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44 Comments
- Woolmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13How is ATI out of the way? They have both the Wii and 360 graphic chips.
- fiorenza, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Good in-depth look at the GPU from an architecture standpoint.
- Satanael, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Did someone just use "PS3" and "Revenue" in the same sentence?
- ZombieLuv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The 8800 supports DirectX 10.
- sals-a, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Well ATI hasn't even released there next gen chip, wait till that happens before you go comparing them.
- Satanael, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I thought I heard the rumor that AMD was gonna do quad-core processors, 2 for central processing and 2 for graphics processing.
Maybe my ass just learned how to talk - awlllwa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3i, am a fan-boy myself for nvidia. But i have chosen ati parts when they were better for the application. I don't think there would be much of a point to be a fan-boy if there wasn't a side to agree with. Every fan-boy out there enjoys the competition. So the idea of a fan-boy is beneficial for the company's because throughout there incessant bickering they can figure out what people really like. Its like rooting for you favorite sports team.
- uptown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Did someone just use "PS3" and "Revenue" in the same sentence?"
Component suppliers get paid ... Sony takes the hit. - lament, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2agreed on the price.
however, the GTS in the 8800 series is the equivalent of the GT series in the 7900. nvidia always rolls out the top end cards, then later rolls out the slower cards. so expect the 8600 to be midline, probably $299 range. - BIGmog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Does Nvidia have any other DirectX 10 cards coming out by the end of the year? I want to upgrade to a DX10 card but not for $500-$650.
- mijokijo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2All I can say is that this is an interesting time for AMD/ATI and nVidia. With AMD pushing their graphics cards as multi-purpose HTC processors and nVidia doing the same, we can finally see the line between CPU and GPU blurring.
Not only that, but with nVidia really upping the ante and AMD/ATI just starting to show the fruits of their collaboration, the stage is set for one hell of a competition. It will be really interesting to see how Intel plays into this (if at all).
It's a great time to be a computer geek. - deathguppie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3being a Linux user.. I have had nothing but heart ache with ATI, their Linux drivers bite ass.
Having said that.. it sure as hell isn't going to help me to buy an Nvidia card that is made for DX10.. well at least until OpenGL catches up (oh my god the world just turned upside down) - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Both being _far_ inferior to the 8800. But, as everyone knows, AMDTi is working on a DirectX 10 part too, so we'll see what that part ends up producing power-wise. That being said, I believe nVidia's got this next generation in the bag, but with the graphics industry, it's a very quick back-and-forth cat and mouse game, and we're certain to see ATi bounce back again. This is just great news for the company.
The biggest part that has changed about the chips, which is hardly touched on by anyone, is how much improved the color quality actually is on these new cards; one of the reasons I've been a long-time owner of ATi cards was that for 2D quality, they simply produced the best part, but these new parts from nVidia are making gorgeous images. The mipmapping engine has been completely updated to make some of the most beautiful mipmaps I've ever seen come from a 3D card, and the color quality has improved by a wide margin. If they can bring this to their lower end cards, I'll be moving to nVidia for the first time in my life.
Something not touched in this article specifically, surprisingly as the article was published by Ars, is the transistor count of these new chips; over 700 million transistors on TSMC's 80nm process, making it the single largest graphics processor ever made, and one of the largest commercially mass-manufactured processors ever made (apart from the Itanium II, which clocks in at 1.7 billion transistors). To put it in perspective, it's got almost three times the transistors as the first 90nm Pentium 4s. This is helps you to understand why exactly the G80 is about as powerful as two G71's put together... it's literally about that size (in fact, it's bigger). I can't even imagine the power constraints and requirements of those chips, and I can barely imagine why anyone would want that in their home computer (barely; as I appreciate computing performance, I don't believe my computer needs to have that kind of hardware sitting around unused >50% of the time, however to the hardcore, gaming-as-a-career gamer, go for it. A room full of these things could easily go on to cure MS in the next decade). - pixelpimp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Will they ever make a Core Duo equivalent for GFX cards?
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1We haven't exactly jumped to quad-core; quad-core is coming, but only for the very highest end (people who have $1000 to drop on a single processor, like server manufacturers and kids with their millionaire parent's Visa). We won't start to see quad-core come into the light for general consumption until about half-way through next year, when Intel releases their all-in-one quad-core solution and chops the prices of the MCM-quads. The G80 is also a DirectX 10 part, fully supporting a unified shader model.
But, if you do wait, at least the price of these cards will have came down a bit. - kryptobs2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't think there will be any out by the end of the year, but I'd expect some low-mid range cards Q1 once they improve yields for the G80's
At the moment there is really no point in a low or even mid range DX10 part, Your better off buying a last gen card as far as price is concerned, and there is not going to be any DX10 games out anytime soon anyways. Besides even when there is unless you get a high end card you'll most likely have trouble keeping acceptable framerates with DX10 features enabled. - Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -9/+10Yep, and Core 2 just ran AMD right out of the business, too.
- uptown, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Pretty good conference call about their products and outlook from this evening if anyone is interested:
http://biz.yahoo.com/cc/9/75019.html
One of the interesting things is how they plan to turn desktop PCs into tomorrow's supercomputers, with advanced processing power. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Nice cards, but WAY too expensive. Sorry, but I'll wait. I don't have $500 for the lowest end card, nor do I have $650 for the highest.
- Everclock, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I love how the 12-year old fanboys always make up 90% of the comments.
Wouldn't all of you fanboys out there love for there to be only one obvious choice for video cards? That way, Nvidia/ATI could charge even more! I can't wait till Nvidia/ATI's next card kicks the ***** out of the other company. Maybe they will even delay the release of their next gen cards b/c they don't have to worry about a competitor releasing a new one every 6-12 months too! - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"It's 90nm not 80nm unless I'm mistaken"
I could very well be mistaken, but the last thing I read on the G80 had them competing with ATi for TSMC's 80nm process space (which is of course limited, as it is a very new process). It's possible they went ahead and used the older process to guarantee the chips were actually manufactured on time, with reasonable yields and pricing. However, I hope this isn't the case, as TSMC's new 80nm LP process could do a lot better for power management (and still see the cards being released Q107, which is realistic for the availability of these cards). 65nm would be even better, but nobody's got the yields at 65nm that Intel seemed to pull out of its ass.. (hmm, maybe Intel should buy nVidia just to make the cards on their own process ;), quick, start the rumor mill turning!!). - Nicolay77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I would buy a 8300GT over a 7600GT just for the anisotropic filtering and antialiasing enhancements, even if the framerates of the two is just the same or at least similar.
- DucksofAnaheim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I`d sell my soul for one right now ! JK
- LordBug, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Maybe my ass just learned how to talk"
haha, love that line.
I think the Voodoo 3 was the first 3D GFX card with 2 processors on one card. The Voodoo 5 was the first to offer 4 on one card, if memory serves. - kryptobs2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I am an nvidia/amd fanboy at the moment, but for what it's worth I have an x800 in my pc because it was a better value at the time, although having switched over to linux since then I wish I hadn't done that. Regardless where I'm going with this is I will often hope a company 'fails' but by that I do not mean goes out of business. For example, I hope sony fails this gen with the ps3, but as a result I would hope with that they take away by learning from their mistakes to make a better more competative product next time further benefiting the consumer.
- LordBug, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1$600 for a brand-new, bleeding-edge nVidia card has been the norm for 1-2 generations now. I'm actually surprised it's not more than that this time around.
The good news is that this should push prices down on all of their other card lines. - BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"being a Linux user.. I have had nothing but heart ache with ATI, their Linux drivers bite ass."
Damn straight. They're better than they were - I can actually play games on my ATi card at home now.
They need to realise that the computer enthusiasts that write the articles, that build the rigs for gaming, that play windows games and that recommend/show GPU performance to their friends, are the people who are now installing Linux on their computers as dual boot, or trying it out on a Live CD, or playing with different stuff in general.
When they see what the REAL situation is when you remove MS/VALVe/whoever cronyism, it doesn't make ATi look good.
"OpenGL catches up"
...erm, I'm sorry to sound picky, but is there some way that OpenGL lags behind Direct3D? Because if there is, it wasn't apparent to me in the last OpenGL app I worked on.
The perception of OpenGL as some older worse technology than D3D is a complete myth, and with the advent of D3D10, I can see OpenGL being the preferable option for lots of developers by a long chalk - you can still slap the "DX10" label on it for the fans by using dx gl support, or just keyboard/mouse support from dx - this is what some developers already do. There are quite famous "DX9 games" that don't touch D3D.
Yes, I know what you're thinking. Don't get me started on ATi's OpenGL support and performance on Linux, I'm just glad we have real graphics cards drivers at work.
(I should note here that ATi hardware is in some ways very very good. There is simply NO excuse I can see for the way it performs so badly) - mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1They actually list their low framerate results as being 'median low', not 'minimum'. I'm sure some statistical magic is at work.
Still, if you look at the results, the high-end cards almost all have the same median low, or at least in the same ballpark. That should be a huge red flag that tells you "The video card was not the bottleneck". In other words, those results don't tell you anything meaningful about the different cards at all. The averages are different, which gives you a useful comparison of framerates when not bottlenecked by other components (in fact, the differences are likely to be understated if part of the benchmark was not video card limited.) - mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I truly hate spending $500 on a graphics card, but I think I'm going to get a 8800 GTS. The long-term viability of any other card on the market is extremely questionable, and I'm worried I might get a x1950xt or some other ~$250 card and end up getting a ~$250 8600gt in a year and a half anyway.
- LordRahl72, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Screw ATI and nVidia. 3DFX all the way. lol
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Here's an interesting conundrum: I currently game with a single 7950GT, it's fanlessly silent and very fast. From looking at Oblivion benchmarks from the techreport review:
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q4/geforce-8800/index.x?pg=14
I see that the 7950GT SLI has a minimum FPS of 54 compared to the minimum FPS of 59 from the 8800GS and the strange result of 58FPS for the faster GTX.
Assuming you have the other components in place for SLI, at least with Oblivion, you can get effectively the same performance for much less. Yet you will miss out on the new texture filtering improvements. 16X FSAA for the relatively same cost as 4X FSAA and superior quality 16X Anisotropic filtering on by default. Tee hee, 16X anisotropic filtering on by default! Pinch me! - Everclock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I agree with your view. I should have been more specific. It is the fan boys that claim that "This brand is sucks and this brand is gonna die...blah blah blah" I understand rooting for your favorite hardware company, but hoping that another fails is another story.
- kryptobs2000, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@Gemeni
It's 90nm not 80nm unless I'm mistaken - ray901, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Very interesting and informative article - dugg
Hope OpenGL can keep up...... - kryptobs2000, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0What exactly do you mean by 'core duo equivalent'
There is the 7950 GX2, which is sort of a dual core, though not exactly. 3DFX tried this with the voodoo 5? could be wrong on that, I believe they had a quad core even, but they both failed pretty horribly, they were also the first to introduce sli - schreck9, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Minimum framerates are meaningless. You have a single hitch in one frame, you end up with a 100ms frame, and your minimum becomes 10 fps - but it doesn't capture the fact that maybe the rest of your frames were only 10ms (100fps). Is that a better experience than getting 90ms (11.1 fps) every other frame? Hardly, but by your measure it is.
These websites need to use a more intelligent statistical measure, like median + variance / std deviation. - pplapeu, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0I am replying to ANYONE.
- sals-a, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0ehwj
- Ryan85, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1I Agree with woolmonkey How's ATI out of the way! doesn't make any sense
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1architeched by Frank Lloyd Wright i see...
- xswag, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1I'm not buying another card till it supports DirectX 10. CPU's jumped from Dual Core to Quad Core (later this month?) in a matter of months. I actually want to wait a year to see if they release Vista SP1(just a matter of time) and see what the GPU and CPU market is like.
- lament, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2i was comparing them to the Wii and 360 chips. how can i compare them to something else that isn't out yet?
- lament, on 10/12/2007, -18/+7right, both being inferior to the 8800 series.
- uptown, on 10/12/2007, -22/+3NVIDIA just reported nearly a 41% surge in sales and a 106.5m Q3 profit. With ATI out of the way, PS3 revenue starting to come in, and the recent acquisition of PortalPlayer ... their future is rosy.
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