Nvidia Launches 8800 Series, First of the DirectX 10 Cards 149
mikemuch writes "The new top-end GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS from Nvidia launched today, and Loyd Case at ExtremeTech has done two articles: an analysis of the new GPU's architecture, and a benchmark article on PNY's 8800 GTX. The GPU uses a unified scalar-based hardware architecture rather than dedicated pixel pipelines, and the card sets the bar higher yet again for PC graphics." Relatedly an anonymous reader writes "The world and his dog has been reviewing the NVIDIA 8800 series of graphics cards. There is coverage over at bit-tech, which has some really in-depth gameplay evaluations; TrustedReviews, which has a take on the card for the slightly less technical reader; and TechReport, which is insanely detailed on the architecture. The verdict: superfast, but don't bother if you have less than a 24" display."
WOW! This is FAST! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Modern games still dont run at optimal frame rates at 1280x1024 with max graphics settings. Most recent of these is Neverwinter Nights 2, I get around 20fps which is enough, but I wouldn't mind it being a bit smoother.
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20fps with your 7800GTX in NWN2 is certainly not acceptable
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Re:WOW! This is FAST! (Score:5, Funny)
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Stop that.
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640K should be enough for anyone.
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How worthwhile that is depends, of course, on
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Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Sun GDM-5410"
HorizSync 30-122
VertRefresh 48-160
Modeline "2048x1536@72" 472.89 2048 2080 3872 3904 1536 1565 1584 1613
EndSection
'The old that is strong does not wither' :)
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Well of course only an "Apple" monitor could ever have these HIGH levels of capabilities...
Is everyone here AppleStupid? - Or maybe the term is MacInTard?
My freaking laptop has a 1920x1200 LCD, and it is at the bottom of the list of displays in my HOME let alone at my office. Even my old 2002 Toshiba Laptop has a 1600x1200 LCD display.
I suppose people are going to go all crazy and start saying that they play games on PCs above 1024x768 next. Oh my, the insanity, how could this be possible?
Ge
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Just remove the fan and smear hear-absorbing paste all over your video card! Works wonders!
DNF! (Score:4, Funny)
*ducks*
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another review (Score:4, Informative)
More In-depth Analysis Here At HotHardware.com (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this mean.. (Score:2)
Yes... (Score:1)
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Yeah, but... (Score:2, Informative)
... does it run Linux?
Seriously... when are the Linux drivers expected?
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Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_linux
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Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70
Check at the bottom the 32 and 64 bit linux drivers are beta and you can use them right now. It looks like they also have bsd and solaris support today also.
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Sure, they're beta, if you want to be picky about it. Probably works just fine - their last beta drivers did.
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See: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70
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Also GPGPU (Score:3, Insightful)
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24" monitor? (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't say...
Now we need (Score:1)
What about the DRM (DX 10 certs require it) (Score:4, Interesting)
They kept changing the standards over and over.. so the question is exactly what is required in terms of integrated DRM.
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HDCP support being required wouldn't surprise me, but that's not so much DRM as a stupid thing to try and make you buy a new monitor. But in either case, won't affect gaming whatsoever, or legal content for quite some time (the ICT isn't likely to be enabled before 2010-2012). I doubt it's required anyways, just highly recommended.
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1.HDCP support so that if the software layer requests it, the data will only be sent to devices that are approved (i.e. those that correctly talk HDCP)
and 2.Support on the software side so that the drivers (or at least one version of them) will be able to prevent screen scraping programs (think FRAPS etc) and other hacks from being able to read graphics data back if the application and OS request "protected media".
Basicly, unless you are actaully using software and
Finally... (Score:2, Funny)
MSI's 8800GTX @ Bootdaily (Score:1)
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Virtualisation Support? (Score:3, Interesting)
TFA didn't seem to mention anything about this though. Can anyone comment?
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Not that I was a developer or really knew anything about the implementations of todays graphics cards I think that off screen rendering has been supported for some time.
For example game F.E.A.R. [whatisfear.com] did take use of, among other things the off screen rendering, or straight to textrure when multiple surveillance cameras were rendered on a monitor in the game world.
The way I see it, the chip itself doesn't have to know so much about how many tasks are using it, it's the drivers or perhaps even higher level softw
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More at ocp and toms (Score:2)
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/08/geforce_880 0/ [tomshardware.com]
Although the toms article is pretty worthless as most benches are cpu bound with a fx64 cpu.
my favorite has to be this page, 8800 GTX SLI/3.80GHz Core 2 Duo SLI
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2053791
Coincidence? (Score:1)
Re:Coincidence? (Score:4, Funny)
No. M$ doesn't release its products until they go bismuth (to treat typical symptoms of M$' early adopters), which is still 4 release candidates away.
[H]ard Review (Score:2)
BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS [hardocp.com]
I found their review to be of typical [H] quality, which I think is pretty decent (when compared to other H/W review sites, that is ;)
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SLI? (Score:1)
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Q: Do the new GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS GPUs support SLI technology?
A: Yes. All GeForce 8800 GPUs support NVIDIA SLI technology.
Makes PS3 obsolete before launch (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I sound very offtopic bringing this up, but many PC gamers also play console games. They will want to compare console graphics to PC graphics.
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Isn't the good PS3 package selling for more like $600?
The 8800 GTS is around $450. You can easily get the rest of a solid gaming PC for $450. So you're talking more about a $900 PC than a $2,000 PC. And that's before pricing a decent HDTV vs. a decent gaming monitor.
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Plus, the PS3 has a herd of vector coprocessors to assist the video engine. I don't think anyone is going not buy a PS3 because it fails to meet some artificial benchmark in the lab. They're going to complain that it costs a hell of
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Besides, the video card you can buy costs as much as a whole PS3. The PS3 is still better bang for your gaming buck. Either way, I'm ok with my Go7600 in my laptop and I'm gonna get a Wii, so y'all can go do your own thing when posturing about gam
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And the new gaming PC I'm building costs less than the PS3, and other than perhaps 100 bucks for the chibi version of this monster when it comes out, I don't expect to have to do much to keep the system I'm building competitive with the PS3 in terms of playing a b
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Not to be a PS3 fanboy (Score:2)
An 8800 GTX is how much, exactly? A PS3 is 550$ CDN. How many PC games will use DX10? 10 games? AFAIK, Halo 1, Half-Life 2, etc, aren't magically DX 10 games since they were written for previous versions of the DX API.
Will SquareEnix be writing PC versions of Final Fantasy XII? X-2?
Cost wise, these cards and the PS3 are close. Game wise, I suspect the PS3 will have more games out than there will be DX10 games. The DX10-Vista lock in is another dis
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Have you ever played PC games and console games? Console graphics have always SUCKED DONKEY compared to PC graphics. The PS2 had the most advanced graphics processor around when it was released... but the output resolution was 320x200 (because that's about what a TV uses), so it really didn't matter a damn.
Nobody sane has ever expected decent graphics from a co
oh goodie (Score:1)
NVIDIA CUDA, GPGPU initiative (Score:5, Interesting)
This review looks at gaming and such too, but also touches on the NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), that NVIDIA is hoping will get super computing into mainstream pricing. What thermal dynamics programmer would love to access 128 1.35 GHz processors for $600?
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=319&type=exp
"DirectX 10 Cards"? (Score:2, Troll)
"DirectX 10 Cards" sounds as silly as saying "Vista compatible PC BIOS". WTF?
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In their rush to get a chunk of the big Windows mar
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It's called the CAPS structure, and DirectX has had it for as many versions as I can remember. You check to see what Capabilites the card supports and decided what features you'll use. The OpenGL extensions are the same damned thing, except there you enumerate a big string list, while on the DirectX side you have all extensions visible and most available in software emulation mode, with the CAPS structure telling you what was hardware accelerated.
Besides, how do you think pixel shaders and
"You must be new here." (Score:2)
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Isn't this the tail wagging the dog? Shouldn't the video card industry have hardware API standards and shouldn't the software vendors be releasing stuff compatible with the hardware?
Sure, if you want to go back to the bad old days of games only supporting a small number of very specific video cards.
Re: don't bother if you have less than a 24" (Score:2)
Is anyone testing these video cards in 3840x1024 yet?
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I don't think many games would support that resolution (I'm assuming that's what you're referring to when you say testing). Also, would you even want to play a game across multiple displays? For one thing, I'd imagine the bezel around each monitor would get annoying.
DirectX cards (Score:2)
Forget the review; what catches my eye here is the term "DirectX 10 Card." The very idea that it's categorized by limited software compatibility, rather than categorized by the type of hardware slot that it uses, is a new idea to me.
I can see a huge upside to it, though. As a time-saver, I would love for the amount of "closedness" to be how hardware gets categorized, so that I could just shop from the "open and compatible with everything" category instead of having to do research along the lines of "is t
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It just happens to be the first to be able to run DirectX 10 games too.
Cards have been talked about that way forever (Score:2)
Well DirectX 10 makes more ch
... bindone? (Score:2)
I want to see the rest of the family (Score:2)
However I now want to get a card of the same price and watts requirements of the 7600GT but with the G80 chipset (the one inside this beasts), just because of the better anisotropic filtering and antialiasing.
So... how long until we have the mid end versions of thi
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These are just video games. At some point, you're seriously facing diminishing returns for your $1200USD SLI 8800 rig.
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Power consumption (Score:4, Insightful)
Power consumption - correction (Score:2)
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AACS copy protection on the new generation HD video media has invasively strict requirements, such as encryption of the video path within the system itself to prevent "sniffing" attacks, which means either the hardware itself or the drivers constitute a form of DRM. Any way I look at that encrypted media pa
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With 768MB of RAM you might actually be able to run Beryl and open up _10_ windows before they start going black!
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about look here:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=7 7248 [nvnews.net]
My workstation at school is a turbo-cache Quadro card with ony 128MB of RAM... which means I can only open a couple of windows before they start going black... sigh.
Friedmud
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It's called the CAPS structure, and DirectX has had it for as many versions as I can remember
It's not the same thing at all. The CAPS structure allows you to enumerate which subset of DirectX the card supports. OpenGL extensions allow you to query for features which were not part of the original specification. This is exactly the difference I was describing. You can't use DirectX 9 features from a DirectX 8 application, but you can use OpenGL 2.0 features from an OpenGL 1.0 application by accessing
Unifed sghaders in OpenGL already here ? (Score:3, Interesting)
GL_NV_geometry_shader4
GL_NV_gpu_program4
GL_NV_gpu_shader4
and new Cg profiles
All we need now is header file
Chances are, for OpenGL directX 10-like functionality will be here before VISTA. Another one for swith to OpenGL from DirectX. Also it will be at least couple of years before majority of the gamers switch to VISTA, but with OpenGL developers can utilize latest GPU to their full potential on the Windows XP.
More about it in this thread form OpenGL.org:
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubb/ultim
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I would submit Halo as an example of a game that shows just how much it was optimized for the target hardware. The PC version chugs on much more powerful hardware.
And frankly, you HAVE to tune your game for each platform, it's not optional. Platforms have different capabilities (pixel shader s
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Though by "testing", I simply mean benchmarking cards however the reviews currently benchmark cards, with the benefit of actually taxing th
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I have a 20" screen. Even with its native resolution of 1600x1200, pixels are quite large. Turn off AA, and particularly AF, and any game looks pretty poor (jagged edges and un-merged texture edges look abysmal when magnified).
Particularly looks awful if my poor vanilla 6800 won't let me do more than 1024x768 for a game (e.g. the monster that Bethesda created which is Oblivion); generally this looks awful scaled to fill the screen (esp. with AA low or turned off). If I'm usi
Forget the graphics (Score:2)
Yeah, games are fine & all that, but I'm just happy for gamers to bring the economies of scale down for this-here plug-in supercomputer.
GPGPU is what will really make it stand out. Physics acceleration, Folding@Home, ray-traced audio, ray-traced window managers, fluid-simulator window managers, film-level 2D pixel processing (my field), realtime H.264 decode & encode... I'm just scratching the surface. High performance computing just got a whole lot cheaper.
Cell? Never heard of it.
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That is why I live in a 10-bedroom, 3-bathroom mansion.
That is why I have 6 monitors at work, even though I just play solitaire.
Because the opposite of 640k is enough for anybody means having as much as possible no matter the need.
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Well, hoping for a patch.
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Out of my price range.... (Score:2)