**Offcial FX thread** Hardocp, Toms Hardware , ANANDTECHS is up with MIN FPS, and Now Hexus.net added

[FreshPrince]

Originally posted by: Adul

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
I have a feeling nVidia will once again pull off their trick of releasing "special" detonator drivers when ATI releases their R350. This new driver will make the card run much faster and probably equal to ATI's counterpart. It'll also miraculously lower the core temp somehow.

nVidia, I smell wut ur cooking

and i SMELl what your cooking :Q

share it!

yes, oxtail in dicon radish soup

 

[Hulk]

ATI did a great job with the 9700 and nVidia did and okay job with the FX.

The end result is that ATI is going to get some breathing room while nVidia stays under the gun.

Breathing room is quite a luxury in this business and falling behind begets more falling behind.

I hope nVidia can keep things competitive or ATI will run the biz, which as we all know would be bad.

 

[DX2Player]

If the sound and heat levels were not as high as they are I would have more faith in drivers bailing the FX card out. But even if its performance does increase 10-15% I still dont want to hear a cooling system putting out 77dBAs while the heatsink on the back of the card gets to 131F 1 inch away from my CPU.

 

[NinjaGnome]

Im thinking im gonna wait for the retail product to come out before i make any sure decisions on this card yet. So far its not looking good for the Fx and it just might stay that way.

 

[UNCjigga]

So clock for clock, who's faster? Like, have any benchmarks been done with the 9700 Pro and 5800/Ultra running at the exact same core and mem speeds?

 

[Nemesis77]

Originally posted by: uncJIGGA
So clock for clock, who's faster? Like, have any benchmarks been done with the 9700 Pro and 5800/Ultra running at the exact same core and mem speeds?

Clock for clock, 9700 wipes the floor with the FX! I mean, they are more or less equal right now (with 9700 winning IMO). But the FX has close to 200Mhz mor than 9700 does!

 

[BlvdKing]

People dog the FX but until ATI fixes their Linux drivers my next card will still be from NVidia.

That is my only complaint of the ATI card, and it's enough to make me not want one.

 

[Whitedog]

Maybe because FX has a much higher clock speed.... ATI will start labeling their cards 9700+ Pro, like AMD had to do.

LOL

 

[Whitedog]

Honestly -- I think it's Shameful NVidia stooped to OVER-CLOCKING the FX just so they could label themselves "King"

tisk tisk...

I'm sure if ATI put a WINDTUNNEL cooling system on the 9700 they could clock it at maybe 375+MHz and it would beat FX...

I say give the two cards IDENTICAL Cooling systems, run them as fast as they can with THAT cooling... then see which one wins.

 

[NFS4]

Originally posted by: Whitedog
Maybe because FX has a much higher clock speed.... ATI will start labeling their cards 9700+ Pro, like AMD had to do.

LOL

ROTF

 

[Whitedog]

Hey Ace, did you say you bought an FX card? (or Ordered one)

 

[Adul]

i'd be interested in seeing the two cards set at even core speeds and even bandwidth numbers.


so both cores at say 300 mhz and both at 16 GB of bandwidth

who would win?

 

[Whitedog]

I wouldn't say "even core speeds", we know what the P4 did at even core speeds with Piii or Athlons even... Not what they were designed for... they were designed to run at higher clock rates...

Same thing here, but I am saying put equivilant cooling on them both, and run them at the "same temperature" and see what happens...

Yea, if you cool a P4 with liquid nitrogen, you can run it at 4+ GHz... but that's not being practical now is it... same thing with FX's gawdy cooling system.

 

[PrinceXizor]

bump!

lol!

Like this thread needs a bump. I already posted it in the article thread, but its worth repeating...I think AT did an excellent job with their review.

 

[UNCjigga]

Originally posted by: Adul
i'd be interested in seeing the two cards set at even core speeds and even bandwidth numbers.


so both cores at say 300 mhz and both at 16 GB of bandwidth

who would win?

Bandwidth isn't that much of an issue here...16 vs 19.6 or something like that. One has DDR-II memory while the other has the 256bit bus. Core and mem speeds set equal would be nice, or rigging up a 9700 Pro with the FX's cooling system like Whitedog suggested would be cool (it'd be interesting to see if the latest shipping cores can be clocked up to 500MHz with that setup!)

Its kinda weird that the FX puts out so much heat when its already on a 0.13mu process. I guess NV40 will need a 0.08 process minimum! I wonder how R350 will compare on 0.13mu...my bet is it can be clocked higher! Who will ATI be using...do they need to rely on TSMC for 0.13 or do they have their own internal setup?

Bottom-line, GeForce FX was designed with the future (DirectX 9+, Doom3) in mind, and will probably offer greater longevity than the 9700 Pro. That means 9500/9700 owners are pretty much locked into an ATI product cycle...entirely skipping the 1st-gen FX boards and ready for an upgrade closer to Doom3's release.

 

[UNCjigga]

Originally posted by: PrinceXizor
bump!

lol!

Like this thread needs a bump. I already posted it in the article thread, but its worth repeating...I think AT did an excellent job with their review.

I especially like how they handled image-quality in this review (mouseovers are nice!) and how they did as much of an apples-to-apples FSAA/aniso comparison as possible!

 

[NOX]

Originally posted by: Whitedog
Maybe because FX has a much higher clock speed.... ATI will start labeling their cards 9700+ Pro, like AMD had to do.

LOL

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: Adul
i'd be interested in seeing the two cards set at even core speeds and even bandwidth numbers.


so both cores at say 300 mhz and both at 16 GB of bandwidth

who would win?

i thought anand overclocked the ram a bit and got no performance increase.

With a higher core clock, the only explanation for the GeForce FX falling behind here would be that the Radeon 9700's raw memory bandwidth advantage helps it out. We debunked this theory by increasing the FX's memory bandwidth by 10% (read: overclocked it to 1100MHz memory) and noted no more than a 0.2% increase in performance, so this test was clearly not saturating the memory bus of the GeForce FX.

so i'm guessing the FX would get killed by a 9700 with only 16GB of bandwidth and the FX at 300MHz. heck, you can look at the tests here, in a lot of the high image quality ones the regular 9700 wins. doesn't it have less bandwidth than the FX?

 

[BD231]

I want one of those FX coolers for my 9700Pro :Q, think of the OC possibilities.

 

[NFS4]

Interesting...

 

[DX2Player]

Originally posted by: NFS4
Interesting...

LOL WTF!!

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: NFS4
Interesting...

 

[ShowdOWN]

even tho i have bought nvidia every year since the geforce line has come about, i think i will pass on this one.
the price to performance and features do no entice me at all.

 

[Bovinicus]

But it doesn't appear feasible to increase the memory clock. Right now it maxes out at 500/1000Mhz. Anand tried to overclock it to 1100 effective but no go. And keep in mind the size of the heatsink just to get it at the speed it is at now. There is no headroom for overclocking, not just yet.

I agree; what I meant was that NVIDIA should have made the GFFX with a 256-bit data path, and made the card compatible with DDRII. This way they could use standard DDR now, and when DDRII becomes more cost effective transition over. This is exactly what ATi has done, and as one can see, it is paying off.

As a side note, they could always take up a 3rd PCI slot with a dustbuster for the memory too. =)

 

[Bovinicus]

Bottom-line, GeForce FX was designed with the future (DirectX 9+, Doom3) in mind, and will probably offer greater longevity than the 9700 Pro. That means 9500/9700 owners are pretty much locked into an ATI product cycle...entirely skipping the 1st-gen FX boards and ready for an upgrade closer to Doom3's release.

ATi still goes slightly beyond the DX9 spec with their specifications. Unless you plan on keeping your video card for 3 years (Which I doubt if you are buying the GFFX) then ATi's spec will do fine. I don't think Doom3 is going to perform that much better with the GFFX. The only exception I can think of is maybe with some complex lighting schemes. The GFFX seems to be good at that. Still, you are correct that it will have more of an edge with future games, but I just don't think that edge is worth the extra cost.