Speculation on nVidia 9 series

[J-Mag]

That may be true and the 8800GTX was for sure a nice surprise in terms of performance, but we all knew that 7800GTX SLI had some limits (mine did) so the boost from the 8800GTX was needed. Which leads me to what slaWter says...

Do you mean 7900gtx?


Given how fast an 8800GTX SLI setup can be, a single 9800GTX will be very fast indeed. 9800-SLI might be overkill in terms of what you will gain for the $$$.

It's all relative to the individual. I personally found the 8800gtx SLI setup to be overkill for my needs this year, but I had every single iteration of SLI prior to that (6800,7800,7900).

The bottom line is that it's the games sell video cards and if the first round of DX10 games prove anything its the fact that the 9 series is needed. SLI for these new cards will be warranted as much and probably more so than 8800 SLI because of this.

[Amuro]

Take a look at some leaked specs posted over at XBit Labs.....
http://www.xbitlabs.com/discussion/3953.html
I hope they're true.

[walterman]

I want eDRAM !

The PS2 has 4Mb of eDRAM @ 48GB/s (since year 2000)
The 360 has 10Mb of eDRAM @ 256GB/s.
Even the gamecube had 2Mb.

There's no GPU for PC with eDRAM yet. :thumbdwn:

[T.h.o.m.a.s.]

the gpu engineers will have some good arguments not to choose edram

[AthlonXP1800]

Here will be G92 Editor's day in October and the launch will be in November. G92 will be much cooler and faster than G80. (nana2)

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2161&Itemid=1

G92 will be the next card for me. :D

[walterman]

the gpu engineers will have some good arguments not to choose edram

It's business argument.

eDRAM would bring us very high performance in scenarios with high levels of resolution/AA/AF.

Example: ATI did put a lot of new features into Xenos, like unified architecture, a tesselation unit, & eDRAM. And it was 2 years ago. Now the R600 has unified architecture, a tesselation unit, but it still hasn't eDRAM. What's the reason ? -> On PC, they want to suck all our money, slowly, releasing the new features, after a lot of generations of cards. It's a big business to release a new high end card each few months. For the new gaming consoles, it's different. They put all the new technology in them, to last a lot of years.

[jolle]

Well I belive the Xenos uses the EDRAM as a framebuffer and the massive bandwidth (I recall the old Bitboys prototype GPU back in 2000 was on a 1024bit wide bus) helps AA performance.
This does ofcource mean that you have a fixed size so you can only have so large a framebuffer.
On PC hardware you have pretty high resolutions, so you would either have to use a very big EDRAM (which prolly costs a fair amount to use), or have it work up to a certain resolution + AA level.
I think atleast..

Unified Shaders didnt make sense on a cost level until DX10.
Prior to that VS units had higher precision reqs then PS, so they cost alot more transistors.
Making a DX9 GPU using a unified architecture would cost alot and be bigger then need be.
On DX10 they all have the same precision reqs, so you might aswell go unified.

Tesselation unit works on a Console, its in EVERY console.
On PC, its not part of any API spec, not yet anyway, so wasting transistors on it is a gamble since it prolly wont be used. I doubt the tesselator on R600 is gonna se any action outside of occational XB360 ports, since it requires creation of extra content and would only work on a fraction of the userbase.
Atleast up until a new DX release includes support and it is compatible to that.

Point is, you cant really say anyone is stiffing you out of features just cause they´ve already been included in a Console spec..
They WILL be used there, they WILL be present on EVERY console of that manufacture and are by definition standardized features from the go.. doesnt work like that on PC.

[walterman]

But you can use tile rendering for high resolutions, like the 360 does for 1920x1080. They use 4 tiles for that res, if i remember.

Unified shaders make sense for DX 8/9 apps too, cause it's better to keep all the ALUs on the chip working, no matter if they're vertex or pixels programs. This way, you aren't bounded by a fixed number of vertex or pixel units.

Also, ATI claims that its hardware tesselator can be programmed using vertex shaders: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/r600-architecture_10.html

And Microsoft is pushing hard to make tessellation a requirement of the next DirectX: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2128926,00.asp

Personally, i don't care about the Tesselator unit. It's new stuff, and a bit out of the specs for DX now, but, the eDRAM, is very old feature. Remember the PS2 in the year 2000 with 48GB/s, and my old TNT2 with 2GB/s at that time.

I just want better hardware for us.

[SH0DAN]

I dont think I will be upgrading to G90/92,but wait for the refresh.

[Redeemed]

I dont think I will be upgrading to G90/92,but wait for the refresh.

My plan:

This rig will, eventually, use both my GTSs. Untill then my new rig will sport one GTS and a current quad core setup using a mobo with Intel's X38 chipset.

Then, when the GF9xxx series is released, I'll probably buy 2 9800GTSs for that quad core rig. Should work out alright, but I more than likely wont be an early adoptor for the GF9 series like I was for the GF8 series. This one GTS is more than sufficient for any game at 1680x1050 with atleat 4xAA and maxed in-game settings, as is this Opty. Later next month when I up my RAM to 4GB (I'll be using Vista Ultimate x64 primarily at that point) I'm sure this rig will play anygame at 1680x1050 with atleast 4xAA (including Crysis, though for that I'll probably need my second GTS and a good OC on this Opty). Regardless, it'll game just fine. As such, why upgrade this rig when I could just save for a new one? :p

That's my plan, anyways. :D

[slaWter]

X38 and SLI, hopefully!

But I think one 9800GTX should be enough for 1920x1080, not sure if I'm going SLI anytime soon, on a Intel board of course. nV chipset is a no for sure.

[jolle]

A 9800GTS sounds nice.
My 6800GT broke so I borrowed a 7900GT from school for now, maybe I can hold off and wait for the 9800GTS instead of going for a 8800GTS soonish.

[SeriTonin]

512 bit bus, 384 bit for another top-end product is redundant. 384 bit for the gts, not the gtx.

mid-range 256-bit one would hope, but probably 128 again. Seems cheaper cards wont escape the 128 bit cloud.