Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...What’s in a name, Nvidia?
Alex Watson
With today’s launch of the GeForce GTX 280, Nvidia is releasing not only a new GPU but a new naming system. Nvidia says that its previous naming scheme – such as GeForce 8800 GT, GTS, GTX and Ultra – had become bewildering for consumers. They got confused because it wasn’t clear that 8800-series cards should be faster that 9600-series cards, while it was never clear that the GTS suffix indicated a faster card than a GT card of the same number. Similarly people had trouble working out which card of a new generation would genuinely be an upgrade over their current card. We’ve had many emails from people complaining that their brand new GeForce 9600 GT isn’t as fast as their supposedly inferior GeForce 7900 GX2 and so forth.
Of course Nvidia exacerbated this by arbitrarily adding odd suffixes such as GSO, and by giving 8-series names to some graphics cards based on the newer G92 GPU. We ended up with a situation where the GeForce 8800 GTS line-up had three cards with 320MB, 512MB and 640MB of graphics memory, where the 512MB version was actually the fastest as it was based on a newer piece of silicon. Try explaining that to your average PC World customer.
So the new naming convention is as follows:
The prefix will roughly denote the speed of the graphics card – a GTX-class card is fastest than a GT, which is faster than a GS-class card which should walk all over a lowly G-class card.
The first number of the name denotes the family of GPU the graphics card has.
The last two numbers indicate how powerful the GPU in question is.
At launch we only know of two GPUs using htis new naming system - the GTX 280 and the GTX 260. So, as these GPUs are GTX-class, we know that these are the fast GPUs of the new range. The ‘2’ of the second part of the name indicates that they are GeForce 200-series GPUs and the ‘80’ and ‘60’ shows that the GTX 280 is faster than the GTX 260.
RESERVATIONS….
Well, I’m slightly worried that Nvidia sees the need for two sub-prime ranges of graphics card (GS and G) as typically low-end graphics cards aren’t much cop for gaming and yet are marketed as being brilliant. Imagine how many people have bought a GeForce 8200 or an ATI Radeon HD 2450 thinking they’ll be able to play Crysis, only to find the game still crawls and giving up on PC gaming to go console for ever.
Details are also sketchy on how the rest of the range will be named – if we end up with GTX 280 and 260 and GT 280 and 260, things could become confused. Nvidia is also banking on people knowing the hierarchy of prefixes (GTX trumps GT beats GS and so forth) which is by no means intuitive to the casual buyer.
We suspect that a GeForce 300-range will further confuse things as you won’t be able to tell which is the better card by price alone – a GeForce GT 380 could be the same price as a GTX 260, for example, and only benchmarks will tell which will be faster. Still, at least hardware journalists won’t be put out of a job after the naming convention change….
Rated: 50% (2 votes)
Loading ...GeForce 9-series: a big disappointment
Clive Webster
The GeForce 9-series has three flavours so far:
- GeForce 9600 GT - a mid-range product that performs near-identically to an existing 8-series product and costs roughly the same.
- GeForce 9800 GX2 – a massive graphics brick that inelegantly combines two underclocked 8-series GPUs for high performance and Sun-like temperatures
- GeForce 9800 GTX – a minor update to the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS that performs near-enough the same, but costs much more.
Aren’t you glad you waited for the 9-series to launch before upgrading your graphics? You really needn’t have bothered.
Not yet rated
Loading ...Nvidia - scared of Intel already?
Clive Webster
During the testing and write-up of the GeForce 9800 GTX review, I came across some odd language from Nvidia in its Reviewer’s Guide (the fact sheet Nvidia sends out to reviewers in order to brainwash them into thinking its next product is great). It’s no real secret that Nvidia is worried about Larrabee, Intel’s forthcoming ‘graphics product’, hence phrases such as:
“A second GeForce 9800 GTX offers tremendous bang for the buck. Compared to upgrading the CPU, it offers much higher performance at a fraction of the cost.”
In other words, ‘don’t buy a Core 2 Quad and a GeForce 9800 GTX, just buy two 9800 GTXes.’ Hmm…
Of course, Nvidia has some benchmarks to back this up. For gaming, Nvidia’s graphs say that a pair of 9800 GTXes with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor gets you better frame rates in a load of games than a single 9800 GTX with a £600 Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650. But as we all know, a pair of graphics cards isn’t going to help non-3D apps, while a CPU will.
The CPU requirements for testing with the 9800 GTX also seem low – a £70 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo E4500 is apparently fine for a single card, while a £180 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500 won’t limit 3-Way SLI performance. Given that almost every Core 2 Duo can hit 3GHz, Nvidia seems to be saying, ‘spend all your money with Nvidia, your CPU is fine.’
This paranoia on Nvidia’s part seems a bit early given that Intel hasn’t even said whether Larrabee will be aimed at gaming or CAD-type applications, and it won’t be out until the end of 2009 at the earliest either.
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
Loading ...If it wasn’t for Crysis, would you need a new graphics card?
Clive Webster
Even a £135 256MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT can play modern games at 1,920 x 1,200 without sacrificing any image quality. All bar Crysis that is, which struggles to be playable on this card even at relatively low resolutions with detail settings turned down. With Nvidia co-operating with Crytek (the makers of Crysis) from an early point - giving them access to early GeForce 8800 cards, helping optimise game code drivers, and so on.
So, with other games easily playable even at very high resolutions and maximum detail settings, wouldn’t Nvidia need a reason for you to buy a new GeForce graphics card? And hopefully to spend more than £135. Enter Crysis, which demands some kind of monster PC to run with Very High settings at a decent resolution and frame rate. ‘Want to play Crysis?’ Nvidia asks, ‘then get yourself a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards…’
Surely, given that Nvidia has been so involved with the development of Crysis, it should have a card capable of playing it? Granted, this isn’t a consipracy of David Icke proportions, but is far more believable. What do you think?
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...Why Hybrid SLI will be rubbish
Clive Webster
Nvidia has just announced a new kind of SLI: Hybrid SLI. This doesn’t pair a GeForce 8800 GTS with a Radeon HD 3870 or anything like that. The ‘Hybrid’ bit of the name comes from the way you can use the GPU of a graphics card with the GPU built into your (forthcoming) Nvidia motherboard. Yippee…
Hybrid SLI brings two new technologies: GeForce Boost and HybridPower. Boost combines the awesome rendering power of the forthcoming GeForce 8200 integrated GPU with a GeForce 8400 GS or 8500 GT graphics card. And yes, I’m joking when I say awesome; those GPUs couldn’t render their way out of polygon-light, vertex-lit paper bag - combining two won’t help matters much.
HybridPower sounds more interesting: when ‘graphics horsepower is not required, such as high definition movie playback* or emailing… HybridPower allows the PC to switch processing from a single GPU, or multiple GPUs in SLI configuration, to the onboard motherboard GPU’ automatically. The aim is toshut down unused, high-energy components and so decrease power consumption and noise.
HybridPower could be of use for a laptop, where battery life could be extended or gaming performance increased depending on what you’re doing. Sony has a similar system where you can manually switch between the integrated GPU and a gaming GPU, though this requires a re-boot.
However, the two graphics cards announced by Nvidia as supporting Hybris SLI aren’t mobile parts, they’re desktop cards. And this is why Hybrid SLI will be utterly rubbish:
1) If you’re gaming on an integrated, motherboard GPU in a desktop PC, chances are you don’t know PC hardware very well (if at all) and so won’t know who Nvidia is or what SLI does. Chances of such a person buying a Hybrid SLI graphics card to add to their integrated GPU? None whatsoever. Chances of a knowledgeable PC gamer user buying Hybrid SLI? Very small.
2) Integrated graphics have sod all performance, and the GeForce 8400 GS and 8500 GT only marginally more. Even using the more powerful GeForce 8500 GT with Hybrid SLI, I reckon you’ll have rubbish performance in modern games at respectable detail and resolutions.
3) While HybridPower has some potential for laptops, it’ll be pants in a desktop PC. If you’ve got a graphics card, you connect that to your monitor. However, if your graphics card is going to shut down every time you boot into Windows or quit a game, that’s not going to work. As most monitors don’t have two DVI inputs, Nvidia doesn’t want you to have to use two DVI cables either (one from your graphics card and one from the integrated GPU). The ideal situation would be for the Hybrid SLI-compatible cards to have a pass-through for the screen-out of the integrated GPU even when it’s powered down, but I’ve been told by an industry insider that that’s too tricky. Instead, Hybrid SLI looks like it’ll ask your graphics card to screen-out via the ingrated chipset’s output when it’s running and trying to render a game This means sending it’s rendered data back to the Northbridge-based GPU over the PCI-E bus which will cause inevitable lag from the bus and the arbitration at the Northbridge. If Nvidia tries to use this method with a a high-performance Hybrid SLI card, I’m betting you’ll see a significant performance drop from a conventional non-Hybrid set-up.
So, given that the people at which Hybrid SLI is aimed won’t know or care what it is (and therefore won’t buy it), that it looks like it’ll be inelegantly implemented, and that I reckon you won’t see much extra performance anyway, I’m betting it’s going to be utter crap. Expect Hybrid SLI motherboards for AMD soon (there don’t seem to be plans for an Intel version, oddly). Of course, only the tests on these boards will tell whether I’m right or not, but let me know your thoughts an Hybrid SLI below.
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* This despite Nvidia also wanting to sell you expensive graphics cards because they’ll accelerate and enhance HD movie playback with Pure Video HD. Well done, the Nvidia marketing team…
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
Loading ...GeFarce
Clive Webster
Bless me reader, for I have sinned. It’s been two months since my last blog…
And not being catholic I have no idea how the rest of a Confession is meant to go; this is pretty much all Hollywood has let me see of the fascinating ritual. That and the Hail Marys (nope, no idea what they are either) and perhaps some farcical mix up where someone’s pushed into the booth and has to recommend an appropriate course of action to a bewildered worshipper.
Anyway, onto the blog, which is all about a new screen I recently bought. Yes, bought. With my own actual money what I had earned. Read more