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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.
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.
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 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.
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."
In context, it's clear the GP was referring to the NVidia cards that were reviewed by the article. And he's mostly right. In only one (of many) actual gaming benchmark did any of the Nvidia cards reviewed outperform the X1950.
Where I believe the GP is mistaken is in his conclusions about the article. The article itself says, in conclusion:
The article notes, correctly I think, that the X1650XT is not a good card for gamers to buy. It notes that the 1950 won't do DirectX10, and the budget NVidia cards may not be fast enough to do it well either.
However, it's also instructive to have a look at this review at Hard OCP. There, in two demanding games (Oblivion and STALKER), the 8600 GTS appears to win handily over the 1950XT. If those benchmarks are accurate, it suggests the ExtremeTech article may draw conclusions that are too favorable to the X1950.
Ah well, interesting times for all gfx card consumers!
Holmwood