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Loading ...Introducing the GeForce 9-series - but why now?
Alex Watson
And the review mentioned in my last teaser post is now up - presenting our review of Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT. Hard to judge, this one - in and of itself, it offers decent performance in newer games, but does the world really need another sub £200 Nvidia graphics card? This is the question that myself, and a lot of other hardware journalists are struggling with. Over at Bit-Tech, Tim comes to much the same conclusion as we did: it all depends on the price. The 256MB and 512MB GeForce 8800 GT are, at £125 and £150 or so respectively, extremely good choices. The 9600 GT, currently priced in between them, and performing in between them too, is also a good choice, but it’s not really answering a question consumers have asked. It does make me wonder why Nvidia has unleashed the 9-series brand now. Tim and I chatted on MSN about this last night, and it wasn’t a question either of us could easily answer. Possible reasons we came up with:
* Perhaps the yields on the 8800 GTs aren’t good. Maybe it’s costing more to produce than Nvidia initially planned, and so they’d rather sell 9600 GTs.
* Maybe the sales of the 8800 GTs aren’t as good as Nvidia expected - since the performance of the GTs is excellent, we could perhaps attribute slack sales (if that’s the case) to the 8-series branding being a little old and tired. A new number would be a good way to kickstart sales.
* Fear of competition from AMD/ATi? Seems unlikely, I know, but given that the Radoen 3850 is available for under £100, perhaps Nvidia wanted to get its new mid-range GPU out there. Of course, the GT version of the 9600 is priced well over £100, but that will drop, and we should see plainer, lower speed 9600s soon enough.
* Something else I haven’t thought of… Any ideas, let me know. This one really has left me wondering…
I’m by no means a Tech Journalist, but, from where i see it, ATI, (and i shall continue to call them ATI (Not AMD)), have released a new range of Graphics cards, the HD 3*** series.
This puts Nvidia under pressure to release a new range of cards. Now although they’ve refreshed the 8 series range with the GT and the new GTS, they want to be seen to be active and not stalled in development and so are releasing their mid range card even though the top end card is not yet ready. The advantage of this is that when the full range is unveiled the card fits in and does not have to be discontinued/replaced like we have seen with the 8800 GTS (320+640/512) to fit the finished range
By releasing the midrange (*600) card now, which is proving to be as powerful about as the 8800 GT, (one of the top cards you can buy), they are also making it clear that they’ve got something with groundbreaking performance on the way or in the works.
Anyone Agree?
Now, I have not fully studied this, but if I remember correctly this new 9 series is DX10.1, while the 8800GT was still DX10.
I wonder if there is something on the pipeline that Nvidia know about that meant they wanted to get a 10.1 card on the market pretty sharpish?
If it turns out that DX10.1 is everything that DX10 should have been, and the only cards that fully support it are the ATi HD3*** series, then Nvidia would have left the door open for an ATi resurrgance.
Cue the 9 series from Nvidia.
There’s no DirectX 10.1 support in GeForce 9-series.
A lack of DX 10.1 support seems like a bit of an omission for a next generation card. OK, it’s no real use, but it’s a tick box that ATi have and Nvidia don’t.
As for the something else……
Maybe they’ll stop production of 8800 chips when the 9800 hits the shelves. That would explain the release of a 9600 chip that had 8800 pricing and performance.
Personally I think it is a bit confusing having two 8800GT’s with different performance, perhaps they are just doing what they should have done when they released the 256 and 512MB versions of the GT, and perhaps they have realised this now, albeit a bit late in the day…