The 9800 GTX Review Thread

[Richard Dower]

So my 8800GTS is good for another generation then, right?

[ripken204]

So my 8800GTS is good for another generation then, right?

well there technically hasnt been a new generation.
you have the 320mb tho... i upgraded from the 320mb to a g92 and it made a pretty big difference. thats like a half generation step up

[Richard Dower]

G92 interests me, but i fear a 55nm shrink will come real soon and the price of 65nm based cards will drop like a stone.

[Kingcarcas]

I'll still jump up to something, i screwed up and got a 256mb 7950gt and i think it's really hurting me @ 1680*1050. Hopefully the price on the GTS can come down.

[K404]

The thing that annoys me the most about the 9800 series is that its completely killed the 8800GTS resale market without doing all that much thats different to the "older" card.

nVidias recent substandard GPU development I could live with, but when their product release choices burn their own customers to this extent, ya gotta wonder just what kind of drug dealers they have contact with. Its good **** they're selling, of that I have no doubt.

[speedfreak86]

I don't understand why you get upset because you can't sell your card for as much. If you couldn't afford the whole price, you shouldn't have bought it. The only thing that has happened is the market is getting very competitive and you are just another competitor. My gts has dropped to more than half of what I paid for it a little over a year ago, but still is fine to play any games that I throw at it. I'm not sour because I spent nearly 400 dollars for a card that has served me well just because the new gen cards beat it for half the price. That is just progress.

[K404]

If the 9800s actually brought something new to the table, I wouldnt mind. They dont- thats my point

[shiznit93]

eDRAM

[Nicksterr]

meh, im not too dissapointed, i just really wish nvidia would further technology for the sake of it, not to reap profits cuz they can.

What they need to do now is completely phase out the older generations.

[Sr7]

meh, im not too dissapointed, i just really wish nvidia would further technology for the sake of it, not to reap profits cuz they can.

What they need to do now is completely phase out the older generations.

I think that's the main thing.. lots of people are eager to see new technology because we're technophiles.

Unfortunately, what a lot of people fail to consider is that sometimes the economy or business environment doesn't take kindly to new technologies being introduced for the hell of it, so tech companies have to play their cards right, and juggle this concern with investor confidence/Wall Street concerns and component pricing.

[Pillo-kun]

i feel the same, but i have only what is in my sign and so far i have not feelt any need for upgrade.

[lior307]

How could be such a great difference between the 8800GTS 512 to the 9800GTX ??
something is weird to me !!
It's almost the Same core with a little speedy memory and maybe optimizations .

[AliG]

There's not that big of a difference, have you checked out the review? The gtx beats the gts by only a few gts, meaning that its due to only the clock increases (which includes the extra memory bandwidth, due to the smaller memory interface than the old gtx, the extra bandwidth makes a big difference).

But I do think there's a few things nvidia is hiding from us, for instance, the power consumption is something like 40w greater at load than the gts 512 and it needs a second power connector. The small clockspeed increase alone can't add that much extra power consumption, the only possible explanations are either that engineering sample was an early modle and consumed a lot of unnecessary power, the 4 phase power supply needs some more power but allows for further overclocking (and I believe the stock vcore is higher), or the gtx has some feature we don't know about yet that slightly improves performance but adds to power consumption

[AliG]

But I bet $10 they aren't, people said the g92 gts tweaktown benchmarks were fake because they expected higher performance from the extra shaders, but instead only saw a few fps (which to be honest I didn't really hope for a lot more considering it was just a mere extra 16 shaders) and were upset when more reviews came up confirming it

[Buckeye]

But I bet $10 they aren't, people said the g92 gts tweaktown benchmarks were fake because they expected higher performance from the extra shaders, but instead only saw a few fps (which to be honest I didn't really hope for a lot more considering it was just a mere extra 16 shaders) and were upset when more reviews came up confirming it

Ok I do not know about how any of the drivers work or coding games etc.

But does a program have to know that there are all these extra shaders in order to use them, or does the driver just take care of that and allocate them depending on what is required at the moment ?

[AliG]

The game has to be coded to make use of them, that's why the r600 could never completely beat the gtx even though it had more than double the shaders by ati's count (though by nvidia's count that's not quite true). But either way, look at the performance difference between the 9600gt and the 8800gt, the card just has to be well optimised for games to perform well, the difference in shaders between the two g92 cards and the g94 cards is a lot smaller than most people expected


As for the driver allocating the shaders, drivers will allow the card to make use of as many shaders as it can, but its hard to truly see what today's high end cards can do since no one tries playing crysis with a 3870x2 and 5ghz wolfdale (the r600 based cards are massively bottlenecked with today's cpus for most applications, that's one reason why they take all the benching crowns but the nvidia cards win in games, they aren't held back as much by today's cpus and the high shader clock makes a huge difference)

[Stevethegreat]

(And) officially the PC gaming is dead......

Never before a single card was about the strongest thing you can get for more than 2 years. While Moore's law was only for CPUs it seemed to be applied to anything electronic which belonged to the enthusiast market (LCDs, PC parts) and of course the GFXs were part of the trend. I bought my GTX November 2006 and I still feel no need to swap it. Whilst this is good for me -the consumer-, for now, it would be ultimately bad for PC gaming, it means that the race of graphics, physics and AI which was taking place on PC (never in consoles) which brought us from the Ultima 1 era to Half Life 2 and Crysis and advanced AI is nearing to its end, expect the following decades to be that of stability and Japanese gaming, the West -it seems- stopped innovating from the time it rode -too- in the console bandwagon.

How I can deduce that? GFX cards' makers were always moving along the pace of their software counterparts (game developers), since they all -now- have jumped on the 2005 PC of propriety software and hardware which is named either PS3 or X360, nVidia and ATI lost their appetite to innovate and in fact -both- stagnated. Since -only- Crysis can bring present hardware to its knees and every other game is based on a mediocre 2005-2006 PC (call me console) with their mediocre 7800s/x1800s -by this time- graphics powerhouses, you can expect innovation to stagnate. Since only the Japanese can make games like Okami, from now on expect innovative games for pre-teens or wherever Japanese devs have their fantasies stucked into (and some 16 yo's skirt I have to add. Forget Fallout's, Planescape's and Unreal Tournament's cynicism, from now one we all live in the flowerland where we'll fantasize of pre-teens whilst being the effeminate lead

All hail the new 9800 GTX!!!!

[adamsleath]

empire: total war for pc later this year. personally i cant wait for that one....but well what can i do but wait patiently...and ive heard that ETW is supposed to be better optimised for dual cores at least with a new game engine...

also; cpu needs to play it's part in graphics....seeing as how there are all those cores coming along...

maybe theyll put ETW on console, and then i can keep Mum's gaming pc FOREVER!!! mwahaha

death to all gaming pc's; and all pc's now only for ...er um what exactly? CAD? they also require huge 3d rendering ability...cut out pc games you'll only lose out on a few million bucks per annum, who cares.

there is no next gen; all vapourware has been cancelled due to lack of interest.

[villa1n]

There's not that big of a difference, have you checked out the review? The gtx beats the gts by only a few gts, meaning that its due to only the clock increases (which includes the extra memory bandwidth, due to the smaller memory interface than the old gtx, the extra bandwidth makes a big difference).

But I do think there's a few things nvidia is hiding from us, for instance, the power consumption is something like 40w greater at load than the gts 512 and it needs a second power connector. The small clockspeed increase alone can't add that much extra power consumption, the only possible explanations are either that engineering sample was an early modle and consumed a lot of unnecessary power, the 4 phase power supply needs some more power but allows for further overclocking (and I believe the stock vcore is higher), or the gtx has some feature we don't know about yet that slightly improves performance but adds to power consumption

The power increase from changing the clockspeeds without warning, like a speed step feature or maybe something like the 9600 does with pci-e oc? lol i dunno, but 40watt is a significant increase with no real significant structural changes..

[Neova]

If we see this increase Also in Games , WIndows Vista and with 9800GX2 will be very good news .



regards

Agreed! 3DMarks is a nice guage of potential performance, but lets see some useful numbers!

Would be nice to see GTX in SLI again those GX2 numbers also!

[nosboost300]

ahh, true, i too would like to see SLi'd 9800gtx's vs. the 9800gx2

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

If all this is true, I am glad I got my 8800gts g92 512mb for $180 (after rebate). For the cash, even the 8800gtx for 320 (check on-line deals) or the 9800gtx are simply not worth it if you're going by pricepoint. If I had ordered two of these guys for 360, the SLI would pwn a single 8800gtx I'm guessing the 9800gtx wouldn't beat it either. By all accounts, if we see the gts g92 come down to 180 normally, SLI might just be the way to go for a lot of people who don't mind spending around 350 on graphics.

[largon]

Do we have a solid date when G92GTX is supposed to be released?

[GAR]

Do we have a solid date when G92GTX is supposed to be released?

Wasnt it March 25th

[nosboost300]

it comes out same day as the 790i ultra.. whenever that may be