NVidia 8300 & 8600 details released!

It has been a while since I decided to click on a link to the Inquirer.

I just hope someone comes out with a 8600 that supports HDCP when I decide to build a new HTPC.

Excited to see the performance of the 8600. Wonder how it will stack up against a 7950GT or the crippled version of the 8800GTS.

Any news of a much needed AGP card from nvidia !
ATI already is talking about a AGP x1950xt !
There is some dude on 3dguru who wants to dump his agp X1950pro !!
They seem to have some overheating and PSU issues.

Looks like the GT might be something worth getting now with a proposed 256bit memory bus. Thankfully, 128bit will be left for the 'low/high-end'.
The Ultra would be my choice. 512mb of DDR3 - it would be 5x more usefull down the road as games are maxing 256 quickly. Too bad about it's release date anyhow.

My WAG would be 20 - 24amps :? Ofcourse the process has shrank. 90nm 8800GTS compared to the 8600's 80nm process.

With that price questimate, it makes you wonder if nV is planning on a large unified price drop - or if it's not the 8600's performance. 8O Ofcourse it's release is 3 months in the future, though, the 7600GT was 200$+ upon it's appearance. *scratch* Can't wait for some benchmarks.

Yeah. Can't wait.
It's all about the bars.

If the GTS drops below 300 with the mid-range debut, it'l be mine.

Agreed. That 8600Ultra model looks like it will be the sweet spot. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but 64 programmable shaders and up to 512MB od GDDR3 1400Mhz memory puts it in league with X1950Pros and X1900XTs. All that for around $180 plus you get DX10 capability.

true, but half the stuff the inquerer say are false, especially information on the r600 and qfx. AMD did a pretty good job on keeping that information silent, and a lot of the stuff the inquerer says is proven to be wrong, such as the saphire dual gpu thing? That thing looked so fake that I bet they simply put a weird cooler on a regular saphire card

Anoobis: That ati cards have always had higher clocks than the nvidia cards in general, do you think the new g84 core will be sufficient to compete with the z1950xt or no? Because I know xfx has an amazing 7600gt that is oc'd to hell with a stock cooler that performs as good as the higher end nvidia cards (7900gs, 7800gt, etc). I don't like how they actually lowered the clocks from 570 to 500 on the 8600 ultra. The 1400 ram isn't bad, but xfx has a 625 core, 1600 ram 7600gt and I'd like to see more of those with the g84 core instead of those wimpy clocks

Good point, probably once the nvidia 9xxx series come out, then dx10 will be more perfected and the performance difference will be as large as it was between the 6xxx and the 7xxx series

There's no real way to tell right now as this is all just speculation. I think the lower clock speeds of the 8600Ultra compared to the higher clock speeds of the X1950 series is a bit of a moot point as the architectures are entirely different and we won't know anything until the cards are out and have been benchmarked in real world testing.

<shivers in expectation>

Every time I look out the window, I can see the huge amount of data flowing into my eyes. On second thought, I don't believe a computer will ever gain complete photorealism. There is just to much data.
-cm

hmm, wondering how the 8600 ultra will compare @dx9 games in par with my 1 month old x1950 pro? That should be interesting.

not good enough to call it a worthwhile upgrade.

Now the gts at only $300, that's what I will call a good upgrade

As for photorealism, I think with amd fusion or torrenza (which one is that allows you to have a mobo with like 4 slots, that can be used for gfx, physics, cpu etc all connected via ht3 or ht4) will make that possible if the geforce 9xxx can't do it, because that will significantly make the connection between the cpu and gfx card faster, and the cpus/gpus will be far more powerful by that point anyway. You never know, they might even make virtual reality computer games within 20 years or so

sounds kinda like Bush's plan for Iraq

well, its all in the perspective of what the current lango is.

For instance, I know that ultra means beyond in latin, and so they might have used that because it sounded like it was the best at the time. Now, I don't know why they brought ultra back, but it does seem strange that it's only mid-range. Maybe its designed that way to make fun of ati to say their midrange has performance beyond that of ati's 8O

Right Speedy.
Would you rather have a Pentium 4 @ 3.4 or a C2D E6600 running at 1GHz less.
Architecture.
nVidia's mid-range 8xxx look to be power houses for DX9 and great cheap solutions for DX10. Cannot wait to see a top end X1950xxx shoot out it with these cards. Iching for some bars

I agree, but what I'm saying is that if nvidia kept the same clocks, then those cards will be demolishing anything on the market

Keep in mind that technically they are no longer "pipelines" in the sense that other nvidia cards before the 8 series had pipelines. They are stream processors there is a large difference. Stream processors are floating point and can be assigned to a variety of jobs ranging from geometric processing to pixel shading. Pipelines were fixed functions meaning that they could only do what they were created to do (pixel pipelines could only process pixels etc) This means that the new architecture is much more efficient and able to fully utilize it's core processor on rendering an image instead of some pipelines standing around unused if that particular scene does not require it (i.e a more heavily shaded scene requires more use of pixel shaders, but not vertex processing (?))

The reasons for nvidia's conservative clocks: (IMO)

#1 Power consumption, to keep it down, they have the clocks a bit lower, both the 8800GTX and GTS are the most powerful cards on the market, no need to push them any further.

#2 See what ATI comes up with. If nvidia's lead is threatened, they will just release a 8850GTX with higher clocks. They are playing a card game with ATI - never put all of your cards on the table.

This is the exact same thing Intel has done with its Core 2 CPUs. See what AMD comes up with, if threatened, then they will just release higher clock rates.

That one is big, but the fact that under DX10 those are unified shader paths not pixel shaders is the most important aspect, NOT the fact that there are more of them.

bah, and even if more than one site is reporting on that, who would want to buy a dual x1950pro gpu. I think the 7950gx2 will perform better, and if quad crossfire is anything like quad sli, than that will make the card even more of a joke, and I don't see how saphire expects to profit of this, after seeing how the 7950gx2 only was hyped up about for a few monthes and then was tossed aside for a single gpu setup. I think the 7900gt beats the x1950pro in most cases, correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't really seen any benchmarks really comparing the two.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

I know it isn't a representative survey but ATI have their work cut out if they truly want to compete in the multi-GPU market. For this section of users, they have less than 4% market share.

Mind you, again on this section of users only, multi GPU isn't big anyway yet - less than 1.5%.