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Affordable DX10 - GeForce 8600 GTS and 8600 GT
mikemuch writes "While ATI still hasn't released a DX-10-capable graphics card, Nvidia today already released its affordable SKUs, in descending price and performance order the GeForce 8600 GTS and GeForce 8600 GT, and 8500 GT. The GTS costs $200-230, the GT from $150-170, and the 8500 reaching down to the $90 range. The architecture for the new GPUs is the same as for the 8800 line, but with lower clocks and fewer stream processors."
While ATI still hasn't released a DX-10-capable graphics card...
Don't worry - ATi will be announcing (if not launching) their new R600 range next week. I wouldn't buy anything until we see how that goes.
There's another look at these cards at anandtech, here: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2970
I usually find their reviews to be the best around. Always very detailed, and from what I've seen always right on the money. (They seem impressed, but their bottom line seems to be that, for now, you're better of sticking with a 7600GT, 7900GS or X1950XT if you already have one.)
nVidia would be fools not to as many games need GL and gaming is probably their biggest market. What they mean by "DirectX 10" is feature set basically. OpenGL doesn't really keep up to date with cards very well so features are usually expressed in terms of DX versions. For example DX 7 means you have at least fixed function T&L, DX 8 means semi-programmable shaders, DX 9 fully programmable and things like that. DX 10 specifies a bunch of new stuff, the Wikipedia entry on it is pretty good if you are interested.
As a practical matter it isn't real useful for end users at this point as nothing really supports it. However it may be of interest to programmers since DX 10 cards take shader programmability to a whole new level. It specifies a unified shader interface, and nVidia has chosen to unify the shader hardware as well (ATi says they have done the same). Thus effectively a DX10 card can be looked at as a stream processor, with a whole lot of units. Various things, like folding, are likely to be able to be designed to run in part on the GPU for massive speed gains. nVidia has a whole deal for helping that called CUDA.
But yes, GL support is there, I can confirm it. I have an 8800 and I play GL games all the time. They work great.
Aero is based on DX9. Any DX9-capable card is able to run it adequately.
I'm sure those will appear on there eventually.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
Here are some links to other interesting reviews of these products:
3 92 tested under Vista 64-bit and shows the 8600 GTS behind the aging ATI X1950 ProM yNCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA== tested under XP and shows better performance on the 8600 GTS
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MT
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=8409 tested under XP but not a lot of newer games
The first number is the major generation of hardware. So these are the 8000 series cards, the 8th generation of GeForce hardware. All other things being equal, a new generation card of a similar number performs better than an older one. So a 7600GT should outperform a 6600GT and an 8600GT should outperform a 7600GT. However the primary reason to look at new major version numbers is new features. In this case, 8 series cards support DirectX 10, 7 series are DirectX 9.0c.
The second number is the minor version and generally increasing numbers indicate increasing speed. Usually, they indicate the amount of processing hardware so an 8800 has more pixel pipelines and shaders and such than an 8600. Then there's the letters. GTX > GTS > GT, not sure how it goes after that. Again, speed related.
What it really comes down to though is you need to look at benchmarks. There's no one magic metric for cards, they'll be better at some things worse at others. You need to see how it performs on the stuff you are doing to make the determination.
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php is your friend. Allows you to select any ATI and nVidia card known and compare them side by side. Somebody back about four years ago here on slashdot pointed me in the right direction to that site and have been using it since. :)
This space is not for rent.
Just some enlightening information: D3D and OpenGL are APIs that allow programmers to use the features that a graphics card is capable of. If a graphics card is capable of a new feature it is made available by extending the APIs of OpenGL and D3D. OpenGL does keep up to date with these new features via extensions. Whereas Direct3D have regular (annual?) full releases. D3D10 features such as geometry shaders ARE available in OpenGL via extensions. These extensions are normally first created by a member of the Architecture Review Board (e.g nVidia) and are given a name containing the creator (e.g. GL_NV_texture_rectangle, NV = nVidia) then when these extensions become more standardized (used by a few members of the ARB) they are named with EXT for extension, and finally when accepted by the Architecture Review Board they are named with ARB. At this stage they are official extensions, then normally with the next release they are moved into the core of OpenGL. This is where people get confused and say "OpenGL is so far behind D3D", what they don't realize is that OpenGL has the extensions mechanism. You tend to find people use the D3D version as a label for a cards feature-set for 2 reasons: 1. There normally isn't an official OpenGL version with new features till a while after the release (extensions don't contribute to a version number) 2. Windows users wouldn't even know what OpenGL is, whereas M$ use DX versions as a selling point 3. Most game developers (unfortunately for us non-windows users) use DX and label their games with it Anyway back to the point in hand, OpenGL is used on far more platforms than D3D and so graphics manufacturers will not stop supporting it doing so would stop all of these platforms (including linux and OSX) using new 3D features. Disclaimer - All of the above is they way I believe that OpenGL/D3D releases work, I don't know what has changed since OpenGL was taken over by the Khronos group or whatever. If I'm wrong about anything correct me!
Tom's hardware has the same feature. In addition to the various benchmarks, they also have a price/performance ratio which is pretty interesting:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html