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NVIDIA's 55nm GeForce GTX 285 Launched
Visceralini writes "NVIDIA is launching yet another high-end 3D graphics offering, an optimized version of their top shelf GeForce GTX 280 single GPU card, dubbed the GeForce GTX 285.
This new GeForce is a
55nm die-shrunk version of the legacy GTX 280 with lower power consumption characteristics that don't require an 8-pin PCI Express connector, rather just a pair of more standard 6-pin plugs.
Performance
metrics are shown here in a number of the latest game titles including
Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2 and Mirror's Edge. The new GTX 285 is
about on par or slightly faster than a GTX 280 but with
less power draw and some room for overclocking over the reference design."
The new GTX 285 is about on par or slightly faster than a GTX 280 but with less power draw and some room for overclocking over the reference design.
40W less while idle (vs. 280), @ $0.12 kWh, means if I can pick one up for $400 (I can dream, can't I?), it will have paid for itself - through power savings - in less than 10 years!! I know what I'm spending my tax refund on!!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
- The current best performing single card is the GeForce GTX 295
- The best performance setup was (before this card) a tossup between dual GeForce GTX 295s (quad SLI) and three GeForce GTX 280s (three-way SLI).
- The overclocking potential of the GeForce GTX 285 & reduced power consumption might make a three-way 285 setup preferrable to a dual 295 setup (for enthusiasts)
...who lack unlimited funds, the best buy at the moment are the ATi HD 48x0 series cards, which have ridiculously good price/performance and will run any current or near-future game easily at high detail.
Read Pynchon.
But can it run Vista?
Pff, Fallout 3 as benchmark.
I want to see hardware benchmarks that fits the software description of "Software written for the future machines", or isn't this future enough?
Unless you live way up north or play games only in the winter, dealing with 840 Watts of heat is going to be problematic for a dual GTX295 setup. Summer is worse in that you now have to pump out that heat through the AC system.
People often will bitch about their cable/DSL bill, but have they ever tried to calculate the monthly cost of electricity their gaming rig racks up alone?
Some of us don't care. :D
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
My 8800 GTS died yesterday, wonderful vertical lines down the screen (lines of characters in text mode) and unexpectedly booting in VGA res.
I looked online for a new card, saw a 285 being sold for cheaper than any 280, and looked it up. I saw that it was basically a 280 v2, so I ordered one. Even at 9:40pm I was offered next day delivery by ebuyer, so I took it. I got the order dispatched email at 10:20pm.
I didn't realise until a little later that its release date was yesterday! That's some crazy timing.
the parent post misses the fact that for dual and more 280 setups, you need a huge case and a kickass power supply. ati 4870s are much easier to fit in a single standard case, and give similar or better performance.
Read radical news here
Preface: I own none of the cards in question, nor any of their relatives, and am not a partisan observer or even a gamer. I keep up with graphics cards to assess their utility for co-processing.
8600GT usually bests the 3870 for a similar price.
Shenanigans. I've never seen a review or review site discover this in testing or make such a claim. Perhaps you meant to say "3650" instead of "3870" because that one fits your description. The 3870 is in a higher league entirely. The specs aren't even close; there's no way for [nvidia|ati]-friendliness in an engine to overcome so large a gap:
Model in question-Gshader/s-Gtex/s-GB/s
8600GT, (DDR2) -- 37.8 - -- 8.6 -- 12.8
8600GT (GDDR3) -- 37.8 - -- 8.6 -- 22.4
9600GT - - - - - 104 - - - 20.8 -- 57.6
9800GT - - - - - 168 - - - 33.6 -- 57.6
3850 - - - - - - 213 - - - 10.7 -- 53
3870 (512MB) - - 248 - - - 12.4 -- 57.6
3870 (1024MB) -- 248 - - - 12.4 -- 72
Recently the 9600GT was priced similarly to the faster/better 8600GTs at ~$85.
What? The slowest 9600GT is faster than the fastest 8600GT. By a lot. It was a huge disappointment upon introduction, falling far short of the performance level expected of a "mid-range" offering when the 8 series was released.
The 9600GT utterly demolishes both in virtually everything...
Again, shenanigans.
The 9600GT 3870 are tightly matched in present games, but the 3870 has 150% more shader power despite the 9600GT's 70% texel advantage and thus will perform much better as shader programs continue to get more complex and play an even larger part in scene rendering.
[the 9600GT] was within 10-15% of the 9800 GT...
Not likely. Look at the specs. Give a source; if one supports your claim, it was obviously a memory-bound game (poor engine implementation) rather than texture- or shader-bound, because the 9800GT has at least 50% more of each on an otherwise similar design. Most games don't suffer from engineers botching such a basic element of engine design; memory bandwidth is by far the scarcest resource (i.e. the bottleneck) for your game, always.
The 3870 supposedly has better hardware than both...
A lot better. As long as your game/settings want an normal amount of shading power, you use AA/AF, your app can exploit instruction-level parallelism as easily as thread-level parallelism, etc. The relation between the 3870 and the 9600GT is borne out in tons of games and non-games. But, you say:
...basically all recent drivers (since at least 8.8) appear to botch the GPU load (with fixed clock speeds mind, no power throttling) so that most games only use 30-50% of the GPU's capacity.
Appear to? To whom? This would represent an enormous crippling of performance on a very visible product (and after competing favorably with the 9600GT in the game hardware press and elsewhere) and subsequent failure to remedy. There was a ~20% performance hit with the 8.8 release compared to 8.7, but your "30-50% capacity" implies it was nowhere near "capacity" before that. In other words: source? reasoning? definition for "capacity"? [I know the 38x0 overspent silicon on the memory implementation that didn't benefit as much as they thought it would, but you're still being very ambiguous with that term.]
It's a bad feeling when you get a low price on a decent 3870 GDDR4, only to have to have your older 8600 consistently performing better...
Buying new stuff that doesn't work better than your old stuff when you thought it would is certainly a bummer. But I just don't buy that an 8600 anything is faster than a 3870, ever, because both the specs and the real-world testing in the press show the latter with such a colossal advantage over the former. The 8600GT was a lacklustre, first-gen 8-series that slipped from its target to a main
For a review that has all the game benchmarks AND is also fun to read, with insightful analysis and clever commentary, check out The Tech Report's comparo of the GTX 285 to SIXTEEN competitor cards and configs. Why settle for just benchmark results and technical jargon when there's humor in the pixels?
sry but those benchmarks are not even close to right. since when does the 280 score 2000 points more than the 4870 1 gig. sry not a chance. when you guys post benchmarks, at least post correct ones. and 1920x1200 at 4x aa and 16x af is not a valid benchmark because those are not 3d marks default (and online comparable for that matter) settings. this is not a nvidia fan boy cry, i run nvidia myself lol but i know what the 4870's can really do.