What’s coming from Nvidia and ATI?
Nathan Taylor gives the lowdown on Nvidia's fabled GeForce GTX 200 Series, and why it'll blow existing cards out of the water.
As I mentioned in my last column, the talk of the town at Taiwan’s Computex – a gearhead’s show if there ever was one – was not on performance parts. A glut of new low-cost devices heavily modelled on the Asus Eee PC dominated the show.
These devices typically have just enough power to get the job done. You can surf the Internet and write Word documents. If you want to play games, well, that’s what consoles are for.
While Intel and the computer manufacturers seem to be taking that message to heart, the apparently dwindling interest in high-performance consumer computing has not stopped AMD and Nvidia from pumping out their next generation cards in the meantime. And these new cards are, from all reports, monsters. Given the current climate, I really don’t think they’ll be huge sellers (especially if the price rumours are correct), but their specs can make a gaming fanboy drool in his teacup.
First, the GeForce GTX 200 series, in particular the GTX 280, has been spotted in the wild more than a week before Nvidia’s official June 17 announcement. The GTX 200 series is the successor to the GeForce 9 series.
The GTX 280 has about 60% more transistors than the just-released GeForce 9800 and a pixel fill-rate that’s nearly double its predecessor. The reference card that has been doing the rounds has two SLI connectors so you can theoretically have three GTX 280 cards running in tandem.
The card also sucks down an incredible 236 watts at maximum load, and is rumoured to cost more than $1000 at retail. Youch. Even if you could find a motherboard with three PCIe x16 ports, you’d have trouble finding a power supply capable of driving three cards as well as everything else on the PC.
AMD, of course, has its own plans. The Radeon 4850 and 4870, which AMD hopes can match the GTX 280 head to head, are due to be released at the end of June. We haven’t seen reference boards or pre-release benchmark results for those chips, but their raw specs don’t quite match up to those of the GTX 280 series. The raw bandwidth and fill rates of the 4870 are around 12-13% behind those of the GTX 280, for example.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t match up in the real world, however – 3D performance is based on much more than bandwidth and clock speed. We’ll just have to wait until we can see release product before we know.
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