Wasn't the Geforce FX intended to be an experiment or a stop-gap?

[Anarchist420]

I was thinking so, because I thought that's what I heard. Why was it designed to be an experiment?

I was wondering if GKnonGK110 was intended to be as much of an experiment as the GeForce FX was. I actually thought the Geforce FX wasn't any worse than the competition at the time, but maybe that's because I thought the 9700 pro (and especially it's drivers) when I had it (in 2002) really sucked. I'd actually buy a 7970 if AMD had fixed their depth calculations to my complete and total satisfaction and if it was only a setting I inadvertantly enabled when using the last AMD GPUs I owned that made it so that some colors were over-gamma'd/washed out (others were more artificially saturated than nv's colors). Unfortunately, nothing out now is that good (IMO).

 

[ShintaiDK]

GK110 is mainly a GPGPU part. I wouldnt be surprised if there was already 1000s of them running around the world in HPC centers.

nVidia might have picked its GTX690 as a cheaper and better solution than a GK110 for average Joe until the refresh.

GK110 aint an experiment. Just because you dont have it now.

 

[SPBHM]

FX wasn't bad for DX8, but it was really slow for typical DX9...
I don't see any similarities,

GK110 is already being sold as Tesla or something,

 

[aaksheytalwar]

And 9700pro was one of the best in history and the best ati ever had.

 

[JM Popaleetus]

And 9700pro was one of the best in history and the best ati ever had.

The entire R300 and R420 lineup was rock solid.

Otherwise, the GeForce 4 and 6 series were preferred. The 5 (FX) was the nVidia's major flop.

 

[RussianSensation]

GK110 in theory is even better than GK104. It takes everything that's great about Fermi/Kepler (FP16 textures, tessellation) and adds even more functional units, dynamic scheduler, wider memory bus, etc. That makes it even better for games and HPC computing.

OTOH, GeForce FX was the worst NV series ever made imo. It really was terrible for almost everything besides OpenGL shooters and Flight sims, was terrible for MSAA/SSAA performance, resorted to tri-linear texture filtering optimization to get extra performance at the expense of image quality, and when DX9 games arrived it was slower than a 9600Pro. Kepler GK110 is nothing like GeForce FX.

This was an all-time low for NV. Their Performance in NV Control Panel resulted in texture filtering artifacts in OpenGL games, they half-baked Anisotropic filtering where FX 5900 Ultra used a different anisotropic filtering mode for different textures on the screen, so that MIP-level of the two textures did not coincide in games resulting in nasty texture mip-level transitions.

If you wanted to use the Quality image setting for FX5000 series, you suffered a massive performance hit with AF:

Then you get to AA image quality where FX5000 series was again much worse. NV's 8xMSAA < 4x MSAA for 9800Pro at that time.

ATI 9800Pro - 4x AA

vs.

FX5900 U - 4xAA

8xAA

Then you get to MSAA performance hit on FX5900 series. Oh boy!

DX9 games? Ya, forget about it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1144/8

FX5000 series was the worst of all worlds - worse mip-map texture transitions, worse AA image quality, worse performance with AA and AF and couldn't play DX9 games at good frame-rates. You needed to use 8xMSAA on the 5900 series and still got worse AA image quality than 9800 got with 4x.

Kepler is actually a very good product, with the main weakness being compute, although that's probably largely addressed in GK110 variant. We'll have to see if NV actually drops GK110 7 Billion part into consumer space next year. Let's hope so.

 

[Red Hawk]

Yeah, the big thing about Geforce 5000 series wasn't so much that it was an experiment. Fermi was pretty big experiment and it had good results. Geforce 5000 was a failed experiment, a disaster as Russian showed. GK110 is probably not going to be as much of an experiment as Fermi was.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

A 6600gt was a next gen mid range part and beat a 5950 ultra.

There were too many refreshes that time due to crappy gpus
5800 ultra
5900 ultra
5950 ultra

Ati just had a 9800 xt king which beat all of them.

 

[Blitzvogel]

The entire R300 and R420 lineup was rock solid.

Otherwise, the GeForce 4 and 6 series were preferred. The 5 (FX) was the nVidia's major flop.

The x800 was pretty sweet. 16 pixel shader pipelines mother ******! I really wish I had been a PC gamer before this gen.

 

[Red Hawk]

No, you really don't. Graphics may have been progressing faster, but you had to pay for that performance. Often you didn't just buy a $400 graphics card to play games with all the fancy effects, like you do now; you would buy them just to be able to play the games at all. If this graphics generation has one upside it's that it is quite easy on the wallet.

 

[Arkaign]

Ummmm.

The FX5800 was gimped by crappy release drivers and a narrow memory bus.

By the time the FX5900 came out, it really was fairly decent all things considered. Although I thought it was still overpriced.

This article paints a much different picture than the doom and gloom scenario :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1104

I went with an unlocked+overclock 9500 > 9700 Pro, it was a tremendous value. But the FX5900/5950 are not as bad as they're made out to be.