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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.'"
How is Nvidia able to year after year make these amazing advances in power while Intel makes (although great) only modest advances?
As I said I do not know anything about chip design so please correct me on any points.
Something that has always concerned me (more as I play games less often now) is how much power these cards draw when they aren't pumping out a zillion triangles a second playing DNF.
Most of the time (90%+ probably) I'm just doing very simple desktop type things. While it's obvious from the heat output that these cards aren't running flat out when redrawing a desktop surely they must be using significatnly more power than a simple graphics card that could perform the same role. Does anyone have any figures showing how much power is being wasted?
Perhaps we should have two graphics cards in the the system now - one that just does desktop type things and one for when real power is required. I would have thought it would be fairly simple to design a motherboard such that it had an internal only slot to accept the latest and greatest 3D accelerator card that suplimented an on board dumb-as-a-brick graphics card.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
In most reviews, the 9800GX2 is faster, and it's also $200 cheaper. As a multi-GPU card it has some problems with scaling, and micro-stutter makes it very jumpy like all existing SLI setups.
I'm not well versed in the cause of micro-stutter, but the results are that frames aren't spaced evenly from each other. In a 30 fps situation, a single card will give you a frame at 0 ms, 33 ms, 67 ms, 100 ms, etc. Add a new SLI card and let's say you have 100% scaling, which is overly optimistic. Frames now render at 0 ms, 8 ms, 33 ms, 41 ms, 67 ms, 75 ms, 100ms, and 108ms. You get twice the frames per second, but they're not evenly spaced. In this case, which uses realistic numbers, you're getting 60 fps might say that the output looks about the same as 40 fps, since the delay between every other frame is 25 ms.
It would probably look a bit better than 40 fps, since between each 25 ms delay you get an 8 ms delay, but beyond the reduced effective fps there are other complications as well. For instance, the jitter is very distracting to some people. Also, most LCD monitors, even those rated at 2-5 ms response times, will have issues showing the 33 ms frame completely free of ghosting from the 8 ms frame before the 41 ms frame shows up.
Most people only look at fps, though, which makes the 9800 GX2 a very attractive choice. Because I'm aware of micro-stutter, I won't buy a multi-GPU card or SLI setup unless it's more than 50% faster than a single-GPU card, and that's still ignoring price. That said, I'm sort of surprised to find myself now looking mostly to AMD's 4870 release next week instead of going to Newegg for a GTX280, since the 280 results, while not bad, weren't quite what I was hoping for in a $650 card.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The 9800GX2 may be cheaper but it most certainly is not faster, even considering your links. From Anandtech, the charts show a significant speed increase with the new hardware.
In fact, from the article:
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.
Which leads me to the question, are you trolling?
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.
When run under Vista, it features tons of additional effects. Those are the reasons why the speed improvement in Crysis aren't that much impressive under Vista.
PS: And for the record, Radeon HD3870X2 uses the exact same GDDR3, not GDDR4 as TFA's review says. ATI choose to go for GDDR3 to cut the costs of the dual GPU setup. (Only a few non standard boards by 3rd party manufacturer use GDDR4 and a PCI-express 2.0 bridge).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This year I put my disposable income towards getting in on all three next generation consoles, and the PC will languish for a long time yet.
I don't think I've changed, I think the market has changed.
They're getting bigger and hotter, and no longer feel like cutting edge kit. They feel like an attempt to squeeze more life out of old technology.
DirectX 10 as a selling point is a joke, with the accompanying baggage that is Vista all it does is slow games down, and none of them look any better for it yet. In any case, there are only five or six of them. You can pick up an 8800GT 512 for less than 150 dollars these days, and it's a powerhouse, unless you're gaming in full 1080p. There is no motivation to put one of those power hungry bricks in my rig. Nothing gets any prettier these days, and FPS is well taken care of at 1680x1050 or below.
Game over, graphics cards.
I wonder what will happen if everyone figures this out? Imagine a world in which the next gen of consoles is no longer subsidised, or driven, by PC enthusiasts...
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."
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
Yes, they're comparing it to two 9800GTXs, which is what a 9800GX2 is: Two 9800GTXs on one board. RTFS indeed. It seems like a case of give and take. The GTX280 is more expensive, but is a single GPU solution, which tends to be more stable. The 9800GX2 is cheaper, runs about as fast, but is a dual GPU unit, so you might have a few more "issues" to deal with in your game playing adventures.
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.
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.