The New and Improved "G80 Stuff"

[josh6079]

I'm obviously no non-enthusiast, but what the heck are you guys buying the card for (other than benchmarking)? I mean what SINGLE good game is coming out before r600 and a G80 refresh that is going to make this card useful??

Neverwinter Nights 2, Gothic 3, even parts of Dark Messiah could really use some more horsepower, either from a current SLI/CF setup or from some of the G80 singles.

Hmm. 50-70% faster than 7900GTX at 1920x1200?? So really it's like SLI'd 7900GTX with a few more features. With a pair of 7900GTX's or X1900XT's being cheaper than the initial 8800GTX offerings, I don't see a whole lot of reason to upgrade from a performance aspect.

True, from a simple performance aspect it isn't worth the price over some 79** SLI or X19k CF, but it's the different feature-sets and DX10 compatibility that give you more than the current dual-GPU solutions give.

I'm mainly interested in their AF department.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Originally posted by: Nightmare225

Originally posted by: Elfear

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
From b3d:

Someone who has a G80 for testing posted some more info on a Dutch forum:

Lumenex engine supports Coverage Sampling AA with 8x, 8xQ, 16x, 16xQ. Q-modes are optimised for best IQ. Performance impact of 16xQ CSAA is comparable to 4xMSAA. AF seems to be much better compared to previous generations.

G80 is very CPU limited. It's 50 - 70% faster than a GF7900GTX at 1920x1200 with HDR + AA + AF, but barely reaches 20-30 fps more on 1280x1024.

Hmm. 50-70% faster than 7900GTX at 1920x1200?? So really it's like SLI'd 7900GTX with a few more features. With a pair of 7900GTX's or X1900XT's being cheaper than the initial 8800GTX offerings, I don't see a whole lot of reason to upgrade from a performance aspect.

Im curious. Judging on some quick math and logic, the reviewers must have been testing some really old, non-demanding games. Because, going from 70% to "only" 30 fps more on a game with HDR + AA + AF seems kind of impossible on a current-generation game.

The games arent non demanding games. Its the standard benchmarks used by reviewers. We are talking about FEAR, SS2, Prey, HL2, Far Cry etc.

If i was in the position of buying either a X1900XTX crossfire or 8800GTX, i would go for 8800GTX.

-You are not limited to Crossfire/Sli problems. Vsync, profiles, more space needed.

Better IQ (in terms of AA/AF). Bigger minimum FPS.

 

[Dethfrumbelo]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster

Originally posted by: Nightmare225

Originally posted by: Elfear

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
From b3d:

Someone who has a G80 for testing posted some more info on a Dutch forum:

Lumenex engine supports Coverage Sampling AA with 8x, 8xQ, 16x, 16xQ. Q-modes are optimised for best IQ. Performance impact of 16xQ CSAA is comparable to 4xMSAA. AF seems to be much better compared to previous generations.

G80 is very CPU limited. It's 50 - 70% faster than a GF7900GTX at 1920x1200 with HDR + AA + AF, but barely reaches 20-30 fps more on 1280x1024.

Hmm. 50-70% faster than 7900GTX at 1920x1200?? So really it's like SLI'd 7900GTX with a few more features. With a pair of 7900GTX's or X1900XT's being cheaper than the initial 8800GTX offerings, I don't see a whole lot of reason to upgrade from a performance aspect.

Im curious. Judging on some quick math and logic, the reviewers must have been testing some really old, non-demanding games. Because, going from 70% to "only" 30 fps more on a game with HDR + AA + AF seems kind of impossible on a current-generation game.

The games arent non demanding games. Its the standard benchmarks used by reviewers. We are talking about FEAR, SS2, Prey, HL2, Far Cry etc.

If i was in the position of buying either a X1900XTX crossfire or 8800GTX, i would go for 8800GTX.

-You are not limited to Crossfire/Sli problems. Vsync, profiles, more space needed.

Better IQ (in terms of AA/AF). Bigger minimum FPS.

That's true. Many games have issues with SLI/Crossifre or don't make use of it at all.

Most of these gd reviews don't pay any attention to minimum fps, which is the most important thing one should know. I couldn't care less about getting 100 fps max... first and foremost, I'd want the minimum to stay above 35 at all times.

 

[Skott]

[/quote]

That's true. Many games have issues with SLI/Crossifre or don't make use of it at all.

Most of these gd reviews don't pay any attention to minimum fps, which is the most important thing one should know. I couldn't care less about getting 100 fps max... first and foremost, I'd want the minimum to stay above 35 at all times.
[/quote]


QFT!

 

[Cookie Monster]

Normally, higher the AVG fps, higher the minimum FPS. If 8800GTX are hitting 100 FPS at 16x12 4xAA 16xAF for standard benchmarks e.g FEAR/SS2/FC etc, then its bound to have much higher minimum fps.

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

Originally posted by: Skott

That's true. Many games have issues with SLI/Crossifre or don't make use of it at all.

Most of these gd reviews don't pay any attention to minimum fps, which is the most important thing one should know. I couldn't care less about getting 100 fps max... first and foremost, I'd want the minimum to stay above 35 at all times.
[/quote]


QFT![/quote]

Problem is, lets say you have a game running at a steady 50fps... theres a heavy area and your fps drop to 3 for half a second, and go up to 50 again... the minimum fps registered will be 3, and that gives a totally wrong impression of its performance

 

[Elfear]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Normally, higher the AVG fps, higher the minimum FPS. If 8800GTX are hitting 100 FPS at 16x12 4xAA 16xAF for standard benchmarks e.g FEAR/SS2/FC etc, then its bound to have much higher minimum fps.

Hmm. My experience has been that the SLI/Crossfire solutions generally give better minimum frames than their single card counterparts. Like when I switched from dual 7800GTs to a single X1900XT my average frames were about the same but the minimum frames on the 7800GTs were higher.

I guess we'll see when actual reviews come out. I'd much rather have the same performance with a single card as it doesn't have the annoying issues associated with it like SLI/Crossfire.

On a side note, I saw this posted at B3D:

"Oh some other tidbits I've been hearing, but I'm not 100% sure about it's credibility, but I guess I can write it here. Just take it with a grain of salt.

Availability of G80 will be bad... or at least it will look bad, probably because of high demand. One source said that availability will be bad and that the lifespan of G80 will be short. NV has G81 waiting in it's wings to fix the availability problem. Nothing was mentioned about the G81 architecture, but G81 could be to G80 what G71 is to G70. Scheduled release: Spring 2007.

Oh and R600 was also mentioned... It will most probably be released in the last week of January 2007 (does this coincide with the Vista release?). The exact date given for launchdate was a Saterday so that's a bit weird..."

and

"I`ve heard from someone who is testing GF8800GTX that it`s performance in Oblivion is excellent.... He reported that in 1600x1200 AAx8/HDR min fps outdoors on GF8800GTX is higher than average fps on GF7900GTX in 1280x1024 without AA...."

First quote came from a seemingly credible poster but the 2nd one was from a guy with only 20 posts so remember the salt.

 

[Zenoth]

What is speculation good for in the end, false expectations, I'd rather wait and see. I fell into the speculation trap myself in this very thread. It's killing me, I'll just wait and then I'll take my decisions.

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: Elfear
"Oh some other tidbits I've been hearing, but I'm not 100% sure about it's credibility, but I guess I can write it here. Just take it with a grain of salt.

Availability of G80 will be bad... or at least it will look bad, probably because of high demand. One source said that availability will be bad and that the lifespan of G80 will be short. NV has G81 waiting in it's wings to fix the availability problem. Nothing was mentioned about the G81 architecture, but G81 could be to G80 what G71 is to G70. Scheduled release: Spring 2007.

Oh and R600 was also mentioned... It will most probably be released in the last week of January 2007 (does this coincide with the Vista release?). The exact date given for launchdate was a Saterday so that's a bit weird..."

It wouldn't surprise me a bit.

 

[lopri]

With the launch date coming in less than a week, Inquirer has organized the rumors/leaks that have been known to date as well as some of the new information. I will update this post as the information gets confirmed, but for now the following links will do.

G80 innards exposed
G80 boasts 24 ROPs

 

[Gstanfor]

Interesting bits from the blurb (slightly edited for readability and nonsense removal)

the 8800 launch is a hard one, so expect partners to have boards in store for the big day's press conference at 11AM on the 8th. The board delivery will go in several waves, with the first two separated by days. No overclocking is allowed on 1st gen products. Expect a very limited allocation of these boards, with UK alone getting a mediocre 200 boards.

GigaThread is the name of the G80 architecture which supports thousands of executing threads, keeping all of the Shader units well fed. G80 comes with 128 scalar Shader units, which Nvidia calls Stream Processors. With regard to dynamic branching, GeForce 8800GTX can do 32 pixel threads in some cases, but mostly the chip will be able to do 16. For reference R580 does 48 threads.

The reason Nvidia went with Streaming Processor description is a DirectX 10 function called Stream Output, that those Shader units will now work on Pixel, Vertex, Geometry and Physics instructions, but not all at the same time.

both Geometry and Vertex Shader programs support Vertex Texturing. When it comes to texturing itself, G80 features 64 Texture Filtering Units, which can feed the rest of the GPU with 64 pixels in a single clock. Depending on the method of texture sampling and filtering used, G80 ranges from 18.4 to 36.8 billion texels in a single second.

The G80 chip in its full configuration comes with six Raster Operation Partitions (ROP) and each can render four pixels. So, 8800GTX can churn out 24, and 8800GTS can push 20 pixels per clock. However, these are complete pixels. If you use only Z-processing, you can expect a massive 192 pixels if one sample per pixel is used. If 4x FSAA is being used, then this number drops to 48 pixels per clock.

For game developers, the important information is that eight MRT (Multiple Render Targets) can be utilised and the ROPs support Frame Buffer blending of FP16 and FP32 render targets and every type of Frame Buffer surface can be used with FSAA and HDR.
If you are not a game developer, this sentence above means that Nvidia now supports FP32 blending, which was not a thing in the past, and FSAA/HDR combination will be supported by default. In fact, 16xAA and 128-bit HDR are supported at the same time.

There is now a mode Nvidia calls "Application Enhanced, joining the two old scoundrels "Application Override" and "Application Controlled". Only "App Enhanced" is the new mode, and the idea is probably that the application talks with Nvidia's driver in order to decide which piece of a scene gets the AA treatment, and what does not.

AntiAliasing has remained very similar to GeForce 7 series, albeit with quality adjustments. The G80 chip supports multi-sampling (MSAA), supersampling (SSAA) and transparency adaptive anti-aliasing (TAA). The four new 1GPU modes are 8x, 8xQ, 16x and 16xQ. Of course, you can't expect that you will be able to have enough horsepower to run the latest games with 16xQ enabled on a single 8800GTX, right? Wrong. In certain games you can buy today, you can enjoy full 16xQ with the performance of regular 4xAA.

On the HDR (High Dynamic Range) side, Nvidia has designed the feature around OpenEXR spec, offering 128-bit precision (32-bit FP per component, Red:Green:Blue:Alpha channel) instead of today's 64-bit version. Nvidia is calling its new feature True HDR, although you can bet your arse this isn't the latest feature that vendors will call "true".

Anisotropic filtering has been made less angle dependent, as well as correcting the texel undersampling, thus minimizing the shimmering effect which was present before.

The external I/O chip now offers 10-bit DAC and supports over a billion colours, unlike 16.7 million in previous GeForce architectures.

Thats not all of it, but its the interesting video bits covered. Hopefully it flows a little better and makes more sense to those less technically inclined.

 

[Centurin]

Given the shortages and ridiculous prices these cards will get, I'm just waiting for the prices to drop on the 7950GTX or even a single 7900GTX. I think expecting an 8800GTX for less than 800 bucks before next year is far fetched.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: Centurin
Given the shortages and ridiculous prices these cards will get, I'm just waiting for the prices to drop on the 7950GTX or even a single 7900GTX. I think expecting an 8800GTX for less than 800 bucks before next year is far fetched.

We will see, I hope EVGA gets enough supply so I can buy one and build my new machine

 

[Capt Caveman]

If shortages as predicted materialize, eVGA will probably have few to none available thru their Step-Up program, similar to how they handled the 7800GTX 512mb.

 

[IndyJaws]

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
If shortages as predicted materialize, eVGA will probably have few to none available thru their Step-Up program, similar to how they handled the 7800GTX 512mb.

How did they end up handling it? Were people still able to sign up for Step-Up but had to wait a while before they had availability, or did they not offer Step-Up at all for that card?

 

[Woofmeister]

Originally posted by: IndyJaws

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
If shortages as predicted materialize, eVGA will probably have few to none available thru their Step-Up program, similar to how they handled the 7800GTX 512mb.

How did they end up handling it? Were people still able to sign up for Step-Up but had to wait a while before they had availability, or did they not offer Step-Up at all for that card?

[Bump] Somebody please answer IndyJaws question. I'm planning to step up my 7900 GTOs; that's why I bought them only a month before the G80 comes out.

 

[Vanditz]

Originally posted by: Woofmeister

Originally posted by: IndyJaws

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
If shortages as predicted materialize, eVGA will probably have few to none available thru their Step-Up program, similar to how they handled the 7800GTX 512mb.

How did they end up handling it? Were people still able to sign up for Step-Up but had to wait a while before they had availability, or did they not offer Step-Up at all for that card?

[Bump] Somebody please answer IndyJaws question. I'm planning to step up my 7900 GTOs; that's why I bought them only a month before the G80 comes out.

Same here. Anybody know?

 

[Capt Caveman]

If you check out the eVGA forums, you may still find the official 7800GTX 512 Step-Up thread. Basically, only a small amount of folks in the beginning got the card, leaving 100s of folks on a waiting list that went on for months. Basically, retailers got the cards first and those in the step-up program got any scraps.

The delay in fulfilling step-up requests went on up to the 7900s release. B/c of the higher price(compared to the 7900s) and long delay/dissatisfaction, EVGA did offer those in the waiting credit and discount on their other cards for those that wanted to go SLI with their current cards.

From that experience, just don't expect to be able to step-up right away. It may take months after release.

 

[Woofmeister]

That's fine, but do they hold onto your cards in the interim? As I understand it, you start a step up by sending in your cards to eVGA. Obviously, that's not a very good idea if you have to wait for months to get the newer card.

 

[HgrdGman]

Possible Price for the G80

http://www.nvidia.com/object/reality_tour06.html


Under the PRIZES; ODDS OF WINNING

$450 to $599 each

 

[Centurin]

Originally posted by: HgrdGman
Possible Price for the G80

http://www.nvidia.com/object/reality_tour06.html


Under the PRIZES; ODDS OF WINNING

$450 to $599 each

MSRP perhaps, but don't expect to pay anything close to that.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: Woofmeister
That's fine, but do they hold onto your cards in the interim? As I understand it, you start a step up by sending in your cards to eVGA. Obviously, that's not a very good idea if you have to wait for months to get the newer card.

This is how it works:

1) You apply for step-up with in 90 days once the card that you want is made available as a step-up card
2) You wait (possibly months in this case) for them to get one in stock that they can allocate to you
3) You send your card in
4) They send you your new card

The potential problems are:

1) They may not make cards that have low allocation available for step-up, so your 90 days may expire
2) Even though you only pay the difference, the cards are sold at MSRP. So, if they make you wait too long, you get ripped off because the prices at etailers will fall way below MSRP.

Personally, I decided to write off my chances of getting a step-up. My GTXes are en route to their new homes as we speak. I'm dorking around with the beginnings of HTPC build right now consisting of a Sempron 64 3000+ and an AIW X800XL... It should make a decent HTPC when it's done and it's plenty to play a little WoW on.

 

[Skott]

The way I understand it is that once they accept your step up (within 90days) you are locked in to get the card. Granted it may take a while after that before its availble but as long as they officially accept you within that 90days you are going to get a card. Now how they do the pricing I'm not sure about. They should do the pricing once they say 'we got one ready for you'. Not the original selling price which would be alot more. According to the eVGA site once they say, 'okay, we got one set aside' You then mail your card to them (at your cost i believe). Once they receive it they in turn mail you (at their cost I believe) the new card. So you may be without a card as long as two weeks. Depending on which postal method you use. Figure a week each way if you go the long-slow method.

Obviously you'd want to contact eVGA and get the finer details but their website gives you the general terms and conditions of the program.

 

[Nightmare225]

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
If you check out the eVGA forums, you may still find the official 7800GTX 512 Step-Up thread. Basically, only a small amount of folks in the beginning got the card, leaving 100s of folks on a waiting list that went on for months. Basically, retailers got the cards first and those in the step-up program got any scraps.

The delay in fulfilling step-up requests went on up to the 7900s release. B/c of the higher price(compared to the 7900s) and long delay/dissatisfaction, EVGA did offer those in the waiting credit and discount on their other cards for those that wanted to go SLI with their current cards.

From that experience, just don't expect to be able to step-up right away. It may take months after release.

That's fine. I just don't want to spend another $600 after spelunking $500 on this former beast. As long as I'm put on some kind of list that guarantees I'll get a card, I'm happy.

 

[Polish3d]

LOL, how can they say that the 8800GTX is xxx % faster than the 7900GTX in and HDR+AA situation