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NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra Provides Performance at a Price
Mighty Mouse writes "Hardware review sites across the web have published reviews on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra. The response appears to be fairly lukewarm at the moment, mainly thanks to its incredibly high asking price. Bit-tech tested the 8800 Ultra in eight different games at three resolutions, finding it to be on average about 10% faster. TechReport's Scott Wasson reviewed the card using another good selection of games, while HotHardware had the chance to check out SLI performance."
10% faster for $200 (+/-)? How's this a deal? For that price it'd better do dishes, too.
Read this review.
9
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=297
And conclusion
"But not this time: The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra is an utter waste of money. "
Don't pay $180 extra for something that gives only few percents extra.
We all know why NVIDIA would release such a card - considering how soon the R600 is released. Still, giving this card too much attention is pointless. It will exist in very limited quantities and even if you can afford one, you are highly unlikely to find one.
So basically, we are looking at a card only a few hundred will buy.
Full Tilt
whats the point?
XFX and others have factory over clocked cards with better speeds than the ultra, though the ultra does feature better memory that should allow overclocked ultras to be quicker than overclocked gtxs.
One thing I did find interesting, most sites say that Nvidia is only competing against itself as the R600 is supposedly very disappointing. In other words, its no threat to the 88 series
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The reviews that were posted here on /. while good normally didn't do their homework today with this new card. Only Anandtech seemed to take a look at what is currently available in terms of factory overclocked 8800GTX's on the market. They used the EVGA 8800GTX KO w/AC3, which benches within less then 1% of the performance of the 8800 Ultra AND costs $180 LESS!
Read the review yourself....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I won't be needing an Ultra anytime soon, and I can't see why others would need to either.
I built a brand new system for myself back in November '06, and I put a BFG-Tech 8800 GTX in it.
I love this card. I love it to death. I can throw anything at all at it, and it turns it into pretty rainbows. I run Oblivion and Supreme Commander at the maximum my monitor can support (1920x1200) full everything turned up to the maximum, and the 8800 doesn't even flinch.
Now, if an enthusiast like me needs to build a new system, and didn't buy a 8800 GTX when it came out, and has a lot of money to spend, then maybe that person will jump on this Ultra.
However, considering that there are no games out there right now that can really tax the GTX, why spend more money on an Ultra, when there's nothing out there to really get the extra performance from? If there was a new game out there, and the GTX struggled to give you 35 FPS on, but the Ultra could get you 45... then that might be a performance issue worth looking at. But who is going to be able to tell the difference between 50 FPS and 53 FPS? The difference will be imperceptible.
Just my 2 cents. However, I applaud NVidia for coming out with this, just to make sure they stay on top of the mountain. It shows that they are not resting on the laurels of their recent successes, and are still innovating.
Nvidia needs to stop releasing new cards. The current 8800 GTX and GTS have absolutely terrible driver support in XP and Vista. There is no reason Nvidia should be releasing hardware. They need to get their asses in gear and write some real drivers.
XP drivers have serious overlay issues, and gui rendering issues that cause adobe apps to be very unstable. It has vsync problems that can crush opengl performance from 160FPS at 2560x1600 to 15fps !!!
The Nvidia control panel is complete shit. Its impossible to use, and its a half ass work in progress. The color control sucks in the nvidia panel.
Anyone editing in Avid Express, or Media Composer will quickly find that Video Overlay's on the 8800gtx are rendered with a different color space than regular ui rendered stuff... It makes it near impossible to match the two also because Nvidia's drivers control panel is horrible.
Nvidia has decided to not support NFORCE 3 boards on Vista. How fucking convenient for them. There is no reason to not support it. It's not that old and the platform can use pretty fast modern cpus and gpus.
Nvidia sold the 8800 as vista ready, without even having a vista driver written...
To this day, the Vista drivers still suck and both the XP or Vista drivers have had very few updates in the course of 4 months. (1 update for xp drivers)
I just dont see Nvidia taking things seriously this time around. They are really fucking up something great. BTW i question the 8800 hardware, because there has been a lot of hardware bugs with the dam thing. Check out EVGA's forum and all of the RMAs that have taken place and how many problems people have with the 8800
AVOID the 8800 until Nvidia gets their shit together.
I understand where you're coming from, but the problem is that they can't just have the computer engineers working on hardware just join up with the people making their software. Sure, there those working on the hardware have to know about the software, but there is always a disconnect between the two teams. Besides, with unified drivers, a fix for the 8800 Ultra will reflect on the GTX and GTS. Releasing a new card is not impeding the development of better drivers, but making them more money to hire more computer scientists to make better drivers (etc.).
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
It is most certainly not a "fanboi" rant anymore than you're a troll.
:) )
/3G switch, or else you can expect ALL adobe applications to basically not redraw. They simply will work for 4 minutes and then a massive redraw melt down will take place...
/3 Switch... and the redraw problem goes away... although it seems to be back with Adobe CS3, so i'm guessing Nvidia needs to fix something in their drivers again...
Go read the nvidia forum, even TODAY, look at the complaints and all of the problems with the drivers released today.
I cant for the life of me imagine why you would think it is a fan boy rant? I own an nv 8800gtx, installed in my quad core qx6700 workstation which i use for 3d animation and modelling professionally. This is not a fan boy rant. I didnt just make up the opengl vsync issue... I fucking discovered it! After scratching my head and trying to figure out why in the hell opengl was so deathly slow, I ran the same opengl test on an ATI x1550 AGP that was in my web surfing computer.... The ATI smoked the 8800 in opengl performance (this is softimage XSI, not doom 3
The 8800 was choking at 15FPS will all 4 viewports being displayed, where as the ATI was 90 to 100fps... and this is all rendering at 2560x1600 on my hp 30inch monitor...
The 8800GTX has been NOTHING but hell since i got it. The few games i played... Company of Hereos for one, would render stray polygons and stretch them into infinity...
You can not run the 8800gtx with the
Turn off the
As for quadro cards... I've owned them. They were NEVER worth their price. Most people run Geforces, not Quadros in their workstations. Quadros are nice by insanely over priced and often lacking in performance compared to the geforces...
And WHY would i buy another quadro, when Nvidia cant even support NFORCE3 anymore, OR write a dam driver for the 8800gtx? You're saying i should invest even more money into Nvidia after having been SCREWED by them?
Hmm.. RANT yes.. Fan boy? no. I have never liked ATI. The 9800pro i owned, i was given (game developement) The ATI x1550 AGP is in my web surfing pc... The PC i basically do nothying excepot get email and do office stuff on...
Nvidia's XP drivers are stable in that XP wont crash... but they are have serious issues as i've listed.
Plenty of people edit video with a Geforce card. Nv8800GTX isnt just a consumer card. A $600 video card is not a consumer card in my eyes. Most people wont buy the dam thing. These are enthusiast cards.... Its a high performance card, the fastest yet... Are you saying it is ok to have terrible drivers for a $600 peice of hardware? Are you saying it is ok to release hardware as "vista ready" without a dam driver that functions in vista?!??
And As for the video editing overlay... I'll leave you with this. Do a search on Avid's forum. Yes AVID does recommend the Quadro line of cards for Media Composer... But if you search the forum... you'll quickly find out that the QUADRO cards have the same dam video overlay color problem. It was fixed in one of the drivers, and broken again in the next... and AVID had to tell its customers to adjust the color overlay settings in Nvidia's control panel. The problem is... It is NEAR impossible to match the overlay color, with the regular gdi color values. So when you're stopping and pausing your video in avid... the dam video colors change, which makes it quite hard to color correct etc.
Buying an expensive quadro would not solve that issue. It's all Nvidia's driver...
I just want Nvidia to support their product, which in my opinion is the best dam card out there... but it is so plagued with problems.
A friend of mine pointed out to Nvidia actually a vsync issue within their hardware, and they all run quadros... to do large format 3d at very high resolutions real time.... Nvidia's response was "ooops oh yeah thats a bug" Basically they couldnt get the cards to all sync and render the frames together across multiple displays...
They're going to ATI now.
I could careless WHO gets my money, as long as the dam thing works.