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Hands On With Nvidia's New GTX 280 Card
notdagreatbrain writes "Maximum PC magazine has early benchmarks on Nvidia's newest GPU architecture — the GTX 200 series. Benchmarks on the smokin' fast processor reveal a graphics card that can finally tame Crysis at 1900x1200.
'The GTX 280 delivered real-world benchmark numbers nearly 50 percent faster than a single GeForce 9800 GTX running on Windows XP, and it was 23 percent faster than that card running on Vista. In fact, it looks as though a single GTX 280 will be comparable to — and in some cases beat — two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.'"
Can Linux run it?
Same answer as all cool new hardware: NO!
Actually, it's likely just a less developed Vista driver, like most performance problems people report with Vista (and by report, I mean actually experience and document, not the random anti-Vista FUD it's so popular to spout these days.)
It's not exactly raw power, I seem to remember an article explaining the differences between the 7x00 gen and the 8x00 gen, where they fundamentally changed how the graphics card dealed with "stuff", can't remember what magazine it was in though.
I don't think intel has quite that flexibility because of their commitment to backwards compatability, while nVidia can just push out new drivers.
My UID is prime... is yours?
and in some cases beat â" two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.
Bullshit. The 9800GX2 is consistently quite a bit faster (TechReport's very detailed review here), and it costs around $450, while the GTX 280 costs $650 (with the younger brother the 260 at $400), with the only drawbacks being more power drawn and higher noise. Even then, I think it's a no-brainer.
Don't get me wrong, these are impressive single-GPU cards, but their price points are TOTALLY wrong. ATI's 4870 and 4850 cards are coming up at $450 and $200 respectively, and I think they'll eat these for lunch, at least in the value angle.
AMD and NVidia are always going to release new cards. It's just the way of the industry.
If you buy a graphics card in the hope that it's going to be the top of the line card for longer then a few months then you're very much mistaken.
Buy a card that will do what you need it to, and then just stick with that until it stops being powerful enough for you. Anyone hoping their computer will be "future proof" is heading towards disappointment very fast.
I run Crysis, all maxed out, on an 8800gtx, and only get lower than 30fps in the end battle.
If I want more speed, i'll get another 8800. That card is phenomenal, and about to get a lot cheaper.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
No wonder people say Console killed the PC game star -- "Alright, got my hardware list done. Time to order. Oh, look what just came out, guess I'll wait for prices to drop. Alright, they dropped! No wait, a new processor is out, think I'll wait. Sweet, think I can order now. No, nevermind, Crysis just came out, I'll have to wait until I can afford the current bleeding edge. Awesome, I can afford it now! No, a new GPU just came out that runs the game better. Oh, SATA 600 is coming out. Ah, forget this, I'm buying an Xbox."
-Devin Jeanpierre
The GTX280 part looks quite powerful; but its die size is really extreme. Anandtech claims that maximum best case yield for the 280 is 105 chips per 300mm wafer. TFA notes that Intel can put 6 dual core Penryns in the same space These guys quote just under $3,400 for a single 300mm wafer. So, assuming absolutely optimal yield, the GTX280's core costs ~ $300 to manufacture, not counting R&D, packaging, distribution, etc. A gigabyte of RAM suitable for a high end graphics card (read, not 10 dollars worth of DDR2) adds some more, and the board, passives, and assorted other logic do as well.
Obviously, the above numbers are wild speculation; but the punchline is that these parts can't possibly be cheap to manufacture. I suspect that NVIDIA will see some nice sales to lunatic early adopters, and they'll probably have a compute only version of this card for high end computing; but there is no way that it could hit mass distribution price points. Even at $650, I'm not sure that NVIDIA's margins are all that exciting on this particular part.
More and more these commodity graphics cards are being used for non-graphical high speed computing by taking advantage of the insane parallelism of the GPUs.
Someone please develop CUDA benchmarks to be included in future reviews.
We need several apps: one with a kernel that is trivial enough to be constantly starved for memory, one that is the opposite (compute heavy, memory light), integer vs. FP, and something that specifically benefits from the new double-precision floating point that only the newer stuff has.
Get back to me soon, mmmmK?
Microsoft owns the desktop. Content creation and delivery folks want the desktop. What does their (lack of) position in the content market matter?
The content folk are, at best, highly suspicious of "the desktop". With good reason.
Do you really think anyone could sell video content that wouldn't play on Vista?
Of course they could. Most people consume their content from standalone commodity appliances like DVD players and iPods. This hasn't changed in the last few decades (substitute "VHS", "Cassette", "LP", etc as necessary) and there's little reason to think it will in the future.