Hardware Discussions

[GX-WarSpite]

So what do you guys think of the card?

[Ethyriel]

More importantly, what do YOU think of this card Mr. NDA?

Here are some new very high res pics of the monster.

[GX-WarSpite]

Actually I've never seen the card in person, though it was at NVIDIA Editor's Day.

[Crazieman]

I think it looks pretty sexy. Just waiting to see the numbers and how it compares to the Radeon X800 before I decide which to get.

If that 14,000 3D Mark03 score is real, it's probably a sure winner. Thats a lot of freaking power.

[bloc]

Fantastic launch. Drivers improvements should continue to speed up the scores.

Will reserve final judgement for a head to head battle between ATi and Nvidia.

Still for mainstream market and my money, the war is won in the sub $200 US market with the card that has the best FPS vs $$ ratio.

9600 xt 5900 xt and 9800 pro.

Race seems tight.

[navyseal]

480 watt PSU? Damn, i thought that 420 watts was going to be enough.

[bobo5195]

BIgger jump than i thought but most games seem to be cpu limited. Anyone going to try this on a 4ghz + vaporchill to see what it can really do? With 2 dvis couldnt you connect it up to one of those uber medical ultra resolution monitors to make it sing for its supper ?

At least now theres a point in getting the high end as you get a couple of extra pipelines instead of some little clock boost. Should help ati and nvidias bottomline. A 220 million transistor gpu has got to be costly to produce though.

Ill wait to the lower end 8 pipeline parts (or 12 if they are cheap) come out to replace the 5900xt to see how they do, should be pretty nice.

[yoda_blues]

If the 6800 is only getting released in PCI-E, what boards currently support it? Is PCI-E even out right now?

[bobo5195]

Div-x encoding in hardware, drools, finaly i can use this card for something. MIssed/forgot about that.

Rumors are that non ultras are 128but bus with DDR1. Their spoiling ppls fun there, only got to look at 5900xts to see what 256bit memory can do.

[bobo5195]

Accord in to the hexus review a 300w was running (after some power button proding). A good 350w should do it, hopefully. Dont btxs (i think the new enermaxs have em) have to have dual 12v rails so that should help keep the juice flowing. 

[marky1124]

What I'd like to know is how much a GeForce 6800 Ultra would impact an older PC.
For instance I have a Athlon XP 2400+ with 512MB PC2700 and a GeForce 4 Ti4600.
Should I generally expect the same ratio of performance improvements moving from Ti4600 to 6800 Ultra as shown in the test system?

I'd like to know how to assess the impact of CPU load versus GPU load in a game.

Any ideas?

Mark

[Corran]

You will not see as much of an imporvement as you will be much more CPU limited.

[GX-WarSpite]

The 6800 Ultra isn't exclusively PCI-E, in fact, I don't think it will even ship like that at first.  The difference is that it has native support for PCI-E.

[Millerboy]

This card is pretty fast. It's twice as fast as my Nvidia GeforceFX5950 Ultra.

[GX-WarSpite]

Hey Millerboy, do you get a static/hissing sound when you scroll web pages or text documents?

[sentlon]

what do u mean by cpu limit ?

can u explain more about it?

sorry for asking stupid question

[Millerboy]

No I don't get a static or hissing sound when I scroll webpages. Why do you ask that?

[Ethyriel]

Every 3D application needs a certain amount of power from the graphics card, and a certain amount from the CPU. This is different for every application, but there are general trends with graphics engine technology advancement, which generally follow time. If your CPU can't provide enough power for a given application, then the impact of a faster video card is going to be reduced. This effect is on a curve, so that if you have a P4 2.4Ghz you won't get as much improvement from an upgrade from, say a GeForce3 to a 6800 than if you have a P4 3.4Ghz. If you have a P4 1.8Ghz, you'll see even less improvement, and as you slow down the CPU, you'll keep getting closer and closer to 0% improvement.

[yoda_blues]

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GX-WarSpite wrote:
The 6800 Ultra isn't exclusively PCI-E, in fact, I don't think it will even ship like that at first.  The difference is that it has native support for PCI-E.

---

Ahh. ok. Now I get it. The PCI-E support thing had me fuggered up. So its still AGP 8X then. Roger roger. I wonder if you would see any real performance increase by releasing a PCI-E variant.

[carnyge]

unless ATI can pull a rabbit out of thier hat there in some big trouble. has anyone else noticed how they seem to be tweaking the living shit outa the 9700 core? i mean they have based EVERYTHING off of it. what happens when they cant tweak it anymore? -cArnYgE

[synanjin]

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sentlon wrote:

what do u mean by cpu limit ?

can u explain more about it?

sorry for asking stupid question

---

Hey,

You got an answer but thought I would also give it a try.

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-23.html#unreal_tournament_2004   as you can see at 800X600 all three video cards when using the same cpu get exactly the same score, the video card is cpu limited in this case because all of the cards can output as quickly as the cpu can give them information.  So playing that game at that resolution all three cards would play the same.  CPU limited

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-27.html  now at 800X600 you can see the 6800 takes a commanding lead and this game is gpu limited with the other cards as they are tied far behind the 6800.  Here the cpu is obviously able to output much faster than either card can manage to use the information.  GPU limited

So to a point you don't gain alot by buying a superfast card with a moderate system.  However, if you continue to upgrade your system you will grow into the new card.  I always get the best deal on as fast a video card as I can (which is seldom faster than my system but), I hope it is faster than my system.  There are several advantages to this.  The fist one I have mentioned, you don't have to ug your video again when you ug your system.  Second even though you may be cpu limited as to the high end,  games are a series of highs and lows and it is the lows you notice not the average or the high.  So if a moderate system with a moderate video card averages 40 while with the high end card it only gets you, lets say 10 extra fps, at 50 fps.  For this example lets say the game is cpu limited to a top fps of 55 fps (which both get on the high end) you are picking up alot of the extra fps because the 6800 doesn't dip down to the lows the other video card does.  Below 20 fps is very choppy (kind of a strobe like nightmarish experience) and 30 fps minimum is considered the goal.  NOT an average of 30 fps but to maintain at least 30 fps. 

I Know this because I upgraded a moderate system (P3 500 @660) from a geforce DDR card to a GF4200.  The charts showed like a 100 fps difference between the cards using like a 1.4 athlon so I was disappointed with the 20 or so fps I got (this is off the top of my head not actual figures).  That is until I got in game (online Q2 or Q3) and noticed it was much smoother and never had the strobe effect slowdown I described above which had been common place with my other card. 

gl anjin

Message Edited by synanjin on 04-15-2004 07:43 AM

[slash3]

Try running some benchmarks with 8xAA and see if the card suddenly nosedives in performance, could you? One of the other websites had some graphs that showed it spiraling downwards >1024x768 when >4xAA was used... not sure what was causing that.

[Trogdor]

There are a few things I take away from all the previews of the 6800 Ultra.

One is that ATI is going to be hard pressed to actually top it. Both will have 16x1 designs, but I don't think ATI will have the 32x0 option, which might be important for games with lots of shadows. (I believe the ATI cards are going to be around 180 million transistors, which leads me to believe that they will not have quite as many features.) I also doubt that ATI will actually support fp32 this time around, which axes DX9.0c/PS3 support from them. That may or may not really matter.

The next thing is sort of related to the first point: Nvidia now has more features that ATI, but there are still some bugs to work out. DX9 games that were optimized for NV3x seem to be dropping quality on the 6800U. Hopefully the fix to use fp32 instead of fp16 will be both easy and not result in a major performance drop. We'll have to wait and see, though. Other sites have shown quite a few areas that need driver revs, but that's nothing new. At least with NVidia, I feel confident their driver team will fix any major issues and probably increase performance a decent amount as well.

I also agree with someone else that said the previews might be lower clocked than the final release. First, the RAM is spec'ed for 600 MHz, which makes it odd that they're running at 550 MHz. They may not hit 600, but 575 or maybe 585 seems likely (or at the very least that should be an OC'ing option). The core is currently at 400 MHz, and I think they might be able to bump that up a bit more, but 222 million transistors at .13 micron might not go much higher. We'll have to see what some of the shipping cards from GB, A-bit, Asus, etc. offer in terms of OC'ing headroom, as they might offer better cooling solutions.

Related to the heat and clockspeed, I'm a little shocked at the heatsink/fan design. If they're going to all the trouble of having a huge HSF, I can't see any reason to not switch the direction it blows and have the Ultra version vent the hot air outside the case. Maybe noise was the reason, or component placement, but I would really prefer to have anything that size making use of external venting. It would be like having your power supply sucking air into the case instead of blowing out... Sure, it might cool the PS better, but the case temp would jump dramatically.

My final thought is that it will be very interesting to see what sort of price and performance can be had from the regular 6800 cards, and even the 6800XT. I didn't think there would be a "soft-mod" option for Nvidia this round, but it appears I was wrong. Unless NVidia has some way of preventing this from being done. Regardless, if the 6800U is going to start at $500 and the 6800 will go for $300, we could be looking at a 6800XT for $200 or so. It should also have at least the performance of the 5950U, and most likely better.  (And without the need for a power supply upgrade!)

Incidentally, I'm betting the mid-range cards (i.e. 6500 or 6600 or whatever) will not really be that great, though, as they'll likely trim them down to 2 or 4 vertex pipelines and 4 or 8 pixel pipelines, so they'll end up looking like something inbetween the 5700U and the 5900XT. And don't look for help from ATI here, as the X300 and X600 look to be renamed 9600SE and 9600XT parts, respectively (a la the Radeon 9000 to 9200 line).

---

Oh, and slash, the "8X" anti-aliasing is of course going to take a nosedive.  It's not really 8X, but it's 4XAA multi-sampled + 2XAA super-sampled.  In other words, their "8XAA" setting at 1024x768 really renders the image at 2048x1536 with 4XAA and then downsamples it to 1024x768.  That's a huge amount of work to do.  (There is a fringe benefit of this providing anti-aliased shadows, though, which you don't get with multi-sampling.)  Really, though, even 8XAA multi-sampled would have a substantial performance hit relative to 4XAA multi-sampled, and it doesn't really improve the quality all that much.  Twice as many samples requires twice the memory bandwidth.  The rotated-grid sampling technique will be much more benficial than supporting higher AA modes.  Anyway, if you look at R9800, the 6XAA only improves quality a small amount at a pretty big performance hit in most games.

[voodooit]

Hey Trog, I don't think there will be a softmod option for these cards because, if I remember correctly, in the FS preview they mention how the vanilla 6800 will probably have around 12 pipelines, and have a smaller transistor count which would also allow it to be cheaper to produce. If the transistor count is smaller, wouldn't that suggest the additional pipelines are being physically removed rather than just sitting there dormant?

[Trogdor]

I thought I heard elsewhere (THG, maybe) that they were using the same core and would simply have some of the pipelines shut off.  If they actually do a different core, than yeah, a soft-mod (or hard-mod) would be impossible.  ATI's X800SE, X800 Pro and X800XT will all use the same core, though, and they're only about 40 million transistors less than the transistor count of NV40 (20% smaller).  I don't know how easy it would be for Nvidia to release separate cores and if the payoff would be worth it.  It takes a lot of time and testing to validate each board and GPU design, which is why I think ATI has been going with the BIOS/driver being the only difference between many of their cards.

[Cowser]

I would think it would have been to some interest for some hardware site out there to actually stick a meter on those power connectors to see what the card draws in different scenarios. I'd be very interested to see the results.

That seems to be one of the biggest issues.

[Thrawn123]

Wow, looks pretty impressive.  However, I do not like the idea of having to have 2 power connections... but could probably live with it as I've heard rumors that's ATI's high end board is gonna have 2 power connections also.  The Pixel Shader 3.0 spec. is what intrests me the most.  Rumor is ATI's new board is still PS 2.0.  You mentioned that FarCry can use PS 3.0.  Has anyone seen/played FarCry with PS 3.0?  Probably not because DX 9.0c is not released yet that I know of.  I play FarCry on a Radeon 9700 Pro which is PS 2.0 and it looks/plays DAMN good.  I can only wonder what PS 3.0 would look like.  Is PS 3 really that big of a leap?  Any comments?

[Cheesedog_3:16]

Ask and you shall recieve! You will have to scroll down for the Far Cry video using PS3.

http://www.evilmofo.com/images/geforcelan/

[Thrawn123]

Cool, thanx for the link.  The dev stated that it only took them 3 weeks to implement PS 3.0 into FarCry.  Impressive indeed.   If rumors are true... this might be ATI's weak point.  Well, we should know around April 26th.

[Cheesedog_3:16]

NP dude, I didn't know that I would see a game using PS3 this soon. To be honest with you, I am sort of shocked. This is great stuff! It may not be the best video quality, but I have a feeling this will have to do.

Message Edited by Cheesedog_3:16 on 04-14-2004 10:29 PM

[marky1124]

Thanks for your reply. Especially Synanjin - interesting points.
I'd love to see some benchmarks showing more midrange systems' performance with top end cards.
The trouble with sites like futuremark is the amount of overclocking, potentially unstable, systems obscures real system results.

Has anyone managed to track down a full video of the speaker presentations at the GeForce LAN party?
The link http://www.evilmofo.com/images/geforcelan/ given above has a taste of a "explaining the shaders" talk.
I'd love to hear the full length explanations.

Cheers,
Mark

[anarchos]

it has power lower consumption than radeon 9800xt

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-19.html

[deb0]

Looks like Nvidia will finally have fully recovered from their strategic blunders of last year; 1) DX code pathing implementations, 2)DDRII impelentation.  If this figures are correct, then ATI has got a lot of pressure on them.  I am curious as to why ATI is very hush hush this time around.  A competitor in a dead heat match, would not miss the opportunity to dampen the promising release of it's rivals  products.  I hope that ATI can in fact compete, as prices will be pulled downward.

[bad-dog]

I'm going to wait and see the ATI respond for that card though i really doubt they will release something to beat that ! anycase whatever will be better is the one i gonna buy all i need is to sell my ASUS FX5600Video Suite almost new used 4 months lol oh well anycase anybody knows what the prices cuz i got 300 bucks for selling this card and stuff i should be having about 500 - 600 bucks i wondered if it is enough ?

[Druga Runda]

the question is when will it be available, and what about that 16 pipe R420?

Could be less features but faster... as there are some rumors about 500-600 clock speed for that - that would be uber moster if ATI can pull that off...

[Goofus Maximus]

I think Shader Model 3.0 is going to be a telling feature. The folks at CryTech have already shown their SM3.0 implementation, which they say only took them THREE WEEKS to do.

Here's a link scroll down to April 15, 3:49pm, to see screenshots of FarCry using SM3.0

Message Edited by Goofus Maximus on 04-15-2004 02:08 PM

[Natedog51]

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Goofus Maximus wrote:
I think Shader Model 3.0 is going to be a telling feature. The folks at CryTech have already shown their SM3.0 implementation, which they say only took them THREE WEEKS to do.

Here's a link scroll down to April 15, 3:49pm, to see screenshots of FarCry using SM3.0

Message Edited by Goofus Maximus on 04-15-2004 02:08 PM

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It's pictures and performances like that, that makes me wonder where that idiot screaming "All Nvidiots should die" went. The differences in those pictures were really astounding and got me definately drooling. I'm just afraid that my PC isn't man enough to handle such a big flippin' card though. As my shot put throwers would say "That card has got some big brass shot puts".

Later

Nate

[voodooit]

Um, how come the water in that second set of pictures using the shader 2.0 looks like that? I remember the water in Farcry when I played it was always clear and fairly realistic looking, as I had the settings set pretty high. It almosts looks as if they had details turned down in the first picture and then turned up in the second picture... anybody else have some thoughts on this? I don't want to sound like I'm biased thinking up crazy conspiracies, but that looks a little fishy.

[Thrawn123]

I don't think the first water picture is even using PS 2.0.  Or if it is, the texture quality is set REAL low.  Water does NOT look like that when I run the game on a Radeon 9700 Pro using PS 2.0 with highest detail lvl.  It's all a SCAM!!  Muahaha!

[japanair]

Any idea how the normal Nvidia 6800 will perform in relation to the 5950 and its Ultra version? Also what power supply would be recommended?