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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.
I wish there was an easier way to judge the speed of one Nvidia card against another just by looking at the name. I can never tell.
Are these faster than my 7800GS? Would they be faster than a 7800GT? Who can fucking tell?
It's about time! I can't wait to play... .... ....... ...wait... nevermind. There are no DX10 games.
Obligatory print version. No pictures, but who needs those?
That said, while I'm not sure how these cards will perform, I have been using their big brother for a while. I've had a Leadtek 8800GTS (640mb) for a few months now, and it runs great. It would probably run better if I was using WinXP instead of Vista, but I'm happy with it.
They also support OpenGL and Linux (using proprietary drivers).
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.)
Jeez, that's a silly question.
Because that's where the money is.
If developers, even a few, thought they could make more money on Linux than Windows, or even turn a hefty enough profit by supporting both, they'd do it.
Thanks for companies like Introversion, Transgaming, and Codeweavers, and of course all the developers of Wine, Linux gaming is more popular than ever. Thanks to people like the folks behind Ogre3D, Newton, ODE, OpenAL, etc Cross-OS gaming is easier than ever.
I think this puts us right on the cusp of seeing a big change in Linux gaming. (And Mac OSX gaming, too.) But until then, Windows is -the- PC gaming OS and that's where hardware and software creators will be making their investments.
Now, I know the usual argument is that OpenGL is already cross-platform and should be supported. And I agree to a point... But ATI's OpenGL support has apparently always sucked, and you don't create a game that will suck for half the market if there's an easy alternative. (DirectX.) (Disclaimer: I have no first-hand experience with ATI cards. I've stuck with nVidia since Voodoo died.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The 8600GTS delivers 40% of the performance of the 320MB 8800GTS for 70% of the price.
The 8600GT outperforms a 7600GT - but is priced like a 7900GT.
As long as there is no stable, useful and fast system supporting DX10, there's no point buying a card supporting it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
WTF is with people calling a product a Stock Keeping Unithttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Keeping_Uni t? It's a physical item, not a freaking number.
The Radeon X1950 beats the NVidia cards in every single test save for the "synthetic" crapmark test that has nothing to do with reality.
Yet their final page says you should buy the NVidia rather than the X1950?
Somebody's been paid off. This wasn't an article, it's a fucking stealth ad. They have no integrity.
And CryEngine already supports DX9.
2
http://www.crytek.com/technology/index.php?sx=eng
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I wouldn't worry about ATI/AMD not having DX10 hardware until their is content and a significant number of users that can use it.
1. You need a Game that supports DirectX 10, how many have been released so far?
2. You need the user to be running Windows Vista to have support for DirectX 10
3. The user needs to have also purchase a DirectX 10 graphics card to complete the loop.
It is the chicken and the egg, and history hasn't been kind to the early adopters of graphics cards that are the FIRST to implement a new API.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
DirectX 10 only works under Vista.
The biggest reason to get these cards over other existing ones is for DirectX 10.
The drivers for these cards don't work under Vista.
Huh.
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.
So in short, you pay more and get less performance in hopes that someday, you will need DX10.
It seems nice of Nvidia to leave ATI/AMD a chance to beat them squarely in the $200 bracket by showing up with more memory bandwidth.
8600 is ok but hardly anything to get excited about. More about features than performance or bang/buck.
Probably not - IMHO AGP users were lucky to get 79xx versions in AGP, which may be the last new model agp card made...
And while Nvidia still hasn't released working Vista drivers...
I would Mod the article submitter Troll -1 over the wording in this article.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I, among others, have yet to see a convincing arguement to buy a DX-10 capable video card. I'm not upgrading to Vista, until they remove their DRM supportive crap and their awful driver signing nonsense. I'll switch to an over-priced Mac first.
I don't play FPS, which is most likely to be the biggest genre that actually thinks it needs DX-10.
My next logical upgrade will be to dual SLIs, unless I can't use dual monitors with them (I know some people who said they've had trouble with SLI and dual monitors, but I haven't researched it much because I'm not upgrading right now).
Which in most cases for gamers, doesn't usually matter-in most cases, the more powerful hardware is better than weaker hardware with new tech. However, with the way M$ is pushing Vista upgrading, how long will it be before there are less impressive games that require DX10 to run, and potentially DX10 hardware? Or what about DX10 games like Crysis? Maybe that will push performance past non DX10 cards. It's hard to say untill we can test things like that.
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I don't think you really understand. ATI's everything support has always sucked. It's not just OpenGL. ATI can't write a stable driver for any amount of money. But then, they don't have to, because people keep buying their crap.
The hardware seems to actually be quite good. But it's no use if you can't use it.
My next-to-last ATI was a Rage card. For each type of Rage, there are actually numerous parts. It always caused me problems. So then I bought lots of nVidia stuff, but eventually I decided to try ATI again. Various people told me that they had fixed driver problems and such. So I bought a 9600XT. Downloaded the latest drivers including catalyst control center, rebooted, and bluescreened. Rebooted in safe mode - no bluescreen. Reboot? Bluescreen. Reboot in safe mode, remove catalyst control center but not the driver, and reboot. No bluescreen! Unfortunately you couldn't change all settings and whatnot without CCC. I've since sold that system, and will be avoiding ATI like the plague it is once more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
Everyone keeps calling these "DX10" cards, despite that being a misnomer. They are SM4 cards, and DX10 happens to be the first version of DX to support SM4. OpenGL also supports the new shaders (and has for longer). When are we going to start hearing about developers switching to OGL to get geometry shaders (which produce some sick effects) in WinXP, still the most popular gaming OS?
"Seriously, an operating system release is just not worth invoking such strong emotions."
I have to disagree with this. Many, many people's lives and careers are intimately tied to their ability to use a computer. Given that MS is a monopoly, and for all intents and purposes hundreds of millions of people will have no other choice but to spend many hours a day interacting with MS's OS, it is absolutely fair to have it invoke very strong emotions. If you had said the same about a game console, where there are really three good choices, and millions of peoples livelihoods didn't depend on it, I would agree with you. We are not talking about that though. We are talking about something that is as much a part of our infrastructure as telephones, electricity, and gasoline. If the electric company sent out a memo tomorrow that told us they were going to seriously increase the cost of electricity, everyone would have to upgrade their breaker boxes, and a bunch of your existing electric uses will be incompatible with their new system, you can bet that people would be swearing. At this point Windows is a utility and will cause just as much frustration when MS does bad things to the customers.
Why are we still designing GPUs for Windows? It's like the Slashdot crowd hates Microsoft for everything but still clings to them for their computer games. Screw DX10, ask for Open GL 3.0 already!
Ok, go look up the technologies, you really need to educate yourself on what, why and when.
The first thing is that OpenGL doesn't support features DX10 does.
The second thing is concepts from the architecture of these cards are not completely exclusive to DX10 or Windows, many of the features can be modified to work well in native and OpenGL environments. (Although as we move to multi-core GPUs, the OS will need to have a basic understanding of GPU scheduling, and right now Vista is the only OS that does this.)
The third thing is the design of this generation of cards was done by Microsoft. Go look at the XBox360 and you will see the same technology in the MS/ATI developed GPU. So whether you hate MS or not, this progression of technology is very much pushed and even partially funded by them.
Also if you look back at the original XBox and the money NVidia got in the development of the GPU with MS, a lot of that technology set the stage for the last generation of GPUs. For example the XBox's GPU was feature comparable to the Geforce3 Ti, and that was all the way back in 1999/2000. NVidia and MS ended up fighting over production costs, but what most people don't realize is that NVidia got a lot of Money from MS up front to develop the technologies that they later put into their Geforce3 Ti, and Geforce 4 line of video cards, which helped them take and hold the market while ATI flopped like a fish.
So ya, MS technologies are pushing what goes into the Video cards, but these are also the 'newest' technologies for GPUs, not just what MS wants.
You will also start to see dual/multi core GPUs and other technologies that are a part of the MS DX10 technologies pushing ATI/NVidia hardware.
DX10 right now is just the only technology that effectively is designed for and uses these new GPU concepts effectively. From native support for multi-core GPUs to GPU scheduling (pre-emptive multitasking video) to even the full set of non-Video APIs that allow the GPUs to handle physics, which is a part of DX10 and something ATI will be using to showcase their new line of GPUs.
That stuff all largely exists. It's just that gamer gear gets the marketing hype.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I had similar issues, but the conflict was the ATI driver vs. The motherboard's drivers.. it was a SFF PC, so out went the ATI, my son got a nice ATI 9600Pro, and I haven't bought any ATI based video cards since.. oops, I did get one for my G4, but ATI was the only one available, and in stock... Just the same, I try to avoid them...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Not taken as a trolling comment. I have to agree, I noticed the same.
.torrents) didn't help either.
I am in contact with a good portion of the local dealers of computer hard- and software. The general consensus is that people do anything but break down their doors for Vista. If they buy it, it's usually bought with a new computer. Actually the campaign did more ill than good. It made it very "uncool" to go Vista, 'cause such a huge hype has been created around it while the reports are pretty bland. The hefty price tag and not being able to "try" it before buying it (ya know, the "trials" that you get from
Generally, there are 4 groups of people who could buy it:
First, the companies. They get whatever their contractor supplies, and they generally get computers with system, not when the system comes out (far from it, they need finished systems not bananaware) but when the life cycle dictates it.
Then the clueless users. They, too, get their system with the hardware. Preinstalled. Because it's simpler, easier and less hassle. I know people who still run 98 because they upgrade every 7 years or so and back then their system came with 98, so why bother buying something else? It "works"...
Then, the wannabe gurus. The people who buy whatever is "hip". Well, Vista could have fit that demographics, but the marketing blew it. Big time. Vista is anything but "hip".
And finally the people with a clue. They'd buy it if it offered any measurable benefit. But it doesn't. Aero is fluff. The added security isn't secure. The promised file system didn't make it. What's left?
There's already a joke circulating how to upgrade to Vista for free:
1. Download a window manager that mimics Aero (optional).
2. Remove half your ram.
3. Clock your CPU down a few notches.
Sadly, it's not that far from reality.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.