The GeForce 9900gtx and 9900gx2

[John Aiton]

GT200 to become 9900GTX and 9900GX2, launch date set to July - Expreview.com

current rumours are that the g200 core has been postponed and renamed,
the new g200 will just be a 55nm g92

yet more die shrunk old tech parts from nvidia

[Cheesus]

Still good news though. Hopefully they'll be able to crank out quite a bit more. And will probably force AMD into releasing something to compete with it, which for us end consumers is great news.

[cottonvibes]

hopefully the 9900's would be more impressive than the 9800's which weren't so great.

any idea on the specs?
perhaps they'll be hitting 0.9~1Ghz clocks?
but i doubt it..

[John Aiton]

Originally Posted by cottonvibes

hopefully the 9900's would be more impressive than the 9800's which weren't so great.

any idea on the specs?
perhaps they'll be hitting 0.9~1Ghz clocks?
but i doubt it..

the 9900s will be very very fast, no doubt
...but

this is still based on the same tech that's been used for years ¬¬

roll on ATI 4 series, ati and nvidia are squeezing everything they can out of current tech to have more time to improve the real next gen

then we'll finally see a card that beats the 8800ultra by more than a little.
8800ultra is damn old and still compares to the very latest cards

[Thanakil]

Impressive names.
Impressive prices.
Semi-impressive performances.

(they make you go "hmmm, niiiice" but not "well, that was definitely WORTH EVERY FRIKIN PENNY OF THOSE 1500 DOLLARS OH YEAH".)

Hopefully going from 9800 to 9900 will mean more than just a small increase, and will actually get more power coming than what they're doing right now.

[cottonvibes]

john,
what you said contradicts itself.

you first say they'll be very fast, but then you imply that they won't be much faster than the 8800 ultras

i won't be impressed till a card is about 75% more powerful than the 8800Ultras.
the 9800 GX2s look like they're about 10~30% more powerful, and sometimes even less powerful than the Ultras. (the 9800s suck my balls at AA)

[John Aiton]

Originally Posted by cottonvibes

john,
what you said contradicts itself.

you first say they'll be very fast, but then you imply that they won't be much faster than the 8800 ultras

i won't be impressed till a card is about 75% more powerful than the 8800Ultras.
the 9800 GX2s look like they're about 10~30% more powerful, and sometimes even less powerful than the Ultras. (the 9800s suck my balls at AA)

i said comparable with ultras, in escence the 55nm g92 core is a highly tweaked die shrunk ultra with a handicapped memory bus

by this long a time after the ultras release they should be nearly obsolete in speed

[dimentionalrift]

ATI and its partners have already released several operational cards like the Radeon 2900xtx that use, not wisely, GDDR 4 memory architecture while Nvidia doesn't even have a prototype (atleast publicly). You can find in several place like in wikipedia rumours and pieces of real information that other than the fact that the 99-- series will be using the GT200 core (55nm BTW), they will also finally use GDDR 4 memory, but they will use it the right way. By my accounts GDDR 4 is about 50% more powerful than GDDR 3, which is the most advanced brand of memory Nvidia has to offer today. So, Nvidia really needs the 99-- series. There are also rumors for a 9900gx2 which might consist of two massively powerful cards with a possible 2GB GDDR4 memory (1GB per GPU) and maybe even an experimental 1024bit interface (512bit per GPU)...who knows.

P.S

The 9800gx2 is more than 30% more powerful than the 8800ULTRA, just check out the films on youtube and compare the performance on high quality and 1900x1200 res. Don't be so disrespectful of it, especially since it costs about 85$ less than an ultra.

[John Aiton]

Originally Posted by dimentionalrift

ATI and its partners have already released several operational cards like the Radeon 2900xtx that use, not wisely, GDDR 4 memory architecture while Nvidia doesn't even have a prototype (atleast publicly). You can find in several place like in wikipedia rumours and pieces of real information that other than the fact that the 99-- series will be using the GT200 core (55nm BTW), they will also finally use GDDR 4 memory, but they will use it the right way. By my accounts GDDR 4 is about 50% more powerful than GDDR 3, which is the most advanced brand of memory Nvidia has to offer today. So, Nvidia really needs the 99-- series. There are also rumors for a 9900gx2 which might consist of two massively powerful cards with a possible 2GB GDDR4 memory (1GB per GPU) and maybe even an experimental 1024bit interface (512bit per GPU)...who knows.

P.S

The 9800gx2 is more than 30% more powerful than the 8800ULTRA, just check out the films on youtube and compare the performance on high quality and 1900x1200 res. Don't be so disrespectful of it, especially since it costs about 85$ less than an ultra.

well, I knew gt200 is 55nm (duh)
I was saying that may be the only difference in cores between g92 and g200

the 9800gx2 is %30 faster than an ultra, woop de doo
the ultra is what? around 17 months old and it takes a hackjob dual card that's supposedly two successors to the 8800gtx in one to beat it by a reasonable amount

what's the real point of ddr4 when the memory bus is inferior to the last gen cards, 256....that's a big downstep
sure it will increase performance, but upping the bus width would do much more


now for the real resons why nvidia sucks this round,
they got angry because of ATI naming a die shrink by a new series name
(the 2900-3870 move) ...even though the 3870 brought dx10.1 support

now nvidia to spite ATI's economical move decide to release the g92 under the 8800 name instead of it's original destination as the 9800
to further spite ati, they witheld dx10.1

btw, these rumours are taken from internal leaked nvidia e-mails (pulled from the inq, yeh inq sucks)

if nvidia went the original path of debuting g92 on the 9800 with dx10.1 then maybe it would have had some impact
even though the numbers are still a pitiful increase over the last gen

I hope you're right about the 9900
untill then my moneyrolls stay in my sockdrawer

[Thanakil]

30% stronger... So instead of having 20fps in a game you get 26fps.
Well, thanks got we got a new generation card of 2 cards together to do that .

We simply expect more than this kind of thing when you use a big-ass name like "9800GX2" and for what is supposed to be a new powerful card.

[fivefeet8]

The 9800gx2 is actually quite a bit more powerful than the 8800ultra with the right settings. When CPU limitations are taken away, the card really starts to separate itself from other cards.

Rage3D.com : 9800 GX2 Performance Preview and HDTV Gaming [ Performance Testing ]

[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by fivefeet8

The 9800gx2 is actually quite a bit more powerful than the 8800ultra with the right settings. When CPU limitations are taken away, the card really starts to separate itself from other cards.

Rage3D.com : 9800 GX2 Performance Preview and HDTV Gaming [ Performance Testing ]

What kind of CPU speed won't limit the card, by the way? :P I hope my CPU won't limit it?

[fivefeet8]

Originally Posted by runawayprisoner

What kind of CPU speed won't limit the card, by the way? :P I hope my CPU won't limit it?

You can always use the settings that ChrisRay used. That'll take the limitations off your CPU a bit.

[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by fivefeet8

You can always use the settings that ChrisRay used. That'll take the limitations off your CPU a bit.

Would you mind pointing me to them?

[3x3cUt0r]

He means High resolution and FSAA.

[makotech222]

i suspect they might be using gddr5. gddr4 runs hotter and i hear it isnt really all that much better. gddr5 is suppose to be much better. i read a while back in jan that gddr5 was being sent to nvidia and ati for testing.

[dimentionalrift]

There is a problem when trying to find significant differences between the 8800Ultra and the 9800gx2 due to several simple factors:
1) When the CPU isn't very powerful (Intel Core2Duo, AMD athlon 64 X2,...), a lot of the raw potential of the GPU is stripped away inorder to balance the shortage in CPU power.
2) Due to the much larger width of the 9800gx2, you can only fit up to 2 cards on a single motherboard, while the 8800Ultras lighter and slightly denser design allows up to 3 GPUs, which equals a lot more potential (2 heads are good, but 3 are even better).
3) The GPU strength/GPU energy usage ratio of the 9800gx2 is lower than that of the 8800Ultra.

HOWEVER, once you put a strong enough CPU (for example the Intel Core2Quad Extreme QX9775-4.0GHz), the card can unleash its inner strength. With such a CPU and about 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM memory, 2 9800gx2 will outperform even a triple 8800Ultra combination in games like Crysis and UT3 if you put all the settings to maximum and a res of 1280x1024 or maybe even as far as 1900x1200.

A more imporatnt note is the fact that the 9800 cards are only a transition stage for Nvidia, just enough juice to keep the company's stocks running until they release the 9900 cards later this year. Expext monstrous specs from them...I would.

[cottonvibes]

dimentionalrift,
1) A graphics card can't do a CPU's job. thus what you're saying in your first point dosn't make sense.
2) The 9800gx2 in SLI would be 4cores VS the 3 Ultras in sli only being 3 cores. Plus when the multi-cores are built-in the card, the performance is better. Hence the 2 GTX's in SLI are worse than one 9800 with its 2 cores.
3) the core of the 9800 is based of the g92 GTS, so perhaps one might be weaker than the Ultra, but it uses two together in 1 card. So it ends up being stronger.

the main problem with the 9800GX2 that you never even mentioned, is that it only has 512 mb per each core. So thats why when it comes to AA, it ends up slowing down alot more than the the Ultra does. Because the Ultra has 768mb for its 1 core, and AA takes up more memory.


and if CPU really is bringing this card's performance down, then all you need to do is set the resolution really high in order to focus on graphics cards' performance.
or you can alternatively set the physics in the game to low, and the particles to low.

[Phil]

A single card will be better then two cards (and that goes for X2 cards as well.

but the 9800gx2 isnt all that bad..

[John Aiton]

Originally Posted by dimentionalrift

There is a problem when trying to find significant differences between the 8800Ultra and the 9800gx2 due to several simple factors:
1) When the CPU isn't very powerful (Intel Core2Duo, AMD athlon 64 X2,...), a lot of the raw potential of the GPU is stripped away inorder to balance the shortage in CPU power.
2) Due to the much larger width of the 9800gx2, you can only fit up to 2 cards on a single motherboard, while the 8800Ultras lighter and slightly denser design allows up to 3 GPUs, which equals a lot more potential (2 heads are good, but 3 are even better).
3) The GPU strength/GPU energy usage ratio of the 9800gx2 is lower than that of the 8800Ultra.

HOWEVER, once you put a strong enough CPU (for example the Intel Core2Quad Extreme QX9775-4.0GHz), the card can unleash its inner strength. With such a CPU and about 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM memory, 2 9800gx2 will outperform even a triple 8800Ultra combination in games like Crysis and UT3 if you put all the settings to maximum and a res of 1280x1024 or maybe even as far as 1900x1200.

A more imporatnt note is the fact that the 9800 cards are only a transition stage for Nvidia, just enough juice to keep the company's stocks running until they release the 9900 cards later this year. Expext monstrous specs from them...I would.

1. Do you mean a bottleneck through the cpu?

ain't gonna happen outside crysis or rts games for now,
and nearly everyone xtreem enough to get a gx2 will have a good cpu or one overclocked to hell

2. they're the same size, pic for proof - http://i32.tinypic.com/w9jyw6.jpg

3. not by much though, both are power hungry to hell

"9800gx2 will outperform even a triple 8800Ultra combination in games like Crysis and UT3 if you put all the settings to maximum and a res of 1280x1024 or maybe even as far as 1900x1200."

well they damn well should, 4 9800gtx vs 3 ultras.
There shouldn't even be a contest between the two, but still they're comparible :ouch:

what I expect from the 9900 - 55nm process, tweaked shaders. Nothing more