Vigile writes "Dual-GPU graphics cards are all the rage and it was a pair of RV770 cores that AMD had to use in order to best the likes of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280. This time NVIDIA has the goal of taking back the performance crown and the GeForce GTX 295 essentially takes two of the GT200 GPUs used on the GTX 280, shrinks them from 65nm to 55nm, and puts them on a single card. The results are pretty impressive and the GTX 295 dominates in the benchmarks with a price tag of $499."
this is like the razor wars (double blade! triple blade! quad blade! pento blade!). With OpenCL and DirectGPU (or whatever MS is calling it this week), this should be good for anyone trying to build a cheap superGPU cluster.
At least those pento blades don't consume a whooping 289 W while you use them. Somehow most previews don't even mention power consumption. The author of the article linked above actually states about this card, that it "properly balances GPU performance and power efficiency". By that logic everything which does not start to burn is power efficient...
Somehow most previews don't even mention power consumption.
Had you RTFA properly, folks have mentioned that card is not yet officially out and nVidia asked to withheld further details as BIOS might still get tweaked.
By that logic everything which does not start to burn is power efficient...
This is not an absolute metric (or is it "yardic" in US?). I presume they compare it to 4870 on which the infamous DDR5 alone - even when idle - draws whooping 40W [techpowerup.com]. 4870x2 has already tweaked factory BIOS and yet twice more DDR5 still consumes same 40W. Yes - RAM alone consumes 40W.
I remember when my friends at school called me a liar because I said our graphics card had 4MB of RAM. It was a sweet ATI VLB card for my dad's architecture workstation.
I might consider upgrading from my 2MB VGA after seeing it in action...:)
And what exactly is wrong with 1024x768x24bpp?
(No, seriously. I used that very setup from 1995 to 2001. Then I got a PCI Voodoo4 cheap because 3dfx had just gone bust, and then got drunk one night and bought a 19" CRT on an auction site, and discovered the joy of 1600x1200.)
All I know is that my graphics box (I call it a graphical) houses a nice little motherboard with a cute Intel chip, some hard drives, and I think I even have a sound card plugged into it.
I remember when the graphics "card" was simply part of the computer -- these days, all the other components are part of my graphical.
I'm glad that people are out there buying graphics cards that can render the latest games in QuadHD resolution at 120 frames per second... it makes the integrated graphics in eee class PCs that much better when the tech trickles down 5 years later.
It's not just about the graphics. GPUs are being called upon to do much more, from AI to Physics, to folding@home. Even encoding and decoding audio and video formats.
As a programmer who does a great deal of data crunching, I sincerely hope that Intel's 80+ core CPU comes along quickly to crush the silliness out of people who are trying to find applications for GPU "cores."
In order to do that Intel would have to adopt some of the architecture that is a GPU. Hence become the very thing you dislike. Right now GPUs are here and being used. Your fictional core isn't and with present limitations most likely will not be showing up for some time.
Does helping folding@home make that portion of your power bill tax deductible? Otherwise.. who cares? Donate to a non-profit science foundation.
You are also kind of donating the hardware, which is a much bigger cost than the power. $10 worth of electricity will do more of these calcs than a $10 donation would enable.
As a somewhat mystified recent purchaser of a GTK 260 from eVGA, I was amazed to discover that NVIDIA has such problems with their linux drivers [nvnews.net]. I owned one of their older cards before and built a new computer and thought it was a no-brainer to pick NVIDIA for linux (freedom issues are notwithstanding, but I decided to go with the pragmatic choice). Only after I ran afoul of the powermizer slow switching crap, or other weird issues such as the misreporting of the screen refresh frequency, did I start digging and realized how many problems there are. As it is, I've got the beta 180.16 driver installed and it's better but I still had to do some tricks to shut off the powermizer feature. Just this morning had some other weird problem with screen corruption that's never happened before with my old hardware but more or less the same software on top of it.
For me personally, I could care less if the card hardware is great if the drivers suck. NVIDIA, fix your linux drivers please. Next time I'll give a much harder look at amd.
I'll save you 5 minutes of research....stick with nVidia.
But in all seriousness, I agred with your point. It seems like their Linux drivers have taken a shit compared to previous releases. Personally for me, I have a lot of artifacting issues in KDE4 that are apparently related directly to nVidia's drivers from what I've read.
But in all seriousness, I agred with your point. It seems like their Linux drivers have taken a shit compared to previous releases. Personally for me, I have a lot of artifacting issues in KDE4 that are apparently related directly to nVidia's drivers from what I've read.
Performance issues, by any chance? I've been baffled why my KDE 4 performance is so terrible compared to my Gnome performance, and I have a reasonable nVidia notebook chip (Quadro NVS 140M).
A lot of the forums have similar complaints, but most people seem to indicate that their problems went away with the 177.80 drivers, which I have installed.
I was hoping the forthcoming nVidia driver will help, but from how people are talking, I've got to wonder if it's even wise to install it when it's released.
I don't know about ATI, but NVidia is a _terrible_ choice! I also used to buy NVidia for all my Linux boxes and recommend it to everybody. I was wrong. The problem is that the free NVidia drivers are extremely slow. They are actually slower than using the generic VESA driver with Intel graphics.
I don't know why - I suspect it has something to do with reading from display memory - but it is a fact. I have a relatively fast quadcore machine, and yet when I am using the free NV drivers, it is unusable for Inte
So by your argument, nVidia is still working on the drivers... still paying their devs the same... but they can accept tweaks from the community that improve them for free. I don't see the issue here.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday December 18 2008, @11:54AM (#26161443)
I wonder if this card will suffer from microstutter. The 9800GX2 benchmarked very well but real world performance was lacking because the card essentially varied between very high fps and very low fps, so it still lagged even though it got decent average fps.
With these dual cards it's best to look at their low fps rating. An average fps is often misleading.
Ten years ago the video card wars were in full swing. Each generation brought amazing new advance and impressive technology.
But nVidia and ATI haven't realized that we passed the point of diminishing returns years ago. Mobility and battery life are what matter. And I know there are hardcore PC gamers out there, but there are only a handful of companies even bothering to push the high-end graphics, so you buy a $500 video card and there are exactly ZERO games that take full advantage of it. Wait a year or
I'd say let the early adopters go for it. It is usually the early adopters that help pay for the lion's share of the development anyway. A year from now, the same performance will be had for less than half, and there should be several games that can play it.
No the render farms do not need this level of graphics either... they render off-screen at seriously low frame rates (frames per minute not per second) they go for quality not speed
They do use the GPU's to render but they are using it as a general processor that is fast (in a cluster) not as a GPU at all...
The only people using high end graphics cards are Gamers and a very few graphic artists...
I agree with you, but I also think that raster 3D is hitting a downward slope in "realistically programmable" feature sets and hopefully ray tracing or hybrid rendering will start to pick up in it's place. I actually think keeping the bleeding edge market going is a good thing toward both obtainable real time tracing and lower power consumption. Even today, I think (even today) nVidia/ATI have to reduce energy costs to go faster.
A while back, AMDTi said that they were not competing at the high-end anymore: "There were also very specific admissions that AMD/ ATI isnâ(TM)t competing at the high end with Nvidia, nor do they intend to match up to the GTX 280 with a release of their own uber-chip." source [hardwarezone.com]. So to say "ATI had to combine two cards to be on top!" kind of completely misses the point. (emphasis added.)
For the interested, there's a great article at anandtech [anandtech.com] talking about how the R770 came to be pretty awesome... Really, though, it's not a super-high-end part.
Nvidia never lost the performance crown. AMD did not even bothered to compete with Nvidia for performance at the high end. Read this excellent article [anandtech.com].
What AMD did with the RV770 series was to totally pwn everything below the super high end. When the 4870 was released at $299, it was generally worse than GTX280, but it easily beat the GTX260 which was priced at $399. When the 4850 was released at $199, it easily matched the 9800GTX which was priced at $249
No, the funny thing here is that AMD *did* have the performance crown, even though they had planned to give it up. Before the GTX 295, the Radeon 4870x2 was the top of the pile for single-card graphics.
I really don't get what's with all the GTA4 complaints.
Yes, installing the game was a pain in the ass, especially with all the DRM. But the game runs fine on my PC. I admit that it could run better. But with medium textures and everything else to the MAXIMUM (1280x1024) I get a good 25fps, which is definitely very playable, and I get about 40 fps in Crysis.
Keep in mind that there is much more things happenning in GTA4 at the same time than in Crysis. You don't have 35 cars on the screen all filled with ra
GTA4 kills proc and not GPU so much - I have a GTX260 Core 216 and a Quad-core Q9550, and I get an easy 40 FPS with medium textures enabled. I hear it's supposed to go higher when Nvidia releases their new drivers. In any case, Steam Forums was having a shootout in many threads when GTA4 was released and there's a pretty clear correlation between processor power and higher framerates. It's also supposed to be 64-bit optimized so I might be getting a boost from running 64-bit Vista.
You get 25fps in GTA4 and 40fps in Crysis
Now, which one (given those numbers) would you expect to look better?
Which one actually looks (a lot) better?
Theres your problem.
Also it has a spectacular memory leak that sees it using up all available physical memory after a while, grinding to a halt and refusing to load any new textures, which is actually pretty funny the first time. Driving around in a flying car avoiding invisible buildings:D
I'm running L4D on my (very) old computer, a 1.6 Ghz AMD single core with a 7600 GS and 1.5GB ram. The game runs fine at medium settings (despite the fact that I am way, way under the minimum system requirements), and when I briefly swapped out the 7600 for a 7900, I was able to turn a few of the settings from medium to high (1024x768, textures low, medium effects -> 1280x1024, textures medium, high effects) and still get a stable 20-25 average frame rate.
Not quality benchmarks, I know, but the engine hasn't changed drastically since HL2 except for graphical improvements (=GPU limited), so claims about it being CPU limited haven't been true since the first public version of the Source engine, and that's assuming they were even true back in 2004.
People need to understand that sometimes, those detail sliders aren't meant to be cranked all the way up on current hardware. They're there to "future-proof" the game, so that it can still look pretty 2 or 5 years down the road. Wing Commander 4 did it for example.
Of course, it's not a huge incentive for developers to future-proof a game when all they get for it is a forum-bashing like "omg the game sux i can't get 50 fps on my 1337 rig".
how do you people buying this stuff get over the noise of the fans? and how often do you have to exchange the fans? i buy only hardware with speed-to-noise ratio near infinity.
Easy--they're deaf. After years of working on building (near) silent PCs, I've learned that what many people/reviewers consider to be 'quiet' is nowhere near my definition of 'quiet'. I'm not quite sure how loud some gamers have their sound systems turned up, or if they play with the window open or what, but I simply can't trust a review on newegg or most websites when someone says a piece of equipment is 'silent'. There are a few websites like silentpcreview.com that do a good job, but if a piece of equipment isn't reviewed there or in the forums, you're SOL (or you get to be the guinea pig).
The same people that I watch movies with. I will have the tv volume at about 1-2 (out of 10), and inevitably, one of my friends will join me and have to turn up the volume because they cannot hear it.
Reminds me of an old joke, "I spent $500 to get my muffler fixed on my car, but now I can hear all these other things that are wrong and it's going to cost me another $500 to get louder speakers."
Holiday Shopping (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So, no hardware in your stockings this year!
You have no idea how wrong that sounds.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
get your mind out of the gutter ...or Santa won't be sliding down your chimney this year.
ugh (Score:3, Insightful)
this is like the razor wars (double blade! triple blade! quad blade! pento blade!). With OpenCL and DirectGPU (or whatever MS is calling it this week), this should be good for anyone trying to build a cheap superGPU cluster.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Funny)
this is like the razor wars (double blade! triple blade! quad blade! pento blade!).
Clearly you don't value a close shave.
Parent
Re:ugh (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:ugh (Score:5, Funny)
I like A Close Shave. But I still think The Wrong Trousers is the best of the films with Wallace & Gromit.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:ugh (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow most previews don't even mention power consumption.
Had you RTFA properly, folks have mentioned that card is not yet officially out and nVidia asked to withheld further details as BIOS might still get tweaked.
By that logic everything which does not start to burn is power efficient...
This is not an absolute metric (or is it "yardic" in US?). I presume they compare it to 4870 on which the infamous DDR5 alone - even when idle - draws whooping 40W [techpowerup.com]. 4870x2 has already tweaked factory BIOS and yet twice more DDR5 still consumes same 40W. Yes - RAM alone consumes 40W.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Impressive Card (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And what exactly is wrong with 1024x768x24bpp?
(No, seriously. I used that very setup from 1995 to 2001. Then I got a PCI Voodoo4 cheap because 3dfx had just gone bust, and then got drunk one night and bought a 19" CRT on an auction site, and discovered the joy of 1600x1200.)
Prob. in order 4x RV770 from ati ? (Score:2)
Re:Prob. in order 4x RV770 from ati ? (Score:5, Funny)
All I know is that my graphics box (I call it a graphical) houses a nice little motherboard with a cute Intel chip, some hard drives, and I think I even have a sound card plugged into it.
I remember when the graphics "card" was simply part of the computer -- these days, all the other components are part of my graphical.
Parent
It's great that there's a market for this stuff... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's great that there's money for this stuff... (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just about the graphics. GPUs are being called upon to do much more, from AI to Physics, to folding@home. Even encoding and decoding audio and video formats.
Re: (Score:2)
As a programmer who does a great deal of data crunching, I sincerely hope that Intel's 80+ core CPU comes along quickly to crush the silliness out of people who are trying to find applications for GPU "cores."
Re: (Score:2)
In order to do that Intel would have to adopt some of the architecture that is a GPU. Hence become the very thing you dislike. Right now GPUs are here and being used. Your fictional core isn't and with present limitations most likely will not be showing up for some time.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You are also kind of donating the hardware, which is a much bigger cost than the power. $10 worth of electricity will do more of these calcs than a $10 donation would enable.
Drivers drivers drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
For me personally, I could care less if the card hardware is great if the drivers suck. NVIDIA, fix your linux drivers please. Next time I'll give a much harder look at amd.
Re: (Score:2)
Next time I'll give a much harder look at amd.
I'll save you 5 minutes of research....stick with nVidia.
But in all seriousness, I agred with your point. It seems like their Linux drivers have taken a shit compared to previous releases. Personally for me, I have a lot of artifacting issues in KDE4 that are apparently related directly to nVidia's drivers from what I've read.
Re: (Score:2)
But in all seriousness, I agred with your point. It seems like their Linux drivers have taken a shit compared to previous releases. Personally for me, I have a lot of artifacting issues in KDE4 that are apparently related directly to nVidia's drivers from what I've read.
Performance issues, by any chance? I've been baffled why my KDE 4 performance is so terrible compared to my Gnome performance, and I have a reasonable nVidia notebook chip (Quadro NVS 140M).
A lot of the forums have similar complaints, but most people seem to indicate that their problems went away with the 177.80 drivers, which I have installed.
I was hoping the forthcoming nVidia driver will help, but from how people are talking, I've got to wonder if it's even wise to install it when it's released.
Re: (Score:2)
I've still been buying nVidia for my Linux boxes. Is ATI finally a better choice?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about ATI, but NVidia is a _terrible_ choice! I also used to buy NVidia for all my Linux boxes and recommend it to everybody. I was wrong. The problem is that the free NVidia drivers are extremely slow. They are actually slower than using the generic VESA driver with Intel graphics.
I don't know why - I suspect it has something to do with reading from display memory - but it is a fact. I have a relatively fast quadcore machine, and yet when I am using the free NV drivers, it is unusable for Inte
fix (Score:4, Insightful)
NVIDIA, fix your linux drivers please.
NVIDIA, open your linux drivers please.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
So by your argument, nVidia is still working on the drivers... still paying their devs the same... but they can accept tweaks from the community that improve them for free. I don't see the issue here.
Microstutter (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if this card will suffer from microstutter. The 9800GX2 benchmarked very well but real world performance was lacking because the card essentially varied between very high fps and very low fps, so it still lagged even though it got decent average fps.
With these dual cards it's best to look at their low fps rating. An average fps is often misleading.
This is all so 1998 (Score:2, Insightful)
Ten years ago the video card wars were in full swing. Each generation brought amazing new advance and impressive technology.
But nVidia and ATI haven't realized that we passed the point of diminishing returns years ago. Mobility and battery life are what matter. And I know there are hardcore PC gamers out there, but there are only a handful of companies even bothering to push the high-end graphics, so you buy a $500 video card and there are exactly ZERO games that take full advantage of it. Wait a year or
Re:This is all so 1998 (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say let the early adopters go for it. It is usually the early adopters that help pay for the lion's share of the development anyway. A year from now, the same performance will be had for less than half, and there should be several games that can play it.
Re: (Score:2)
No the render farms do not need this level of graphics either ... they render off-screen at seriously low frame rates (frames per minute not per second) they go for quality not speed
They do use the GPU's to render but they are using it as a general processor that is fast (in a cluster) not as a GPU at all ...
The only people using high end graphics cards are Gamers and a very few graphic artists ...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you, but I also think that raster 3D is hitting a downward slope in "realistically programmable" feature sets and hopefully ray tracing or hybrid rendering will start to pick up in it's place. I actually think keeping the bleeding edge market going is a good thing toward both obtainable real time tracing and lower power consumption. Even today, I think (even today) nVidia/ATI have to reduce energy costs to go faster.
Point: Missed (Score:4, Interesting)
For the interested, there's a great article at anandtech [anandtech.com] talking about how the R770 came to be pretty awesome... Really, though, it's not a super-high-end part.
Taking back the performance crown? (Score:4, Informative)
Nvidia never lost the performance crown. AMD did not even bothered to compete with Nvidia for performance at the high end.
Read this excellent article [anandtech.com].
What AMD did with the RV770 series was to totally pwn everything below the super high end.
When the 4870 was released at $299, it was generally worse than GTX280, but it easily beat the GTX260 which was priced at $399.
When the 4850 was released at $199, it easily matched the 9800GTX which was priced at $249
Re:Taking back the performance crown? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the funny thing here is that AMD *did* have the performance crown, even though they had planned to give it up. Before the GTX 295, the Radeon 4870x2 was the top of the pile for single-card graphics.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't get what's with all the GTA4 complaints.
Yes, installing the game was a pain in the ass, especially with all the DRM.
But the game runs fine on my PC. I admit that it could run better. But with medium textures and everything else to the MAXIMUM (1280x1024) I get a good 25fps, which is definitely very playable, and I get about 40 fps in Crysis.
Keep in mind that there is much more things happenning in GTA4 at the same time than in Crysis. You don't have 35 cars on the screen all filled with ra
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, which one (given those numbers) would you expect to look better?
Which one actually looks (a lot) better?
Theres your problem.
Also it has a spectacular memory leak that sees it using up all available physical memory after a while, grinding to a halt and refusing to load any new textures, which is actually pretty funny the first time. Driving around in a flying car avoiding invisible buildings
Re:Really, though. (Score:5, Informative)
GTA4 is processor dependent, not GPU dependent, cos it's the crappiest console port we've seen in years.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Really, though. (Score:5, Interesting)
Please cite that.
I'm running L4D on my (very) old computer, a 1.6 Ghz AMD single core with a 7600 GS and 1.5GB ram. The game runs fine at medium settings (despite the fact that I am way, way under the minimum system requirements), and when I briefly swapped out the 7600 for a 7900, I was able to turn a few of the settings from medium to high (1024x768, textures low, medium effects -> 1280x1024, textures medium, high effects) and still get a stable 20-25 average frame rate.
Not quality benchmarks, I know, but the engine hasn't changed drastically since HL2 except for graphical improvements (=GPU limited), so claims about it being CPU limited haven't been true since the first public version of the Source engine, and that's assuming they were even true back in 2004.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People need to understand that sometimes, those detail sliders aren't meant to be cranked all the way up on current hardware. They're there to "future-proof" the game, so that it can still look pretty 2 or 5 years down the road. Wing Commander 4 did it for example.
Of course, it's not a huge incentive for developers to future-proof a game when all they get for it is a forum-bashing like "omg the game sux i can't get 50 fps on my 1337 rig".
Re:i hate fans (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy--they're deaf. After years of working on building (near) silent PCs, I've learned that what many people/reviewers consider to be 'quiet' is nowhere near my definition of 'quiet'. I'm not quite sure how loud some gamers have their sound systems turned up, or if they play with the window open or what, but I simply can't trust a review on newegg or most websites when someone says a piece of equipment is 'silent'. There are a few websites like silentpcreview.com that do a good job, but if a piece of equipment isn't reviewed there or in the forums, you're SOL (or you get to be the guinea pig).
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Equal amount spend on the audio system.
Reminds me of an old joke, "I spent $500 to get my muffler fixed on my car, but now I can hear all these other things that are wrong and it's going to cost me another $500 to get louder speakers."