Geforce 8900: an overclocked G80 that should give R600 a run for the money.

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Originally Posted by turtle

Very well put, and I agree on almost everything. :toast:

If the tasks the MUL is currently working on are essentially free or were in past generations with significantly less power, and added to G80's spec just for a >500GFLOP 'checkbox' (there's a Geo line for ya), would it really require 173 Gflops for those tasks? I wouldn't think so. They've got to be cooking up some way to use it. It seems like such overkill for such simple operations.

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You may have a point, but I'm the wrong person to ask. It may not even be that simple as the geometry of scenes get more complex. That being said, a MUL is a very small unit, and the relatively large GFLOP number it results with is mainly due to the fact that it's tied to the massive amount of shader units and shader clockspeed of the G80.

But it goes back to the question of why NVIDIA bothered to mention the MUL, and in my mind they wouldn't have if it wasn't programmable, otherwise why lead developers on about something they can't use? I think that just further supports the idea that they'll open it up eventually.

While it depends on how different 8900 G80 cards are from 8800 G80 cards (the memory chips used and PCB design), I see no reason why hacking the drivers or modifying/flashing the 8800GTX's BIOS couldn't work. But if it's like the 7800GTX 512MB was, flashing won't help.

My guess it higher clocks and faster GDDR.
If thats not enough then we see some odd hard to get card later at sick price.

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Originally Posted by ahmad

Nvidia had been going for a raw performer, not a feature oriented design. G80 mimicks that. If you ask me, if it wasn't for AVIVO, nvidia would have never cared to improve their decoding hardware/software.

I sure hope Nvidia doesn't go out of their way to try and optimize their drivers some more by reducing the visual quality of the g80's output just for better FPS... If they do that who knows how long it will take me to recover from that stupidity.

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Avivo... If it wasn't for purevideo, ati would never have released avivo... It goes back and forth. Every time one company does something, the other will attempt to "one-up" them on their next new architecture.

As for a raw performer, the 8800GTX is a bit more than just that. Image quality wise, it's untouchable by anything on the market, just like how the x1800/x1900 was in it's lifespan. It would appear nvidia learned from the flak it caught last gen and went all out in both the IQ and raw power, and it certainly does show. To say this card isn't feature packed is an act of blindness... New AA methods(with 16x USABLE ON SINGLE CARD!), the industry's best AF method, unified architecture, best video playback quality of any card on the market, and much more... It's not just raw power man.

That said, expect the R600 to beat the 8800GTX... As for the 8900GTX, I wish I could say, but "paper-work"(you know what I mean) has me pwnt there... There's more to it than expected though, I can say that much.

if it doesnt have 1.5 gigs of ram, i say get that :banana::banana::banana::banana: out of my face!!!!!!!!! lol.

Where did you get the idea that g80 IQ is better than ATI's current? All the comparisons I have seen show them to be on par.

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Originally Posted by DilTech

As for a raw performer, the 8800GTX is a bit more than just that. Image quality wise, it's untouchable by anything on the market, just like how the x1800/x1900 was in it's lifespan. It would appear nvidia learned from the flak it caught last gen and went all out in both the IQ and raw power, and it certainly does show. To say this card isn't feature packed is an act of blindness... New AA methods(with 16x USABLE ON SINGLE CARD!), the industry's best AF method, unified architecture, best video playback quality of any card on the market, and much more... It's not just raw power man.

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Originally Posted by DilTech

As for a raw performer, the 8800GTX is a bit more than just that. Image quality wise, it's untouchable by anything on the market, just like how the x1800/x1900 was in it's lifespan. It would appear nvidia learned from the flak it caught last gen and went all out in both the IQ and raw power, and it certainly does show. To say this card isn't feature packed is an act of blindness... New AA methods(with 16x USABLE ON SINGLE CARD!), the industry's best AF method, unified architecture, best video playback quality of any card on the market, and much more... It's not just raw power man.

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That really sounded like something written on the box the G80 comes in..no offence =)

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Originally Posted by ahmad

Where did you get the idea that g80 IQ is better than ATI's current? All the comparisons I have seen show them to be on par.

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http://www.vr-zone.com/index.php?i=4216&s=24

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Even though the distinction is less noticable, when you look closer, and in the zoomed-in pictures, you can clearly see better filtering with the 8800GTX, attaining sharper and more detailed image quality. So no longer will ATi hold the Anisotropic Filtering Image Quality crown!

So even though the AA is nothing really to shout about (in terms of image quality, not talking about speed), the AF is really pretty significantly improved!

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http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2870&p=14

AF was where the X1* series beat the 7 series NVidia cards... The 8800GTX took that crown back.

As for the AA, it just shows that once you reach a certain point there's not much in gains to be had in terms of image quality.

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Originally Posted by Ubermann

That really sounded like something written on the box the G80 comes in..no offence =)

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Now that you mention it... They should let me write the captions on the boxes. :D

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Originally Posted by DilTech

AF was where the X1* series beat the 7 series NVidia cards... The 8800GTX took that crown back.

As for the AA, it just shows that once you reach a certain point there's not much in gains to be had in terms of image quality.

Now that you mention it... They should let me write the captions on the boxes. :D

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AF difference is much less drastic than last gen though, and there really isnt that big of a difference between the two now (though g80 is admittedly better).

However EATM AA is absolutely amazing (in oblivion at least, havent tried other games), and so i would still give ATI the IQ crown based on that.

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Originally Posted by zakelwe

The MUL theory is interesting. Other possibles apart from this and an overclock are whether the 8800GTX has all it's stream processors enabled to aid yields or whether another 32 ( pushing it up to 160 ) can be used in a pinch for a low volume very expensive part.

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I just saw this on XTReview:

""We have designed the G80 with 160 Stream processors in mind etc. grouped in 10 clusters by 16 Stream processors..but we enabled only 128 SPs with the 8800GTX SKU"