XFX GTX280 is out!

[Athlon64~SPARTA~]

The newest vid card the GTX280 and 260 has been released!

 

 

I want one! But my newest Rail Buggy@ 42 mpg project has ate up the vid card budget!

When I get it done I will buy a new vid card with the fuel saveings of about $60 a week for me.

Edited June 19, 2008 by Athlon64~SPARTA~

[Zathrus~SPARTA~]

 

Well you don't want one for a bit anyway. It will take them 2 or 3 months to get the drivers worked out. ;)

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

Thanks for the post, but I have the Awesome 8800 GTX OC and I don't need better

for another year or two. The fact is Nvidia made cards (8800 GTX) so powerful that

games don't push them to the max. My CPU and OS are the bottle necks.

 

 

What can the GTX280 and 260 play or run, that the 8800 can not ?

[Durka-Durka~SPARTA~]

Cool card Athlon. Can't wait till they come down in price so I can get one!

[usthomsen~SPARTA~]

Thanks for the post, but I have the Awesome 8800 GTX OC and I don't need better

for another year or two. The fact is Nvidia made cards (8800 GTX) so powerful that

games don't push them to the max. My CPU and OS are the bottle necks.

 

 

What can the GTX280 and 260 play or run, that the 8800 can not ?

 

 

Hey hey hey mister GRUMPY ;) if thats what the kids want then they want it. I am not gonna bother telling them different but i agree that the 8800GTX is so good that it far exceeds the needs for a gpu and people should look at the cpu, ram and os for perfomance before changing there gpu.

 

[custard~SPARTA~]

Viii is your quad core really the weak link in your rig not the GTX?

 

Nice card Athlon but what would be nice is a card as good as the 8 series but running considerably cooler, that would help us out heaps.

[Athlon64~SPARTA~]

Its supost to blow the doors off the 9800 gx2 But I don't have the time to runn down the sight and article or price for ya so feel free to do so. I think it makes the 8800 look like a 7600 in comparsion

Edited June 18, 2008 by Athlon64~SPARTA~

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

Yes seriously now,

 

The Quad 3.3Ghz 6800 Extreme is not the weak link in my system.

The CPU is on 30% load on one core when loading processes like PS2 and the likes.

 

I think that the flow of data from the Processes starting, load the puppies down

along with the 32bit Vista OS. Now the OS could be replaced with 64bit version

but I'm waiting for all you guys to have that headache first.

 

 

May be it's not my CPU but the BUS & DDR2, either way, you can actually see winrar

slowing down the unpack as process starts.

[Athlon64~SPARTA~]

ok found a review. It has twice the stream processiors the 8800 has, really shows its own in crysis, and leaves the 9800gx2 behind in most of the bench marks, but you decide. Seriously

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?opti...5&Itemid=72

Edited June 18, 2008 by Athlon64~SPARTA~

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

Thanks for all the info & review link Athlon,

 

Great reading, only 2 months after the 9800 xxx

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the link to the benchmark

 

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?opti...9&Itemid=72

 

 

Microsoft DirectX10 support

Unified Shader Model 4.0

OpenGL 2.1

 

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?opti...mp;limitstart=2

 

What happened to DX10.1 ??

 

 

I wouldn't like to get my SATA connector under them mothers ..

 

 

[MedicSN6]

GOOD GOD!!! Thats awesome! 3 graphix cards woohoo! Bring on the EVE!!!

[Athlon64~SPARTA~]

WOW! that thing will runn eve with all of its hands tied behind its back! Dx10 is still in there I heard the game makers are still trying to digest it. They make a right angle or 90 degree sata cable. But these new cards will runn all of the games in high deff provided you have a monitor that will have the frame rate in hideff.

Edited June 19, 2008 by Athlon64~SPARTA~

[Hoss_EBDA]

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-...le-review-test/

 

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-review-test/

 

http://www.guru3d.com/article/bfg-geforce-...edition-review/

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

The Nvidia G280 & 260 DOES NOT SUPPORT DX 10.1 only DX10

 

 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/nvidia-gtx-2...ew-30971-5.html

What about Direct3D 10.1?

 

After the campaign Nvidia has been carrying on for some time now about its uselessness, it?s not really a surprise to learn that the 200 GTX won?t support this version of the Microsoft API. This is no surprise, but still, it?s a disappointment. According to Nvidia, support for the API was considered initially, but the developers they queried said they felt it ?wasn?t important.? It?s true that Direct3D 10.1 doesn?t add anything revolutionary ? as we pointed out when the Radeon HD 38x0 came out, it?s mostly a matter of correcting gaps left in the Direct3D 10 specifications. Yet there are still some interesting new functions that could prove to be useful to the rendering engines, such as deferred shading ? which is more and more popular ? and algorithms for rendering transparent surfaces without sorting.

[MedicSN6]

Any price on this beast yet?

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

Very Expensive and not that good because drivers are fresh....

 

in the UK £350 which is around $700

 

you'll get it cheaper in the USA because you always do....

 

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct....s)%20-%20Retail

 

 

 

I see no reason to upgrade my 2006 8800 GTX till next year if that...

 

Yes I got my first 8800GTX in November 2006, it's now July 2008 and I'm looking for 2009 mid to late before upping the dog

 

[MedicSN6]

Do you see the price of the 8800 GTX dropping because of the new 280s and 260s?

 

[MUTILATER]

Yeah ..no DX 10.1 ... That's for the next model in another few months.

 

As for the GTX280 being king of the hill ... Errrr , try comparing it with respect to cost, This card is way over priced as you can get a 9800GTX for around $250 here now and even 2 x ATI 4870's are about $480 which will leave the 280 in the dust. ATI currently have the best value card currently.

 

If your game supports SLI ... this is the best Bang/Buck option with 8800- GT/GTS/GTX all coming in front of the 280 in the stakes for fill rate, However the 512 mem bus on the new cards should be a huge improvement.

 

Also rumors of a huge price drop at end of july on the 260/280 as Nvidia is overpriced and losing market share to the new ATI cards ... OCAU reports a 30% drop in price very soon.

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

I would add a little something,

 

Rather than SLI & 280 etc... after reading tests from Tomshardware and other places

I would suggest the 9800 GTX X2 is a mother- of- a card

 

One slot, one card but two maiin GPU's, in effect 2 cards in one. SLI the right way.

[Athlon64~SPARTA~]

It is the king of the hill! It beats the 9800gx2 and in Duel SLI. TRI SLI, Quad SLI nouthing will touch it. As useual you got to pay to play, The cheaper 2 card soluiton will last only for a short time, I wouldent suggest it due it won't last long enough to get you moneys worth. It boils down to being the best or second best. And what type of game you play. fps or sim. If all your doing is sim, don't spend the money. The host of new games due out soon, is finely going to start useing the abilitys of these new cards. Its comming at us fast!

 

Evga goes for $649 and it also will be in the $550 range.These are the first introductory models and then the ocs will be out increaseing the gap to the outher late comers. So just when ATI thinks they are getting close. The gap widens once again.

And AMDs new Phenoms are drawing closer to intells quad core, so the platform of choice may change soon to. New Boards are out as well. I do well with a duel core.

Edited July 7, 2008 by Athlon64~SPARTA~

[adder360~SPARTA~]

So just when ATI thinks they are getting close. The gap widens once again.

 

well thats not realy the case. as ATI crossfire works much better than SLI (wount bore you with why) but i remember that on the specs of the system with the highest 3D mark was using 2x 2900 ati cards in crossfire. im not shore if this is still the case.

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

If we look at the core processing of the 2xx cards there is nothing special

 

What is special about the 280 ?

 

All the tests on real games, the 280 does not give the boost over 9800 GX2

or come to the the discontinued 8800 GTX Ultra GX2 which are both cheaper.

I've not mentioned the Ati 4870 which is even cheaper.

 

 

I can't see the argument for the 280.

 

 

but the 4870 has 4 DVI outputs from a single card, supporting TH (Trippe head)

the Nvidia does not, nor does it support DX10.1

[MUTILATER]

Nvidia 280 GTX - $725 +

 

Nvidia 260 GTX - $460 +

 

Nvidia 9800 GTX2 - $575 (6% slower than 280)

 

Nvidia 9800 GTX - $265 (Sli or Crossfire two and kill the 280 with change to boot)

 

Nvidia 8800 GTS/GT - $215/$175 (Again Sli wins compared to the 260)

 

ATI 4870 - $260 (Crossfire two and you whip a 280)

 

ATI 4850 - $195 (Crossfire two and be 15% behind the 280)

 

Now lets put some reality into effect (Pay to play LOL) Crysis on a 9800GTX all settings on High (2nd from max) @ 1900 x 1600 equates to average frames of 38, same on 280 GTX has a massive increase in frames of .. 4, Boo Hoo !

So for your extra $150 you get $37 per frame. yet the ATI in crossfire will return you a saving of around $250 and be even better at the EXACT same job.

As for games coming out needing this new fandangled card is purely skeptical as Games as WE already know are 1-2 years on average behind hardware specs, Nvidia is reported to be showcasing new models later this year 99XX .. So why would you pay a premium for a 280 when you get no benefit currently in games.

 

OH and while I'm on a roll AMD becoming competitive with CPU's ... LMAO give me a break, The E8400 is still the top dog by a very long way for games, Yes it's a dual core ... Quad core is not required for ANY game as NONE can utilize four cores! ... Try Overclocking your AMD to past 4ghz ... Blaaa You Can't ! But the Intel Cpu's can hit 4.6Ghz.

The price difference between AMD and the Intel is negligible also, so that side of the argument doesn't wash either.

 

Currently the best value for money would be this setup - E8400, Gigabyte p35 DS3, 2gig PC800 ram (Nothing fancy 4-4-4-15), 9800 GTX ($570 AU) You will need a brand name 500w + PSU and if you wish to clock it a decent after market cooler, but in its stock form this will be the best value game setup. Good frames with almost every game on max at a min of 1600 x 1024 or on a 22" lcd barring Crysis the hardware hogget.

[Athlon64~SPARTA~]

It does have twice the stream processors than All the outher older cards have, So it won't load down as easy as the older cards, As the review says, 2 in SLi, all the rest are finished. It has the best frame rates in crysis. It will keep the frame rates when the older cards load down and slow up in HDMI Hideff DX10 games. I think that DX 10.1 was a adaption for the raidion cards to work on the DX 10 games. Ya there are cheaper cards out there, But the GTX280 is the inductiory card of the series and the over clocked models soon to follow. When the new games come out then we will see the difference. AMD is closeing the gap to intell and will probley pass them soon. Not yet but soon, After all they were the leader for a few years before. But if your running XP and DX9 on vga you will never see the difference.

So if your not going to run vista and do DX10 then stay with your old card and don't worrie about it.

I remember someone saying that DX10 was dead and no new games were comming out. OK. And AMD cpus do more caluations per clock cycle then the intell does Intell 4-5 per cycle AMD 7-9 per cycle. Better start looking at some different review sights huh?

 

Comparison

 

 

8800 GTX ----- GTX280 stock model

 

 

 

Cores 128 ------ 240 Increase of 87.5%

 

 

TEX 64t/clk ------ 80t/clk increase of 25%

 

 

ROP Blend 12p/clk ------ 32p/clk increase of 167%

 

 

Precision fp32-------- fp64 increase of 80%

 

 

GFLOPs 518------- 933 increase of %80

 

 

FB Bandwidth 86GB------ 142 GB increase of 65%

 

 

Texture Fill 37 GT/s------ 48 GT/s increase of 29.7%

 

 

ROP Blend 7 GBL/s-------- 19 GBL/s increase of 171%

 

 

PCI Express 6.4 GB------- 12.8 GB increase of 100%

 

1.4 billion transistors

And The GPU is bigger then the core 2 8400 duo cpu

 

 

 

 

 

 

Compaired to the x1900 specs

 

Radeon™ X1900 Graphics Technology - GPU Specifications

 

Features

 

* 384 million transistors on 90nm

* fabrication process

* Up to 48 pixel shader processors

* 8 vertex shader processors

* 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3

* memory interface

* Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

 

Ring Bus Memory Controller

 

* Up to 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads

* Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs

* Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test

* Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)

* Fast Z-Buffer Clear

* Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

 

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

 

* Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware

* Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations

* Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads

* Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control

* Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency

* 3Dc+ texture compression o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats

* High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats

* Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

 

Advanced Image Quality Features

 

* 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline

o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

* 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline

o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

* 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes

o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling

o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes

o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode

o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

* 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes

o Up to 128-tap texture filtering

o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options

* High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

 

Avivo™ Video and Display Platform

 

* High performance programmable video processor

o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding

o DXVA support

o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering

o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion

o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing

o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)

* Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time

* HDR tone mapping acceleration

o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output

* Flexible display support

o Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters

+ DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready*

o Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs

o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output

o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)

o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display

o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs

o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays

o Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output

o YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays

o Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays

o Fast, glitch-free mode switching

o VGA mode support on all outputs

o Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates

* Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

 

Theres your break, A big one!

Edited July 8, 2008 by Athlon64~SPARTA~

[adder360~SPARTA~]

your eye needs a minium of 20 frames in a sec to think that some thing is a moving image so add a few more to be on the safe side, if you have more than 30 frames in a sec you are wasting frames as you cant comprehend them.