NVIDIA NV40 GeForce 6800 Ultra Review

Gamma corrected AA?

 

Programmer-side features

 

Nv40

congrats to the the person who found and posted the Quotes from D. he siad it well about Nv40. Anywas the Nv40 isa fast beefy card but i beleave and want to that ATIs R420 will out shine it in speed and quality/ ATI is planning a major release for catlyst drivers in 1.8 months or so with i guess new look and many new exposed features of ther DX9 cards. so on thatnote: if i dont see ya tommorow / good evening/ good day/ and good night/ <<<< Jime carry The Trueman Show

 

Hrmph. "Fun with post-filtering" again? I know it isn't inherently evil, but I've never trusted it as it seems open to abuse.

 

well

The main limit of the 6800 isnt its pipelines its the memory and ati will face the exact same problem. By going to a 16 pipe system nvidia simply lets more pipes chew on more pixels at the same time it does NOT however ensure all those piples get fed every cycle.

This isnt a problem for nvidia as they are touting the complex effects possiblities more so then raw pixel pushing power.

Ati on the other hand sounds like they are trying to push far more pixels and they wont have any more bandwidth to drive that engine in the first place.

 

I think he's saying their raw fillrate (e.g. non-shader) will be bandwidth limited to the same degree as NVidia. Unless ATI can stop Nvidia IHVs from getting their hands on equally locked GDDR3 memories. Assume each non-culled pixel uses 8 bytes of bandwidth (conservative), that means 16 pipes will write 128bytes per cycle * 500 Mhz = 64gb/s. You'd need 1Ghz memory clock (2Ghz GDDR3) for this. You could only be non-bandwidth limited and reaching your peak theoretical fillrate with no-z, no textures, no blending, diffuse color only.

IMHO, if ATI is going to win, it has to do two things: Beat NVidia on per-clock shader throughput and secondly, beat Nvidia at overclocking the core.

 

Excellent preview but why it's named as a "review"? Sorry if this has been asked before.

 

A predictably informative read, Dave. Nice work. 8)

 

I don't expect the R500 this year, but what do i know

 

I know I'm kinda late, but still, nice preview Dave, definitely one of my favourite 2 or 3 on the subject!

Can't wait to see how NV40 stacks up against its competitors, though.

 

I think the problem is this IS the nv 45 vs the r450 and unlike nvidia ati wasnt ready to skip the 420 and go straight to the 450.

I expect the nv40 aka nv45 is designed to handle limited memory bandwidth while the 420 aka 450 was designed expecting it to be paired with 750 mhz ddr3 memory and to come out many months from now.

So now ati doesnt have time to tweak the chip or the money to do it either and so has a design built for memory they dont have and for time they dont have. Oh and also not having the cpus around they expected to be around by then is a poop too. Wont help how "fast" the gpu is if the cpu cant keep up and nor can the memory.

Oh did I mention its prolly also gona hurt like hades if they hadnt planned on making an agp version of the r450 and thus dont have a reference board for it with the power needed to run it?

 

Why do I feel like there's alot of mistakes in what you've written? So you saying the current 6800 Ultra is actually the NV45(that was rumoured a little while ago?? If so then ATI have really done a bang up job if the rumoured specs do what they do.

So when 750 GDDR3 memory gets released ATI can easily release the R42x with the memory and call it X900 XT. Maybe even tweak the chip to include Dynamic Branching etc.(SM 3.0 compliant).

ATI doesn't have the money? That's a first. AMD are releasing alot of new CPU's nowadays.. hey and they ALOT better than Intel.

Why would ATI want a AGP part in a few months if PCI-E will be out. It's been rumoured already that the NV40 and R420 will be the last AGP parts.

US

 

Where the hell do you keep getting this ridiculous idea that ATI is short of cash?

Look at their damn financial statements. They made 400+ million in revenue last quarter, they raised 500million for some as to yet unknown reason before christmas. This is not a company that sounds like it is hurting for cash.

<edit>
r420 = low-k not soi
Micron will be supplying ATI with gddr3. Samsung is supplying nvidia.

 

NV40

NV40 is fast card but for some hinkering i think ATI will be faster and as far as Nv45 and R450 they may be out this years end asa bigger leap in speed but let me ask ya when is it to mutch to mutch for pearformance . i know the 9800 pro may be fine for me for atleast 2.4 years
sure some new games then may choke some but hey it be worth it for now

 

ATI will get RAM from both, i believe Micron is only for ATI for a while... with the faster RAM.

 

One question regarding the review Dave:
What's the differiencies in the Pixel Shader tests from Marko Dolenc's Fill-rate Tester between
- PS 2.0 - Longer
- PS 2.0 - Longer 4 Registers
- PS 2.0 - Per Pixel Lighting
Which one is supposed to be more used in games?

PS i tried to search on the forum or even DL Mdolenc test application, but i didn't find anything really usefull :/

 

Oops I could have sworn they said soi also well low k isnt so bad then cost wise.

On the ram I had assumed that ati simply couldnt outbid nvidia for the limited supply of 600 mhz ram NOW I know from you that what they realy did was pick the slower company to supply ram as samsung happens to be the leader in gddr3 ram by quite a margin now.

Hopefully for our sakes micron will get its act together soon or ati will manage to get a supply of the ram from samsung because either way I dont like the prospects if they dont.

 

Any proof of that ?