GeForceFX 5900

[StealthHawk]

Does anyone know how this card will compare to the gfFX5900Ultra?

I am curious as to how much the extra 128MB helps the Ultra, especially at high resolution and with 4x FSAA.

[JGro]

The extra 128MB didn't seem to help the Radeon 9800 for the most part, even at 4x AA and 1600x1200. And that's with a small clock increase too.

The only benchmark I saw where it helped significantly was Comanche 4.

[StealthHawk]

True, true. But Chalnoth says that the NV3x architecture will benefit more from having extra RAM than the r3xx architecture will when using FSAA.

Also it should be noted that only 128MB of RAM was enabled on the r9800 when it was using the Catalyst3.2 drivers. Although even in tests with the Cat3.4s it was only about 5% faster when using 4x FSAA....and that improvement could have come from the driver and not the extra memory.

[JGro]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
True, true. But Chalnoth says that the NV3x architecture will benefit more from having extra RAM than the r3xx architecture will when using FSAA.


Hmm, that's interesting. Did he say why?

[LS32]

I wonder if the added latency of the ddr 2 (on r350) counteracts the extra bandwidth offered by its higher clockspeed personally. Maybe the r360 has deeper buffers to make up for the added latency so even if it is clocked the same, it will be faster given ddr2 than the r350 core.

One other thing of note is that if the nv35 does everything in full 32 bit per component precision, its 28.8 gb/s bandwidth is equivalent to 21.6 gb/s of bandwidth for 24 bit....odd how close that is to the radeon 9700's bandwidth. Obviously there is some compression and textures are stored in the memory etc but to me it would seem that even though nvidia does have the extra bandwidth, their precision makes the benefit of the extra bandwidth nil.

[JGro]

Originally posted by LS32
I wonder if the added latency of the ddr 2 (on r350) counteracts the extra bandwidth offered by its higher clockspeed personally.

I believe that was the reason for the higher clockspeed. It is only about 10 MHz faster.

Also since there are twice as many memory chips on the 256 MB R350 there is higher overhead.

[bkswaney]

I was reading some where that adding the extra memory made the bus split up and that was the reason the Regular 9800 scored better at most things.
Or something like that. :)

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by JGro
Hmm, that's interesting. Did he say why?

Yeah.

Discussion (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11594)

[Dazz]

It will be 1 or the other

Option 1# 450MHz core, 850MHz DDR but w/ 128MB Ram
Option 2# 400MHz core, 800MHz DDR

I think the latter is more realistic.

[Unit01]

LOL

[jbirney]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
True, true. But Chalnoth says that the NV3x architecture will benefit more from having extra RAM than the r3xx architecture will when using FSAA.

I like Chalnoth has as he is a smart person. However I never once bought into that theory of why the nv30 was slower with x4 AA. In fact DaveB over at B3D pretty much debunked Chalnoth idea. We all know why the NV30 fell flate at high res, high AA, lack of bandwidth.

[Sazar]

I have a question about the 256mb cards...

the 128mb cards can and in many instaces DO have traces to each memory chip that are the same length hence making it easier to oc and so on/so forth...

with th eextra 128mb onboard how does the length of the traces not being equal affect the overclocking potential of the cards ?

[Uttar]

I don't know Chalnoth's explanation of more memory being more important for nVidia cards. I'd love a link. What I'm pretty sure of is that there is more memory overhead for the NV3x than for the NV2x, based on benchmarks: huge, memory-lack-related hits happen faster than on NV2x with a similar amount of memory.
Many reasons there I guess, among which the fact that the NV3x store fragment programs in memory and that it likely got a few additional color compression bits per pixel.

I don't know how it compares to the R3xx though.


Uttar

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by jbirney
I like Chalnoth has as he is a smart person. However I never once bought into that theory of why the nv30 was slower with x4 AA. In fact DaveB over at B3D pretty much debunked Chalnoth idea. We all know why the NV30 fell flate at high res, high AA, lack of bandwidth.

Ok, rephrasing the question, then. Will the extra memory on the Ultra card net any practical(> 10%) performance gain over the non-Ultra during the life cycle of the card? Let's say the lifecycle is 6months-1.5 years.

I don't believe that 4x FSAA scores were crippled on NV30 because of lack of memory. But at super high resolution does the extra memory help 4x FSAA at all in games today?

[schuey74]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
Ok, rephrasing the question, then. Will the extra memory on the Ultra card net any practical(> 10%) performance gain over the non-Ultra during the life cycle of the card? Let's say the lifecycle is 6months-1.5 years.

I don't believe that 4x FSAA scores were crippled on NV30 because of lack of memory. But at super high resolution does the extra memory help 4x FSAA at all in games today?

Yes, the extra memory will help as there are a good amount of games using the Unreal Warfare engine and whole lot more coming, and Doom 3 should definetely be out during the life of this card. Both of these engines definetely use the extra video memory in the higher resolutions.
The question is whether that extra 10% - 20% in performance is worth it for you. If you plan to keep the card for the above mentioned timeframe and you have the money then...yes!

The amount of video memory determines at how high you can run the desired AA modes. I don't know the exact number, but each different mode takes up a certain amount of the video card's memory as the rez goes up, then the available AA modes goes down.

[StealthHawk]

How do we actually know that the extra RAM is helping? No one has tested an non-Ultra card. the extra RAM didn't seem to help the r9800Pro much.

[ReDeeMeR]

Well Doom3 alpha uses 80Mb of video memory, I dont think the full version will use anything higher then that, they probably want to optimize it as hell to sell to low end ppl.

Plus I dont see Nv35 operating 256Mb of memory-type of games, just think aobut it??? this barrier is still far away.

Hell *****Box use 64Megs and they can still whoop some half arsed gfx in Halo2 :D

[schuey74]

The amount of video memory depends on the resolution you're running the game in and Doom 3 willl probably make use of that extra memory by the time you get to 1024. Remember that this is THE next big game engine and it will be used a lot over the next three to four years, at least. That means that's what's tough to run on today's hardware will be no big deal in a few years................like Quake 3.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by ReDeeMeR
Hell *****Box use 64Megs and they can still whoop some half arsed gfx in Halo2 :D

Of course console games, as always, use lower resolution textures than PC games would use, and run at low resolution....and also have a habit of not using FSAA :p

[ReDeeMeR]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
Of course console games, as always, use lower resolution textures than PC games would use, and run at low resolution....and also have a habit of not using FSAA :p


Yep, but since we're having something like FX5200 as a mainstream card and it's just now penetrating the market, hopefully replacing them old TNT's(eeew) and Geforce 2MX's
I just dont see games using that high resolution textures.

Lets point some facts, high res textures require alot of space = more CD's and more instaliation space

I was wondering, do textures size's effect the core??? Is 5900 capable of operating these large textures??? Or is it completely memory limited???

[ReDeeMeR]

Originally posted by schuey74
The amount of video memory depends on the resolution you're running the game in and Doom 3 willl probably make use of that extra memory by the time you get to 1024. Remember that this is THE next big game engine and it will be used a lot over the next three to four years, at least. That means that's what's tough to run on today's hardware will be no big deal in a few years................like Quake 3.

Ok hopefully I'll make some sense :p

What's the memory usage increase precentage going from 1024x768 to 1200x1024 and to 1600x1200???

Is it possible to calculate it somehow?

[schuey74]

Originally posted by ReDeeMeR
Ok hopefully I'll make some sense :p

What's the memory usage increase precentage going from 1024x768 to 1200x1024 and to 1600x1200???

Is it possible to calculate it somehow?

Easier than you might think. Just multiply the height & width of the resolution and this gives you the amount of pixels on screen for that rez. And the amount of pixels that must be displayed has a direct effect on how much memory is used for textures.See below

640x480= 307,200
800x600= 480,000
1024x768= 786,432
1280x960= 1,228,800
1600x1200= 1,920,000
2048x1536= 3,145,728

So by doing some simple math you can have a good idea on what the requirements would be. If you've read the reviews of the 256 cards you probably noticed that extra memory basically only helped UT2003 in 1600x1200. At this rez the game uses up 160 megs, hence the advantage. If you do the math, it tells you that the game would use about 26 megs at 640x480. That's why anyone w/ a 32 meg card has stuttering in the game when trying to run it any higher than 640x480, the game starts accessing the system memory at 800x600 and higher. And as the Doom 3 engine is going to be even more demanding, I think it's safe to say you would see the advantages of 256 megs of video memory at 1280x1024 and maybe even 1024x768.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by ReDeeMeR
Yep, but since we're having something like FX5200 as a mainstream card and it's just now penetrating the market, hopefully replacing them old TNT's(eeew) and Geforce 2MX's
I just dont see games using that high resolution textures.

Sadly, I agree with you. Although this shouldn't stop them from having HIGH DETAIL settings that people with decent cards can select. I could care less if people with crappy system had to turn down the details....if the high res textures weren't included they wouldn't be missing anything anyway. It's pretty much a fact that texture artists create high detal, high resolution textures then scale them down. So it wouldn't really require extra work to have higher res textures.

Lets point some facts, high res textures require alot of space = more CD's and more instaliation space

Also agreed. But with multi-CD games being the norm now, it's high time we moved to DVD format. Also, hard drives with huge capacity are cheaper than ever.

I was wondering, do textures size's effect the core??? Is 5900 capable of operating these large textures??? Or is it completely memory limited???

The video card has to support the texture size. I think every nvidia card since the TNT supported at leasst 1024X1024 textures. And since the gf1 at least, 2048X2048. TNT may have even supported 2048X2048, but I don't remember...and it's not really important. TNTs would choke on them anyway.

[ReDeeMeR]

Aight, thanks guys :)