like 20 seconds for the first world records to fall
good old crt from sony...
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
People also seem to of forgotten that you could buy 21" CRT's that could run 2048x1536@75Hz 10 years ago.
I bought a couple of newer 21" monitors second hand a few months back, and they kick the shit out of any LCD's I've seen.
I still wouldn't mind having one of those Samsung/Sharp 30" displays though.
Hint: Apple don't make LCD's so obviously the same display, possibly in a different case, is available OEM.
Just like my IBM P275 21" CRT's, they're actually Sony displays AFAICT (Haven't opened them, but they're definitely FD trinitron).
It's just such a shame that you can't buy new CRT's anymore, as I haven't seen anything under $5000NZ (~$3000US), that compares favourably to my $200NZ CRT's (second hand of course).
I think I'll start stockpiling them, so that I don't have to buy an LCD until they actually have the dynamic range and clarity of a good CRT.
What could be better than a jet powered motorcycle? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8l6GTHLSWE
You'd have to be stupid to buy an Apple monitor when a Dell is a fraction of the price and has more features.
I was wondering - will these fancy features (esp. the geometry shaders) work with OpenGL, if the necessary extensions are exposed and used? Since the hardware is there, I guess it won't be a problem?
I don't think many games would support that resolution (I'm assuming that's what you're referring to when you say testing). Also, would you even want to play a game across multiple displays? For one thing, I'd imagine the bezel around each monitor would get annoying.
Though by "testing", I simply mean benchmarking cards however the reviews currently benchmark cards, with the benefit of actually taxing the video card enough that the CPU isn't the bottleneck.
WTF, why is this offtopic? The guy's right.
Poster makes a good point. This is slashdot, getting all excited over hardware that last week we were all vowing imaginary boycotts over because the vendor refuses to do the right thing and open their specs, if not their driver sources.
Yeah, games are fine & all that, but I'm just happy for gamers to bring the economies of scale down for this-here plug-in supercomputer.
GPGPU is what will really make it stand out. Physics acceleration, Folding@Home, ray-traced audio, ray-traced window managers, fluid-simulator window managers, film-level 2D pixel processing (my field), realtime H.264 decode & encode... I'm just scratching the surface. High performance computing just got a whole lot cheaper.
Cell? Never heard of it.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Try turning off shadows. They seem to cause the problem... Runs smooth a silk for me with a 7800GTX at 1680x1050 with everything else at max. If I turn on shadows I get 10 or so FPS.
OpenGL will support these, no doubt, but OpenGL is frankly pretty quaint these days.
A modern graphics API is comparatively quite simple, and looks nothing like classical GL. You load shader code into the card, map some of the card's buffers into main memory and then fill then with tables of vertex attributes, or texture data. You'd also set a few state flags and uniform variables. The shader code then interprets those attributes and uniforms in whatever way you like to draw stuff to the screen; the graphics "API" doesn't even handle any rendering anymore, because that all happens completely on-card in the shaders. All the API does is keep shovelling arbitrary data into the graphics card.
Suffice it to say this bears no resembleance to OpenGL, although you could easily implement classical OpenGL as a shader. Any "extensions" that set this sort of thing up will simply rely on OpenGL to set up a rendering context on a window, and then promptly bypass pretty much all of GL itself.
That CUDA thing looks interesting though. If you coupled that with a mechanism to make the graphics card output to a window, you could code up your renderer using the CUDA framework and then pump in some data as before. I can see CUDA (or an industry standardised version of it) replacing OpenGL as a cross-platform rendering API in the future.
Yeah, that is why I drive a bus to work, even though I live on my own and don't carpool.
That is why I live in a 10-bedroom, 3-bathroom mansion.
That is why I have 6 monitors at work, even though I just play solitaire.
Because the opposite of 640k is enough for anybody means having as much as possible no matter the need.
Had heard of that, already did, didn't help, unfortunately :(
Well, hoping for a patch.
We've been screwed by Microsoft again. Here's an excerpt from my blog, "After a brief phone to ATI, I was informed that both the X1800 and X1900 series cards will support the new Dx10 standard. A quick pop over to PriceWatch shows that the cheapest X1800 card is $176 and the cheapest X1900 card is $203. Now, since I'm getting the whole rest of the box for $667, I find this to be a bit steep. Hopefully, Nvidia will have something under $150." Sadly, that's not the case. This is the ONLY card from Nvidia that supports Dx10. The only sites that I've seen that are pre-selling it are in the EU. The one listed in the article in the orignal post says 605 British Pounds which works out $1,152.59 USD.
Am I only that see the irony in putting a $1000 video card in a $600 computer?
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank