Hands On With Nvidia's New GTX 280 Card 212
notdagreatbrain writes "Maximum PC magazine has early benchmarks on Nvidia's newest GPU architecture — the GTX 200 series. Benchmarks on the smokin' fast processor reveal a graphics card that can finally tame Crysis at 1900x1200.
'The GTX 280 delivered real-world benchmark numbers nearly 50 percent faster than a single GeForce 9800 GTX running on Windows XP, and it was 23 percent faster than that card running on Vista. In fact, it looks as though a single GTX 280 will be comparable to — and in some cases beat — two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.'"
Re:Yeah but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Same answer as all cool new hardware: NO!
Re:Vista cuts performance... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Power vs Intel (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think intel has quite that flexibility because of their commitment to backwards compatability, while nVidia can just push out new drivers.
I call bull on those conclusions. (Score:3, Insightful)
and in some cases beat â" two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.
Bullshit. The 9800GX2 is consistently quite a bit faster (TechReport's very detailed review here [techreport.com]), and it costs around $450, while the GTX 280 costs $650 (with the younger brother the 260 at $400), with the only drawbacks being more power drawn and higher noise. Even then, I think it's a no-brainer.
Don't get me wrong, these are impressive single-GPU cards, but their price points are TOTALLY wrong. ATI's 4870 and 4850 cards are coming up at $450 and $200 respectively, and I think they'll eat these for lunch, at least in the value angle.
Re:So, practically who bought 9800 (Score:5, Insightful)
If you buy a graphics card in the hope that it's going to be the top of the line card for longer then a few months then you're very much mistaken.
Buy a card that will do what you need it to, and then just stick with that until it stops being powerful enough for you. Anyone hoping their computer will be "future proof" is heading towards disappointment very fast.
Tame Crysis at 1900x1200? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I want more speed, i'll get another 8800. That card is phenomenal, and about to get a lot cheaper.
Well, there goes my upgrade plan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Impressive. But impractical. (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, the above numbers are wild speculation; but the punchline is that these parts can't possibly be cheap to manufacture. I suspect that NVIDIA will see some nice sales to lunatic early adopters, and they'll probably have a compute only version of this card for high end computing; but there is no way that it could hit mass distribution price points. Even at $650, I'm not sure that NVIDIA's margins are all that exciting on this particular part.
We're gonna need CUDA benchmarks (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone please develop CUDA [wikipedia.org] benchmarks to be included in future reviews.
We need several apps: one with a kernel that is trivial enough to be constantly starved for memory, one that is the opposite (compute heavy, memory light), integer vs. FP, and something that specifically benefits from the new double-precision floating point that only the newer stuff has.
Get back to me soon, mmmmK?
Re:Vista cuts performance... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft owns the desktop. Content creation and delivery folks want the desktop. What does their (lack of) position in the content market matter?
The content folk are, at best, highly suspicious of "the desktop". With good reason.
Do you really think anyone could sell video content that wouldn't play on Vista?
Of course they could. Most people consume their content from standalone commodity appliances like DVD players and iPods. This hasn't changed in the last few decades (substitute "VHS", "Cassette", "LP", etc as necessary) and there's little reason to think it will in the future.