This has more of a long term solution than the 7800 512 GTX did. Plus they are only competing with themselves on this, not trying to rain on the parade of a new GPU from a competitor like the 512 obviously was.
I'd love it if the G80 showed up by the end of the summer, but I dont think it will now this card is in the mix.
I'd love it if the G80 showed up by the end of the summer, but I dont think it will now this card is in the mix.
- Jul 27, 2002
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What are you talking about?
F.E.A.R. 1024x768 Max Everything (Including Soft Shadow)
F.E.A.R. 1600x1200 Max Everything (Including Soft Shadow)
I like Nvidia's advertising strategy, saying that it has 1 Gb of memory when it really doesn't. SLI does not combine the memory, each GPU still only has 512 Mb to work with.
IIRC this card is an exception. It really DOES have 1GB ram since it doesnt' use SLI for the link.
Originally posted by: lopri
What are you talking about?
F.E.A.R. 1024x768 Max Everything (Including Soft Shadow)
F.E.A.R. 1600x1200 Max Everything (Including Soft Shadow)
WHAT?! I got 60 fps @ 1024 by 768 and I was happy about that, is this for real?
- Jul 27, 2002
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SLI = Scalable Link Interface = PCI Express
PCI Express circuit doesn't necessarily have to exist on motherboard only. In fact, AT's review testify that the original 7900GX2 had even more PCI-E lanes than SLI motherboards. So yes, the frame buffer per GPU remains 512MB. It doesn't really matter, however, since today's games don't need that much framebuffer, and even if they did, two GPUs with half the framebuffer will render faster than a GPU with double the framebuffer anyway. (7900GT SLI is faster than a single 7900GTX)
But what worries me is that this launch could be seen as a slap on ATI's face. You know, the PCI Express has been inherently scalable. So as we observe today, you don't necessarily need an SLI chipset to run dual-GPU solution. Had ATI conceived something like this when NV was storming the market with an SLI, it'd have been a fantastic counter. People could have bought ATI's dual-GPU solution and just stick it on PCI-E X16 slot on NForce board. Instead, ATI's been struggling to get (and fix) their own chipset to date. See, now we'll see this new pseudo-SLI cards from NV being slapped on Intel/ATI's whatever chipset and still beat their GPUs. ATI seriously needs their headquarter replacement. They have such brilliant engineers and hardware, but thanks to their moronic management/marketing team, it's always NV's decision that gets approved by critics/market.
PCI Express circuit doesn't necessarily have to exist on motherboard only. In fact, AT's review testify that the original 7900GX2 had even more PCI-E lanes than SLI motherboards. So yes, the frame buffer per GPU remains 512MB. It doesn't really matter, however, since today's games don't need that much framebuffer, and even if they did, two GPUs with half the framebuffer will render faster than a GPU with double the framebuffer anyway. (7900GT SLI is faster than a single 7900GTX)
But what worries me is that this launch could be seen as a slap on ATI's face. You know, the PCI Express has been inherently scalable. So as we observe today, you don't necessarily need an SLI chipset to run dual-GPU solution. Had ATI conceived something like this when NV was storming the market with an SLI, it'd have been a fantastic counter. People could have bought ATI's dual-GPU solution and just stick it on PCI-E X16 slot on NForce board. Instead, ATI's been struggling to get (and fix) their own chipset to date. See, now we'll see this new pseudo-SLI cards from NV being slapped on Intel/ATI's whatever chipset and still beat their GPUs. ATI seriously needs their headquarter replacement. They have such brilliant engineers and hardware, but thanks to their moronic management/marketing team, it's always NV's decision that gets approved by critics/market.
Now that this is known to work on non-Nvidia SLI boards ... this is making me look at the Core 2 Duo as a real contender for my $$. At the very least I'll be holding off plans to build my Dual-Core Gaming rig for another 2 months.
2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo
SFF or mATX
7950GX2
... could be one powerfuly compact box.
2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo
SFF or mATX
7950GX2
... could be one powerfuly compact box.
- Jul 27, 2002
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Originally posted by: Smartazz
Originally posted by: lopri
What are you talking about?
F.E.A.R. 1024x768 Max Everything (Including Soft Shadow)
F.E.A.R. 1600x1200 Max Everything (Including Soft Shadow)
WHAT?! I got 60 fps @ 1024 by 768 and I was happy about that, is this for real?
Yah.. it's real. I've borrowed a 3GHz dual-core Opteron (thanks, Neal) just to see how high a score I could get.
And OC the hell out of my GTXs (720/920 SLI) Also tried to mimic the LinkBoost I had my NB-to-CPU HTT @1200 (4x300), NB-to-SB HTT @ 1250 (4x250) and PCI-E @120MHz. I had to clear CMOS after the bench. (lol)
Cookie Monster
Diamond Member
- May 7, 2005
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It looks great but I have two questions
1. Hows the noise? It has two very small (fast spinning) fans and logic dictates that can't be good
2. How will availability be? Will it be available in large numbers or will it be like the 7800GTX 512MB?
1. Hows the noise? It has two very small (fast spinning) fans and logic dictates that can't be good
2. How will availability be? Will it be available in large numbers or will it be like the 7800GTX 512MB?
1. its quieter than 1900xt, but not as quiet as 7900gtx..(from techreport)
2. so far it looks like its available... depends on demand it may end up be another 7800gtx 512mb..
- Jul 27, 2002
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1. It should certainly be louder than 7900GTX. The noise will of course depend on the load, and at prolonged load, I'm guessing it'd be a tad louder than 1900XT? (pure guess)
2. I'd say there will be plentiful of them. Some people think it's a similar launch to 7800GTX 512, but to me this is a complete opposite situation. 7800GTX 512s were basically cherry-picked regular 7800GTX. But this card has actually "down-clocked" chips. Considering the rapid price drop of 7900 series, I can't help but assume the G71's yield is pretty good. This time around the memory supply seems abundant also, and on top of that NV downclocked the memory, too. The PCI-E inter-connectors and PCBs shouldn't be too hard to make. Mature drivers support, on the other hand, is a different matter, however.
2. I'd say there will be plentiful of them. Some people think it's a similar launch to 7800GTX 512, but to me this is a complete opposite situation. 7800GTX 512s were basically cherry-picked regular 7800GTX. But this card has actually "down-clocked" chips. Considering the rapid price drop of 7900 series, I can't help but assume the G71's yield is pretty good. This time around the memory supply seems abundant also, and on top of that NV downclocked the memory, too. The PCI-E inter-connectors and PCBs shouldn't be too hard to make.
Mature drivers support, on the other hand, is a different matter, however.1. SLI but no Crossfire benches on the Anandtech review? Hmmm, seems like someone's getting some dough from this situation.
2. Again in the Anandtech review, why at the end did they compare the 7950GX2 to an X1900XT? They're nowhere near the same price.
2. Again in the Anandtech review, why at the end did they compare the 7950GX2 to an X1900XT? They're nowhere near the same price.
because that is the card eveyone is waiting for NV to beat. When did it come out and NV is still trying to beat it. NV needs to learn that they can't just make more horsepower, they need to do something different with that power. At the end of the day this just does the same thing my 7800gt that I bought nine months ago does....only faster. The ATI x1900xt however has better AF IMO and can do HDR+AA plus is very good with Oblivion. So I am very interested to see what NV can do against a x1900xt price aside.
At the end of the day people always take performance over the pretty gimicks. That 7950X2 getting about 50% more frames in Oblvion at 1600X1200 than a X1900XTX will sway many people to pay 100 bucks more for it.
Over the next few months the price will drop and push the X1900XTX further down.
You got a source for that? I looked at 5 of the reviews on the first page and none of them benched with oblivion. (Where ATI has a firm lead from all i've heard, odd that it's not being used to bench with :disgust: )
If we say that the 7950X2 performs around as well as 7900GT SLI (give or take a bit) then looking at this test http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2746&p=4 i can't see how on earth that sort of improvement is happening since the X1900XTX leads by 8%. A slight win to the 7950X2 perhaps, but 50% !?
Good thing about 7950GX2 is that is it HDCP compliant..
"Multimedia users will be glad to hear that all GeForce 7950 GX2 cards are HDCP-compliant. For the first time NVIDIA?s requiring all their board partners to include the crypto-ROM chip that carries the HDCP key that?s required for encoding protected high-definition content."
"Multimedia users will be glad to hear that all GeForce 7950 GX2 cards are HDCP-compliant. For the first time NVIDIA?s requiring all their board partners to include the crypto-ROM chip that carries the HDCP key that?s required for encoding protected high-definition content."
Read the TechReport article...this is just like SLI...ie. you only get a 512mb frame buffer. A bit misleading in the advertising I think, but most people probably wouldn't care.
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