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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.
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.