nVIDIA GeForce GTX200

[reivanen]

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-g ... view-test/

Its quite impressive. Especially the GTX260 at 399$

What do you think?

[det]

That page doesn't even list GTX260 benchmarks and you can't even buy a GTX260 now

[Cabbage]

The new ATI card will hopefully blow it out the water, will be cheaper and more powerful from what ive read, assuming it dosent turn out to be anther 2900HD ofc..

[reivanen]

The new atis will compete with 9800gtx/ultra. GTX200 series is in a league of their own, competing with 2gpu setups.

Power efficiency is totally new, as they only drain some 20w power in idle.

[det]

Nope. 4870x2 will beat gtx280. Crossfired 4850 will destroy gtx260 at same price point.

[Michilus_nimbus]

Nothing beats my gf8400

[reivanen]

Dual GPU configurations - no thanks.
(no im not a fanboy. The gx2 is awfull, as is x2:s)

[[Krogoth86]]

Well the GTX 280 is a nice piece of hardware but not really interesting for me and most other people. Price is likely to stay rather high, power consumption really isn't at its best (although not so bad for a high-end card but as the smaller ones are based on this it might not turn out so well), the fan has to be the worst thing built on something for the last few years (some people even returned their cards because they were extraordinary loud under load)...

I think ATI now has a good chance of getting some nice amount of additional performance as they doubled their texturing units (which where a big bottleneck) and also have adapted some techniques that made the G80 so succesfull in modern games like the seperate shader domain. So while NVIDIA more or less introduces a refresh ATI really has done some changes on the architecture. I'm looking forward to the release on monday...

Dual GPU configurations - no thanks.
(no im not a fanboy. The gx2 is awfull, as is x2:s)

Well it seems that ATI confirmed that the 4870 X2 will no longer suffer from micro stuttering - the one big disadvantage of dual combos. Together with in the meanwhile multiple 4850 benchmarks it seems that a 4850 CF comes dangerously close to the GTX 280 (and sometimes beats it) - a 4870 combo really might win the performance crown but this still has to be officially proven...

[REVENGE]

On the surface, all indications suggest that NVIDIA has really dropped the ball with this one in terms of a price/performance perspective. Otherwise, perhaps they'll pull a nice driver boost out of their ass sometime after launch.

[[Krogoth86]]

Omg - the 4850 @ 9800 GTX niveau and with insane quality settings it even pwns an Ultra (and that's a serious test)!

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hard ... _qualitaet

[reivanen]

The 9800GTX+ (55nm process, higher clocks then 9800gtx) is priced at 199$, and it beats the exactly-same-priced 4850 in every scenario.

Don't derail the thread here - this is about the masterpiece called GT200 core - GTX200 series.

[Elkvis]

The 9800GTX+ (55nm process, higher clocks then 9800gtx) is priced at 199$, and it beats the exactly-same-priced 4850 in every scenario.

Don't derail the thread here - this is about the masterpiece called GT200 core - GTX200 series.

it is better, but the price is not the same.

Dont get all fanboyish on us, the 4850 is the bottom of a new series. The 9800GTX+ is the top of an old architecture.

[[Krogoth86]]

The 9800GTX+ (55nm process, higher clocks then 9800gtx) is priced at 199$, and it beats the exactly-same-priced 4850 in every scenario.

Don't derail the thread here - this is about the masterpiece called GT200 core - GTX200 series.

Well the recommended price is at 230$ (whereas you can buy a 4850 for even 150 ├óÔÇÜ┬¼ here incl. taxes). It also of course doesn't beat the 4850 in every scenario because ot its let's say +10% performance it's still nowhere near the +71% advantage with high quality settings in higher resolutions. We'll have to see about the energy consumption as the predicted values for the 4850 are pretty good while a 9800 GTX+ indicated a small raise in power consumption and from today's view it seems that the 9800 series still has the VRAM Bug. It's still a very nice card but imo it gets beaten by the 4850 (with no doubt when you want to play with high quality settings)...

Dont get all fanboyish on us, the 4850 is the bottom of a new series. The 9800GTX+ is the top of an old architecture.

I think the "problem" about all this is that is seems that all that NVIDIA currently has planned for the (in fact pretty important) non high-end sector are those 9er series refreshes and currently it looks like AMDs new series will be dominating this range...

I'm still looking forward to the final results...

[Keithus]

4850 seems to be able to crank MSAA to a spectacular degree now, so it gets my vote over the 9800gtx/9800gtx+. Unfortunately the 4850 has a horrible single slot cooler though.

On topic, the GT200 look and perform beautifully, too bad you have to sell your soul to buy one. Once nVidia move their GT200 to 55nm and cheapen their manufacturing process it should be a very interesting competition between red and green.

[Elkvis]

yeah, don't forget that that is only the absolute base reference design though.

[Caydr]

At what point does that performance become unnecessary?

Oh shit I feel a tldr coming on.

Some facts:

1) Xbox and PS3 have a GPU which is -at best - on par with a top-of-the-line single-card Geforce 7xxx series.

2) The Geforce 8xxx series makes all previous video hardware obsolete, being a minimum of 33% faster in any situation and typically much more than that.

With those three facts in mind, consider point 3:

3) PC gaming slowing down, it's inevitable. Slobbering-mouth greasy FPS playing console tards are easier to sell to because they're mainly people who have only been gaming for a short time - ie, people whose first system may have been a playstation 2, rather than a Commodore 64 like in my case. So unlike me and many of you, you can throw just about anything at them and they'll think it's wild and original. No offense intended... well maybe a little. Tards.

5) Consoles are slightly more difficult to pirate games for. From what I understand, a tard probably couldn't handle it, so it's not likely to happen.

All this combines to form the conclusion that developing games for consoles = good, developing games for PC = not so good.

Now, with that in mind, why would developers decide to go the extra mile just for PC gamers so that those few PC gamers who actually buy their product can enjoy 3% better shadows and lighting - assuming they even OWN the $700-plus-tax hardware necessary? They won't.

Take Crysis as an example. It's too advanced to run on a console. Hell even Half-Life 2 episode 2 had to be tweaked to death and reduced in quality to go on xbox, and is even worse on PS3. HALF-LIFE 2. A game that's considered by PC standards to be "not very hardware-intensive". As in, my computer can run it at 200 fps if I don't use all the whiz-bang oversaturated lighting and 300x antialiasing. And a console can't run that at 60 fps... or was it even 60 fps? Don't consoles output at 30fps? I don't recall. It's even worse in that case, but I really don't remember.

All this adds up to one conclusion: there is no reason for developers to make games which require hardware most PC gamers don't have in the first place, especially when the improvements are minimal and developing with console-level graphics in mind is more sensible.

You are not going to need that GTX280 or whatever anytime soon and Nvidia's going to be bleeding money for making yet another ultra-high-end chip so soon after the 8 series and "epic lulz edition" 9 series.

If ATI gets their act together they can be in a dominating position within 6-12 months. It's going to be hard to get over the stigma of being in a severe underdog position for the last couple of years, and not in good shape before that either. Their last majorly successful card was the 9700/9800 from back in 2001, AND they're now simultaneously making CPUs that can't compete with Intel's. AMD is designing and manufacturing as fast as they can and it's a well-known fact that Intel already has much faster chips designed, they just don't see a reason why they should start manufacturing them when they're already at the top of the market.

If I buy another video card before 2010 it'll probably just be because I liked the box art and felt like wasting money.

[imbaczek]

having seen AMD's 4xxx-Radeon, I conclude that GTX2xx are pointless.

[reivanen]

I'd have to agree with you if it wasn't for the surprises nvidia keeps working on.

This is one of them: PhysX



And from what i've been told they still have one technology under way due in the next couple of weeks.

But i agree fully on that the hd4000 series is something that brings ati back to the competition!

[Caydr]

First off, I have no first-hand experience with a PhysX card or a PhysX enhanced game. This being the case, there are still things I know are wrong with it.

Other competing technologies are becoming more and more mature. See Half-Life 2 Episode 2 - some of the stuff is canned, but a lot of it is generated realtime. Also see Star Wars Force Unleashed.

PhysX can only be used to enhance graphics, not actually affect gameplay, and it can only be done on PC. While it could be used for gameplay purposes (running from a falling *whatever*, etc), then you'd have a sticker on the box that says "Must have Geforce 9xxx or PhysX card to play", which can be translated into layman's terms "Don't buy this." This is especially true in multiplayer games, where you will not be able to have PhysX players and non-PhysX players on the same server since one of the groups would have a major advantage.

IMO prettier graphics do not make a better game, and it doesn't look like anyone is taking PhysX seriously, I don't think it's a very strong argument in favor of Nvidia. PhysX is a "wait and see" technology. Everyone who's heard of it and seen what it can do thinks "that's awesome!" but doesn't want to burn $300 to get the benefits of it if it's only going to be used to its full effect in small handful of games.

Even if it's thrown in with the 9xxx series and up, it'll be years before the marketing people will let them say "Requires Geforce 9 or higher" on a box.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well when considering that PhysX feature you also should consider that there recently only are like 15 games at all which support GeForce PhysX...

In addition to that ATI's advances on this sector haven't been announced yet. Well apart from the fact that they will support Havoc together with Intel (which is unprobable of being supported by the GPUs yet) and NVIDIA offered ATI to include CUDA and with that PhysX for their cards / drivers too. So with a bit luck ATI will feature both...

But first let's wait what ATI meant with just talking about physics calculation capabilities in some of their brief previews...