GT200 performance analysis + RV770 revised

Alot of that I really didnt understand but I agree with the GTX 200's not living up to the price! I'm disappointed in Nvidia for flooding the market with GPUs that for one arent that much faster than previous gen GPUs and two are way expensive.
Your right about games not really needin all that power too. ONly game that stresses my set up is Crysis.... I'm glad these cards were released. Now it makes the GX2 cheaper and more affordable. It would be even nicer if the GX2 would get down in the 300's. Making it that much more affordable.
I just dont understand why Nvidia would even release the GTX 260. It's going to perform on a similar level as the GX2 and 9800GTX.... and cost much more. It's so stupid IMO. They should have waited it out for a good few more months... let eveyone continue to buy 8 series cards and 9 series cards and introduce the GTX 200's with more performance this upcoming Christmas. That would have been good for marketing and not flooding the market with GPU after GPU... All these cards Nvidia released ie 8800GT, 8800GTS 512, 9800GTX, 9800GX2, GTX 200 perform rather similarly on a price performance standpoint and it just doesnt make much sense with the naming and the series designation.
Alright... I've ranted too much.

Agreed,i say NVIDIA must do something like the 8800 series, remember them?
8800 was truly a revolution over 7900 series

Maziar!!! I haven't seen you in a while. Where have you been?

NEVERMIND!!! I see what you are saying now.

For instant gratification you need more texture fillrate with right combination of bandwidth which GT200 doesn't deliver that much more than G92. Not more SP. The bandwidth bottleneck is gone for the most part. Nvidia want maximum performance in DX10 & future games. This will require more shading power than G80's ratio would provide. In these kinds of games, GT200 performs well and the increase in per clock performance compared to G80 is close to the increase in ALU performance per clock.

This is what Nvidia is aiming for 260gtx beating out gx2 but that's really upto the developers not Nvidia but what Nvidia got is slightly better performance than a single 9800gtx in most of the current titles out. Just some ridiculous bandwidth starved situations does GT200 prevail. Do you see what ATI was aiming at the time when they made 2900xt? Nvidia is just following suit and is just catching up in that dept.

With CUDA coming to light and this overcompensation of processing power in the new GPUs....it looks like NV has a master plan brewing...

Doesnt it make more sense for GPU engineers/manufactures to develop the cards around bad a$% games rather than game developers to develop games for the GPU?

The original DX10 was modified by M$ for nVidas sake. This was a exception, not the rule. Looks like I need to read up on DX11. Any sources?

If you have a high understanding of math it's not far off from computers. It's all numbers anyway. In the real world yes there are variables but it isn't far off from specs and how coders program the games.

Oh yeah forgot to say I've read in multiple places NVidia is coming out with a lower die (55nm or 50nm?) in a few months or so for the G200 series.

Maybe then you'll see the heat, quietness, and performance worthy of the price.

For now, buh-bye

Coming out with the 65nm version a few months before the 55nm is pulling a fast one. Anyone buying one now will be like someone who bought a 125 watt Phenom 9850 a few months before the 95 watt version arrives. Anyone buying that will be just a few months shy of Deneb.

Nvidia's getting into AMD territory here. Putting out stopgap products to improve performance just a smidgen rather than holding off until the real part is ready. Sad really.

Performance-wise in graphics, math like this isn't quite destiny, but it's close.. If you are good with numbers you are also good with analyzing it's performance. The specs are basically numbers. Variable between how coders program the games. 1 game might be texture heavy, pixel heavy, another might be shader heavy, cpu heavy, etc, etc.. You do realize that coding is also number crunching.

GTX is not really faster than GX2 or even close gx2 performance. I don't know what review you've been reading. GX2 is much more powerful than GT200. Only reason why GT200 spread it's legs in 2560x1200 resolution with AA because it has 1gig of vram and a lot more bandwidth. Not because GX2 is lacking in fillrate or processing power compared to GT200.

Instant gratification comes from fillrate long as it's not shader limited. AA performance also derive from it. The fact that there are couple of games that are shader heavy doesn't mean all games are like this. Within the last generations shader count has been rising but not to a point that a G92 128SP would be shader limited.

I don't know what you are trying to get at but I'm analyzing it's performance not because I think GT200 sucks although I think it sucks for what Nvidia is trying to sell it for. I think you have your head on backwards thinking I'm dissing GT200 and you need to stick up for it. Discussion for improvements in it's architecture and why Nvidia didn't do it with add more texture fillrate when Nvidia spokesman specifically said that most games off loads to textures and back to the memory which has to do with fillrate not shader which GT200 emphasizes on.

Just look at 260gtx vs 9800gtx. You do realize that 260gtx has whole lot more ROP, shader, and bandwidth but it isn't all that much faster than 9800gtx in most of the current crop of games. 3 fps faster in Crysis? That's not exactly what I call a step up. Now read what I'm trying to say on the first post and if you have an understanding I'm here to respond.

No it does not because those "b-a" games you're talking about get beat by twitch gamers and then get dumped to never be replayed again. Many old school gamers like myself go back to games we enjoyed years ago (I've been known to replay Daggerfall under Dosbox). If a card was developed entirely around a limited play FPS like Crysis, then it wouldn't be capable of meeting the demands of games that fully develop under DX10.1 in the future.

Besides, not everyone who plays games spends $450 (I did last February but that was a first for me), let alone $650, just to get an extra 10 fps in a particular "b-a" game. At any rate, I don't play FPS, so though Crysis visuals impress me, it's gameplay does not. What I want are open world fantasy and SF CRPGs that are fully DX10.1 (patched or from the ground up) that I can enjoy for years.

Hrm.. with my step up, that $650 card is brought down to $361.

That sounds pretty good to me.

They probably assume that anyone willing to spend $650 on a card will have a 30" LCD or output to something like a 42" plasma TV (does the GTX280 have the video connectors for that?). That's not entirely true. I spent $450 in February on my 3870x2 and planned on getting a 24" LCD for 1920 by now but real life caught up. I built a budget system for relatives and another for my kid, plus vacation plans.

So, I won't have the quad core CPU or the 24" LCD before the fall, both of which the 3870x2 needs for good performance. Perhaps Nvidia realizes that anyone who games at 1680 or below with a GTX280 will lose out by being CPU limited at those resolutions and won't get performance near the benchmarks?

It does make sense to balance a card with both a CPU and a particular resolution. I can't fault them for considering 1920 a low resolution for that card. After all, the 3870x2 really shines at 1920 and higher, so I'm not getting the best until I install that Gigabyte mobo I have laying around with one of the upcoming 95 watt 9850's alongside a 24" LCD.

If engineers didn't make mistakes, and companies didn't make bad decisions at the top, then Dilbert wouldn't be so funny and nearly spot on. I have engineers in the extended family (retired from the Cold War days) who couldn't say much but did tell some funny stories about snafus at major aircraft companies that they caught in time and fixed before it turned serious. So, if engineers working on fighters can make mistakes and have to redesign things, then why are engineers at a graphics card company expected to be mistake free?

Engineers are human, pointy haired bosses and management types aren't; they're aliens from another planet trying to subvert our technological progress while making money off the stock market.

If it's EVGA's program it's the difference in price. So he'd have paid $349 for his old card. Frankly, I'm amazed that EVGA can afford to do that when no one else does. Do they have a special price with Nvidia?

I wish somebody had a step up program for ATI. At any rate, the 4870 will be just under, at, or just above, the 3870x2 and the card that would be a step up from mine (the 4870x2) won't be out till the fall. So, any 3 month step up program would not have helped me.

As often as they refresh their cards, I don't see future performance as anything more than marketing. By the time the full features of the GTX280 are used, then it will most likely equal the high midrange card in that Nvidia generation.

It's all up to developers and they are dropping the ball. At any rate, though cards should be viable for 2 years, I'm skeptical of the whole "future proofing" concept.

It's like DX10.1 with ATI. It's not being used now, by the time it is, the current 3xxx series won't cut it and the 4xxx series will barely cut it. You'd need the hypothetical 5xxx series by then.

I paid $299 for my EVGA 9800GTX.

But from what I hear, the GTX 280 is not that big a leap.. Im kinda disappointed.

Don't worry, 9800GTX is a solid card and handles everything well

why does the gx2 beat the gtx 280 if one high end card should beat two weaker cards in SLI

Im not shelling out another $361 for that card. Maybe in 3 months the GTX280 will drop down to a price that'll make it a bit more reasonable.

But yeah, Im pretty happy with my 9800GTX, I just wish I could get Vista to recognize it as a 9800GTX and not my old 8600GTS =\ (Yes, Ive driver cleaned before installing the GTX and drivers, GPU-Z and Windows Hardware manager both see it as a 9800GTX, yet display properties and Rivatuner still show it as a 8600GTS)

Done it 3 times now.

Uninstall everything Nvidia-display related, run driver cleaner, shut down, reseated the card, booted into safe mode, run driver cleaner again, rebooted, installed the 9800GTX drivers, rebooted, and it still comes up as the 8600GTS in the display properties and Rivatuner, HOWEVER, Windows Device Manager and GPU-Z both display the card correctly.

The GTX 260 looks interesting, but I dont think it'd be much better than my 9800GTX.

I'm not talking a clean install drivers... I'm saying of windows. A reformat! That will fix the problem guaranteed!

This thread about my speculations about GT200 about a month ago about texture to SP ratio have also been mentioned in Techreport pod cast by Scott Wasson last Saturday and how it would be able to achieve better performance with GT200. http://techreport.com/articles.x/15103

They talk about GT200 at 0:36:35 of the show.

Excuse my previous post. I had thought RV770 had more filtering ability than previous post. I just assumed this because RV670 had same address and filtering rates and in synthetic test 4850 had higher FP16 blending filter rate than 260gtx before the final specs have been released.

Radeon HD 4870
12.0 pixel fillrate
30.0 bilinear fillrate
15.0 FP 16 Fillrate
115.2 GB/s
1.2 teraflop

This is correct specs but my original post isn't too far off from my speculations.

RV770 is just that much more efficient than GT200 considering it has less filtering rates but able to surpass GT200 far as FP16 blending filter rate goes and easily surpassing pixel fillrate of 260gtx with less ROP.