Originally posted by: Auric
Bring on the 8600U AGP
Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Originally posted by: Auric
Bring on the 8600U AGP
I wish. I dont think so personally because of NVIDIA's stance toward AGP. While ATi launched several AGP cards e.g X1650pro, X1950pro nVIDIA didnt counter them with any new AGP cards. (They could have with 7950GT AGP for example). I think AGP is nearing its end.
It would be great if it was true though but highly unlikely.
Originally posted by: A554SS1N
The Ultra branding went ages ago, for this reason I think this is all just a collection of made up thoughts and rumours.
Originally posted by: Ateo
Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Originally posted by: Auric
Bring on the 8600U AGP
I wish. I dont think so personally because of NVIDIA's stance toward AGP. While ATi launched several AGP cards e.g X1650pro, X1950pro nVIDIA didnt counter them with any new AGP cards. (They could have with 7950GT AGP for example). I think AGP is nearing its end.
It would be great if it was true though but highly unlikely.
My Gainward 7800GS (20 pipe 7800GT core) Bliss 512 MB begs to differ.
And the Gainward 7800GS+(24 pipe 7900GT core) Bliss 512 MB protests loudly
Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Originally posted by: Ateo
Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Originally posted by: Auric
Bring on the 8600U AGP
I wish. I dont think so personally because of NVIDIA's stance toward AGP. While ATi launched several AGP cards e.g X1650pro, X1950pro nVIDIA didnt counter them with any new AGP cards. (They could have with 7950GT AGP for example). I think AGP is nearing its end.
It would be great if it was true though but highly unlikely.
My Gainward 7800GS (20 pipe 7800GT core) Bliss 512 MB begs to differ.
And the Gainward 7800GS+(24 pipe 7900GT core) Bliss 512 MB protests loudly
That aint an offical SKU from NVIDIA though
Originally posted by: Auric
Difference is the 1650 and 1950 are reference designs by ATI which any AIB can simply duplicate. Even the 7600GT is not that, apparently, and so even though it is very similar to the general design of the 6600 (and indeed the 7600GS) all but two AIB's couldn't be arsed. Likewise, the minimal effort made by Gaywad to make their non-standard 7800's meant they remained unique. So, while both ATI and Nvidia say AIB's are free to do as they will with the bridge chips the reality is they largely have not. Now that ATI has stepped up this generation, hopefull Nvidia will do likewise. Nice to see that Powercolor quote: ?We still have a huge demand for high-end AGP?.
According to VR-Zone, the rumours that the GeForce 8600 (G84) will be using a 256-bit bus are incorrect; instead the chip will still be using a 128-bit bus, like its mid-range predecessor (G73), a configuration which matches what we have heard. They further claim there will be two versions upon initial release; one at 650/900, and the other at 550/700, both with 64 shader processors.
Assuming the architecture did not change, this would imply 16 samplers and 32 filtering units, and the equivalent of 8 ROPs (but with "free" 4x MSAA in terms of depth tests). Practically, this is rather similar to the figures of the Radeon X1950 XTX (higher in terms of filtering; lower in terms of ROPs, arguably), but this card would have less than half the bandwidth of that SKU.
Furthermore, it would be assumed that a mid-range card tends to be used at lower resolutions than a high-end one. As you move up in resolution, the overall bandwidth requirements go up, but not as fast as the fillrate increase because the memory coherence also improves (triangle size goes up, relative texture sizes go down, etc.)
However, G80 has significantly more texture cache than any part that's come before it (128KiB of L2, and a fair bit of L1 too). While an efficient texture cache mechanism and hopefully quite efficient framebuffer compression techniques can't hurt, they are also unlikely to do miracles. That's why we speculated NVIDIA would go with 1.1GHz GDDR4 for the higher-end model, but perhaps the prices on these memory chips are still too high. Either way, it remains to be seen how bandwidth limited G84 will be, should these specifications be accurate.
Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Link
According to VR-Zone, the rumours that the GeForce 8600 (G84) will be using a 256-bit bus are incorrect; instead the chip will still be using a 128-bit bus, like its mid-range predecessor (G73), a configuration which matches what we have heard. They further claim there will be two versions upon initial release; one at 650/900, and the other at 550/700, both with 64 shader processors.
Assuming the architecture did not change, this would imply 16 samplers and 32 filtering units, and the equivalent of 8 ROPs (but with "free" 4x MSAA in terms of depth tests). Practically, this is rather similar to the figures of the Radeon X1950 XTX (higher in terms of filtering; lower in terms of ROPs, arguably), but this card would have less than half the bandwidth of that SKU.
Furthermore, it would be assumed that a mid-range card tends to be used at lower resolutions than a high-end one. As you move up in resolution, the overall bandwidth requirements go up, but not as fast as the fillrate increase because the memory coherence also improves (triangle size goes up, relative texture sizes go down, etc.)
However, G80 has significantly more texture cache than any part that's come before it (128KiB of L2, and a fair bit of L1 too). While an efficient texture cache mechanism and hopefully quite efficient framebuffer compression techniques can't hurt, they are also unlikely to do miracles. That's why we speculated NVIDIA would go with 1.1GHz GDDR4 for the higher-end model, but perhaps the prices on these memory chips are still too high. Either way, it remains to be seen how bandwidth limited G84 will be, should these specifications be accurate.
Something to ponder about.
I have been wondering about this. Lots of people will be running these new cards, especially 8600 and 8300 series, on XP machines, without DX10 support. So these cards will be DX9 only with XP.Originally posted by: chizow
Keep in mind the G80 derivatives will all run different drivers than their 7-series and below brethren.
One would hope, but sadly, I don't think that's the case. One of the many, many reviews I read researching the 8800 had a comparison and breakdown of the different drivers nVidia had to deal with in regards to the 8800 launch and the impending Vista launch. Basically, there's going to be four drivers that they need to update and support for some time to come. Each driver is @20 million lines of code, as the review stated, comparable to the amount of code in Windows NT.Originally posted by: BernardP
I have been wondering about this. Lots of people will be running these new cards, especially 8600 and 8300 series, on XP machines, without DX10 support. So these cards will be DX9 only with XP.Originally posted by: chizow
Keep in mind the G80 derivatives will all run different drivers than their 7-series and below brethren.
Looking on the NVidia web site, I can see that there are different "unified" (sic) drivers for the 8800 and 7xxx series. But these are XP drivers only for now.
I would tend to believe (hope...) that XP/DX9 drivers for the 8xxx series would be less problematic than drivers for Vista/DX10.
Originally posted by: Eomer of Aldburg
The 8600 Ultra looks very enticing, especially for the money and dx10 support. Hopefully it comes out in a few months! Will be like night and day from my 6800GT.