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Comments: 208 +- Technology: NVIDIA Ships Decent DX10 Graphics Card For Under $100 on Tuesday November 17, @04:27PM
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kdawson
on Tuesday November 17, @04:27PM
from the stay-out-of-the-uncanny-valley dept.
from the stay-out-of-the-uncanny-valley dept.
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MojoKid writes "NVIDIA is launching a new mainstream graphics card today, aimed at consumers in the market for a relatively low-cost upgrade from an integrated graphics solution or older entry-level GPU. The new GeForce GT 240 features a GPU with 96 processor cores, 8 ROP units, and 32 texture filtering units. The GPU is manufactured using a 40nm process, features a GDDR5 memory controller (that's also compatible with GDDR3), and unlike NVIDIA's current high-end GPUs, the GT 240 is DirectX 10.1 compatible. For $100 or less, what's perhaps most interesting is that this graphics card actually puts up respectable frame rates with AA turned on and no external power needed beyond what a standard PCIe slot provides."
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nVidia 9400M (Score:4, Interesting)
How does the GT240 compare to a 9400M?
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I like apples.
Re:nVidia 9400M (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana
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barely at best, it's still slower than an 8800GT. You can almost get a 4870 for less than that. [newegg.com] which would be DX11 compatible/significantly faster. Or get a 4850 which is still significantly faster and DX10.1.
basically, this was a bad move by nvidia, but it's all they have at the moment.
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You can almost get a 4870 for less than that which would be DX11 compatible/significantly faster.
Uh, no. That would be 10.1 on any ATI card that starts with 4. Nice try, though.
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try again. [tomshardware.com]
DX11 and DX10.1 will be sharing a lot of features. DX10.0 does not. All the people getting an 8800gt for example, got screwed by that. I'm glad NV has a DX10.1 solution, but when will anyone have a copy of the DX11 card to test?
Sorry though, I meant to link the 5750, I was looking through stuf
Why are you people moderating him insightful? (Score:5, Interesting)
This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
First off, DX 10 and 10.1 have a lot more in common than DX 10.1 and 11, hence the version numbers. DX 10.1 was largely a more strict version of the DX 10 standard, for example requiring 4x FSAA filtering and 32-bit FP rendering. Well all DX 10 hardware supports that anyhow so no big deal. Still there were differences that required new hardware to fully support 10.1.
Now DX 11 has some new stuff and DX 10.1 cards are NOT compatible. Tessellation is one of those and yes earlier ATi cards do have a tessellator, but it's not DX11 compatible. However that's now all that's new. Another big one would be Shader Model 5.0. This adds various features such as double precision support and a new compute shader "basically a way of addressing the shader hardware for GPGPU stuff).
So older cards are NOT DX 11 capable. A notable absence in the ATi 4 series would be double precision support.
I should note that this doesn't mean that they can't use the DX 11 library, it just means they don't support DX 11 features. The break between 9 and 10 (where old hardware couldn't support 10 at all) appears to be the last for awhile. DX 10 hardware can use DX 10.1 and DX 11 APIs, but it doesn't support the new features.
However when someone calls something a "DX 11 card" what they mean is "A card that supports the full DX 11 feature set." Currently the only cards on the market meeting that designation are the ATi 5000 series. The ATi 4000 series are DX 10.1 cards.
For more info on what's new in DX 11 see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee417843(VS.85).aspx#Full [microsoft.com] that's MS's page on it which will get as highly technical as you'd like.
Parent
Radeons don't have video acceleration (Score:2, Insightful)
Some day, ATI will have better drivers than Nvidia, and they'll even be open source. But today, Radeons don't have video acceleration at all, and certainly nothing nearly in the same league as VDPAU.
And video acceleration is the main reason someone would have a 9400M.
You're telling people to upgrade from something that works, to something that doesn't work. The original poster was probably asking if 9400M to GT240 would be an upgrade from something that works, to something that works better.
Anyway, to ans
Re:Radeons don't have video acceleration (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong! But I'll cut ya some slack cause it was only released a few weeks ago:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_xvba_vaapi&num=1 [phoronix.com]
ATI cards do support video acceleration under linux, although not as nice of an implementation as Nvidia's yet...
Parent
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Yeah, but with ATI you have to deal with their driver bugs.
You say that as if nvidia hasn't had their fair share of driver problems.
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High-end PC game performance is already available to casual gamers.
I put a Radeon 4650 in my new machine and it runs Crysis on high and handles very new games like Borderlands and COD Modern Warfare 2 without trouble. The machine is nothing special really. An i5 that cost me about $750 to build.
Just for laughs, I put the 4650 in my i7 Win7 system (1366 socket) that I normally use for music production, and it drove my two big monitors beautifully.
I've just ordered another 4650 (about $60) for the i7. It u
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d3ac0n, if you take your time shopping, and use sites like NewEgg, you can do a really solid system for even less.
You probably know this already, but if you go to the Tom's Hardware Forum, and look at the section on home builds, people come up with builds and then other users pick them apart and make recommendations for better parts/lower prices. You can get a lot of ideas there.
People are building solid i5 systems for $700 and less (w/ 4gig DDR3). Socket 1366 i7 systems for less than $1k. If you want to
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Tom's Hardware Link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tom's Hardware Link (Score:4, Interesting)
I looked into this a little bit. It looks like it's more or less the same performance as my 512mb 8800 GT. Anyone else confirm that? So this is mainly just a power and price thing...
Parent
Re:Tom's Hardware Link (Score:5, Funny)
Are you asking if your top range, two generation old graphics card is now having its performance matched by a low end, current generation graphics card?
Parent
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No, I was asking if there was an improvement on my top range two generation old graphics card. They are only matching it with this new low-end card, in other words... so the main gain, it seems, is power consumption.
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Great.. (Score:2)
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This card is VDPAU Featur Set C. Which is the
Currently, the portions capable of being offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) and VLD (Variable-Length Decoding) for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264 / DivX 6), VC-1, WMV3/WMV9, Xvid / OpenDivX (DivX 4), and DivX 5 encoded videos.
My CPU never broke 10% with anything from Xvid to 1080p x264.
Now if we could only get the sound working [ubuntuforums.org]
Last I checked AMD just finally re
Um, so? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Feature set.
I'm out of the PC Gaming scene(in fact, my computer is Grape. [penny-arcade.com]).
But I do understand the idea of building a sub 500 dollar PC that supports Windows 7 and nearly any game you awnt to throw at it though.
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The performance is increasing per dollar, but the manufacturing of the video cards is an almost set price.
Much like with hard drives, yes there are 2 terabyte hard drives for around $200, but that does not mean that you can find a (recently manufactured) 200 gig hard drive for $20. The cost of all the sub-systems sets the base price.
how do ati cards at the same price do next to this (Score:2)
how do ati cards at the same price do next to this?
Re:how do ati cards at the same price do next to t (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
They don't? (Score:4, Informative)
This [google.com] is one generation old (not two) and more than adequate for the casual gamer. It's also under $100. It's also available in AGP, which is why I own one.
Mal-2
Parent
But will it run Crysis? (Score:2)
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Can you clarify your use of the word almost? I read that chart as 30-60fps depending on resolution.
Are my standards too low?
Dear NVidia, (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice chip. I'm waiting until you make a 40nm GPU that beats the 9800GT. 40mn is required because heat and noise are crucial to me. All of your fast 2xx series stuff is hot and power hungry, so I haven't moved.
Listen carefully: My magic price point is $200 or less. TPD must be no more than approximately 100W, ah la the 9800GT. I want 1GB (but I'll settle for 768) because 512MB is too small now. I have never cared about SLI and I won't start anytime soon. I *DO* care about heat and noise, so make these
Yay! Re-badged 9800GT FTW! (Score:5, Informative)
Come on, nVidia... Stop with the re-branding already.
This is just a die-shrunk 9800 GT, which was just a die-shrunk 8800 GT.
Yes, it's a great card for $100. But stop misleading people into thinking it's the same tech as the GTX 260-285.
(They did the same with the "GTS 250", which is just a re-badged 9800 GTX, which was just a re-badged 8800 GTS.)
What's with that hedline (Score:3, Informative)
I paid 76 dollars for my 9600 GT, fanless, and it' is direct x 10 compatible.
Sure got told... (Score:3, Interesting)
1.7% yields of Fermi GPUs in first batch.
Wooden screws used in the non-working Fermi prototype card which Nvidia claimed was working.
Q2 2010 release date now for consumer Fermi GPUs instead of the promised Q4 2009 release.
20% clock miss on Fermi architecture.
And now they're releasing re-badged crap yet again.
When will it end?
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Integrated graphics aren't bad by design, just implementation.
This or better could be integrated, but instead what ends up as integrated graphics is the most bottom barrel POS that is barely capable of displaying a desktop wallpaper.
If they can stick it in a laptop, they can put it on a motherboard.
Parent
why can more Integrated have there own ram? ati do (Score:2)
why can more Integrated have there own ram? ati does why not intel? nvidia?
Intel is crap and I hope apple does not go back to them with the corei3 cpu.
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The level of idiocy you exhibit with the "logic" in your statement astounds me.
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Re:So, I have a question... (Score:4, Informative)
If a device can display video at 1080p 24+ frames per second, what's the point of more?
Displaying a video and rendering a 3d scene are two entirely different things. With a video you don't need textures, bump mapping, or dynamic lighting, you just play the frames.
Parent
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It's not about displaying video, it's about rendering 3D scenes. Any old suck card can do 1080p24 (or 1080p60 for that matter). It takes a lot of horsepower to handle realtime rendering at high resolution.
As for why the higher resolution, it's because you're sitting closer and the more details the better. Even in the video domain 3840x2160, if shot natively, would look better on a 60"+ TV than 1080p. Not amazingly better, and of course there is a point of diminishing returns, but...
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The trend with graphics boards is to make them way too big and bulky. It's ridiculous.
Considering the fact that it has it's on GPU, a significant amount of onboard RAM, it's own BUS and all that, and multiple outputs... AND cooling systems (heatsink, fans) ... it's really not all that big. It's smaller, most likely, than your motherboard, and has almost the same features. And with the newer cards with their crazy GPU specs, heat production, onboard RAM, outputs AND inputs, etc ... it's really not that big and bulky.
I suppose it is in comparison to the old 4mb 2D video cards, but.. :)
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I suppose it is in comparison to the old 4mb 2D video cards, but.. :)
I don't know about that as at one time I had an ancient VESA card that extended nearly the length of the AT box I found it in.
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I remember having a not-so-ancient 2D video card that was fairly small. The Diamond Monster 3D [Accelerator] [tomshardware.com] card that I got later, on the other hand, was pretty large :)
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If you really miss the slot that modern video cards eat up, you could always get an extender [criticalcables.com]. Too much money, IMHO, and some case assembly may be required, but, then, how much is it to you?