NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 (G80): GPUs Re-architected for DirectX 10
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 8, 2006 6:01 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
AA Disabled Performance
Up to this point, most of our benchmarks have been run with 4xAA, as we feel most people considering something like the new 8800 GTX are going to be interested in image quality as well as performance. If you don't care about antialiasing, the need for such fast graphics cards trails off quickly, as you'll see here.
The 8800 GTX SLI still has issues with Battlefield 2, but more importantly you see the clustering of all of the high-end graphics configurations once antialiasing is disabled. Discounting the single ATI X1950 XTX and GeForce 7900 GTX cards, the spread among all the cards is about 20%-25%. Battlefield 2 is also clearly beginning to run into CPU limitations, with many of the cards showing very little in the way of performance drops when going from 1600x1200 to 1920x1440. When 8800 GTX SLI is fixed, we expect to see a more or less flat line throughout resolution scaling. Battlefield 2142 would once again be something nice to test, as frame rates are a bit lower with that title, but overall the Battlefield series has always been pretty demanding when it comes to CPU power (not to mention have enough memory).
With 4xAA, Episode One showed a bit more separation, and our particular demo seemed to be CPU limited to around 230 FPS. Disabling antialiasing shows that 230 FPS is indeed where our CPU tops out. The other cards move closer to this mark, but without dropping to a lower resolution none of them are yet able to reach it. With the minimum score coming in at 56 FPS, and even then only at 2560x1600, Half-Life 2: Episode One does not appear to really need anything faster in the GPU department just yet.
Disabling antialiasing in Prey improved performance in most of the tested configurations by about 20%, and the 8800 GTX SLI setup becomes a bit more CPU limited.. The relative positions of the cards don't really change much, although the GeForce 7 series cards appear to do slightly better without antialiasing compared to the ATI cards.
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DerekWilson - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
i'm sure there was a lot burried in there ... sorry if it wasn't easy to find.8800 gtx and gtx are both no louder than 7900 gtx. 1950 xtx still takes the cake for loudest graphics card around by a long shot -- especially after it heats up in a game.
crystal clear - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
My comments in Daily Tech on this subject-More "G80" Derivatives in February R
E: More info would be nice
By crystal clear on 11/8/06, Rating: 2
By crystal clear on 11/8/2006 8:03:43 AM , Rating: 2
If you link VISTA -SANTA ROSA platform-Core2DUO(merom)CPU line up(T7300,7500,7700 models)then a matching Graphics card
to complete the link.
So a G80 for laptops/notebooks?
The pairing of Intels Santa Rosa platform with Vista in the 2Q 07 is next big thing for the first tier notebook manufacturers & all they need is a matching G80 for this setup.
Unquote-
Nvidia currently caters to Desktop requirement/needs with the new G80 releases,wonder how the notebook/server versions will be-with Vista ofcourse.
yyrkoon - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Vitual memory is probably a good thing for most cases, but in the graphics arena, this *could* potentially make for sloppy/ bad coding practises. Knowing a lot of game devers (some of which actually work for well known companies), I've heard them from time to time complain about maxing a 16x PCI-E pipe. What I'm trying to say here, is that while it would be a good thing for never having to run out of texture memory, but that system memory, and definately the swap disk can not hold a candle to the memory bandwidth that most Video cards are capable of. End result, is that you definately *will* get a performance hit. All this, and we already know the memory bandwidth capabilities of modern PCs, suffice it to say, the most we'll see from current systems is what ? 12-13K GB/s ? Even a 7800GS can do roughly 35 GB/s on card. A 7600GT ? 22GB/s ?Still I think Directx10 is a very good thing, and as I didnt read the whole article, perhaps a missed a little ? Reason being, I've been reading about Directx10 since April, and a friend of mine was privy to some of this information after an interview with ATI.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/featu...">http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/featu...
saratoga - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
I don't know how they threading really works, but its quite possible VM support is required in order to allow multiple threads to run without stepping all over each other,.saratoga - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Sorry, should read "I don't know how THEIR threading works"falc0ne - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
I don't know what is the problem but I'm really unable to see the images within the latest articles from Anand...Can anyone give me a suggestion? What might be the cause of that?The thing is I'm really, really interested in these articles and I need to see those images. Thanks
yyrkoon - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Oh, er, then in the options tab of Firefox, (tools->options->content) check the "load images" check box ;)falc0ne - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
well...it would've been simple but I'm afraid is not that...It might be the addblock extension from firefox, other than that I have nooo ideeea...Well I will use the IE tab option instead and load the pages using IE 7. Thanks anyway:)yyrkoon - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Checked the exceptions list ? I know that firefox makes it really simple to block images from a site (to a point of being too easy).JarredWalton - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
If you've got AdBlock on Firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+A and you can see what it's blocking. If it blocks the images.anandtech.com stuff, you can then see which RegEx isn't working right and edit that.