Page 27 - The Verdict

The verdict

Hey hey hey, this is H to the T coming live at ya from the mazes of technology in Guru City! Finally the honorable judge Guru has reached reached a verdict. All rise please, the eagle has landed!

Each year we reviewers write how impressed we are with a new generation graphics cards. This year it's a little more than that. Not only did the performance increase. Nope, we have a new version of DirectX, Shader model, architecture and yes higher raw computing graphics card. The accumulation of everything written in this article is the sum of the increasing complexity of graphics processors. This is making these articles as written today way more difficult to understand and comprehend as it is a lot of information to take in.

My job is to filter out the stuff that you guys will presumably never understand and only show you the more important items that are relevant to you while being able to understand it at a certain technical level or even care about.

Complexity. To understand where we are I need to take you back. The first "real" 3D accelerator (we could not call it a graphics card in these days) I ever tested was made by 3Dfx, the SST-1 (Sellers, Smith, Tarolli-1). The add-on board was comprised out of a set of two single chips each with a dedicated function (the raster chip and the texturing chip). Each chip had roughly one million transistors.  Most of you who have been following Guru3D.com know this , but prior to the "Guru of 3D" name this website was called "The Voodoo Guru". The two 3DFX chips combined made a product called the "Voodoo Graphics" add-on card. This is literally how this site was named. This is actually where my life literally changed and became focused on the graphics industry.

Interestingly enough, NVIDIA bought 3DFX and I think hired roughly 100 of their engineers back then. Nevertheless, the original Voodoo Graphics had a total of 2 million transistors in two chips running at 50 MHz. This is where it all really started in my honest opinion.

Back to current technology versus complexity... we now are at NVIDIA's G80, GeForce 8800 GTS & GTX. We run one chip with 681 Million transistors with multiple clocked domains within the chip. The Stream processors run at 1350 MHz, the generic core at 575 MHz, the memory at 2x 900 MHz. We can place two of these cards next to each other and double up rendering power (two chips) by placing it in SLI mode. We now have a card that can cope with both DirectX 9 (or lower) and DirectX 10 and we now also have a card that not only is a feast to image quality yet also offers give or take x2 performance over the last single chip high-end product (7900 GTX). Quite frankly, that's a lot to swallow. With the additional horsepower you can do a lot of tricks. 16x AA, high-range HDR with AA, improved IQ, decode 1080P HD streams and yeah even calculate physics or other generic purpose functions on a GPU.

Fact is that I need to get back to the basics here and that's playing games as this is why you buy this card. It's safe to say that the 8800 series will offer you fabulous gaming pleasure. I mean this is a DX10 card, yet with no DX10 officially released and no DX10 title available we have only been able to use the card with DirectX 9 titles and frack... the bugger is fast and the games look so darn beautiful.

Now I just have to break in SLI here: two days before the launch I finished up this review and precisely at that moment NVIDIA delivered a working SLI driver. Oh well, let's spend another day on SLI then I figured. The fun part is it took me only half a day. Doubling up the graphics rendering power of the PC obviously with cards like the GTX made the system FLY. You see Prey rendering at 150-200 FPS at the heaviest settings with AA and AF fully enabled. Completely crazy framerates. Now despite this driver had a few very small squirms as a game or two did not activate in SLI (BF2 for example) the performance honestly shocked me. Seriously you are looking at the PC with something half-hard. You will literally make a decision like this: what's more important... my girlfriend or this SLI setup (Ed: and I think we all know what Hilbert went with =P), most of all what's more fun? Seriously you will have to think about that for a moment or two (Ed: Seriously, Hilbert needs a date). SLI with two GTX's is flabbergasting, extreme and just like the price... overwhelming.

Overclocking, it's not supported at driver level with the current driver revision. First off you'll find very little (well not one at all) pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 cards in the stores. NVIDIA has set a restriction to SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) like XFX, BFG, EVGA, etc. that they can not (pre)overclock the cards anymore. Too many 7900 cards have been returned (RMAed) resulting in loads of damaged products and thus overall costs and loss. NVIDIA will allow overclocking though at the time of this writing it was not available in the driver. Overclocking however was supported through nForce NTUNE on our 680i SLI mainboard. But unfortunately being platform bound to overlock in my eyes is not at all a valid method of overclocking. So if you use the card in an Intel 975 mainboard for example you can't run NTUNE as it's nForce mainboard software. Rest assure that there will be overclocking features available, with or without NVIDIA's help.

** update from NVIDIA: I'd just like to point out that with nTune 5.05, we have added support for GPU overclocking on all motherboards, Intel 975 included. Please download it and try it out.

Anyway, back to single card performance. The 8800 obviously will eat anything you throw at it and then shout dude is that all? Framerates are flying which means you can enable heaps of eye candy. You start playing your games with a monitor that supports 1600x1200 and then enable 4xAA and 16xAF. I have been playing Prey for a while at a resolution of 2560x1600 (and that's 500% more pixels over 1024x768!) at 53 frames per second with every possible setting in the game set to HIGH. So I enabled 16xAA and at that same resolution I was still playing with an average of 34 FPS. If you are stuck at 1600x1200, 16xAA and 16xAF will get you 67 FPS.

Call of Duty 2 then, which is a tough nut for any graphics card; with all in game IQ settings at HIGH I have never been able to play the game at 2560x1600. The 8800 GTX kicked me in the nuts and was screaming. You can do it even with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled, seriously amazing. Battlefield 2 @ 4xAA 16xAF at 2560x1600 did 92 FPS... 92! If you compare that to a 512MB 7950 GT you'll notice that such a card gave you only 36 FPS. If you take a SLI based 7950 GX2 you'd get 55 FPS. But yeah, I kid you not; the 8800 GTX pushed the framerate to 92 FPS where the GTS was still pushing 66 FPS.

I can continue on and on with examples but fact is the results remain the same. The GeForce 8800 series open up a new era game computing. Not everyone will use 16xAA or even care about it but you can. Not everyone can play at 2560x1600 but you could. If you play games at 1280x1024, trust me this card will last you a long time as you'll have a lot held in reserve once games become more complex and you are DX10 ready and hey, what about the new Image quality standard? Bloody fantastic.

What to buy, the GTS or the GTX? Well whatever floats your boat budget wise I'd say. Obviously the GTS will offer you more bang for your bucks. But the performance differential between the two cards is roughly 25%... what a coincidence...

1. 25% less performance
2. 25% less streaming processors
3. 25% smaller price tag of a GTX

And that's also the price differential .. 599x0.25=149 bucks. And since the GTS is exactly 150 cheaper, it's a proper match.

The one thing we just have not been able to test are DirectX 10 titles and that's really what this card is all about. I adore the 8800 GTS yet I love the GeForce 8800 GTX on DX9, but I can only predict that it's going to rock at DX10. And until Microsoft Vista is released, I still owe you another review with DX10 titles.

A couple of words on the two retail cards tested. I'd like to congratulate Sparkle on the fact that they are finally making a box for Europe that sells. Yes that did sound stupid eh? Seriously it's so important. Fact is at this point in time it does not matter which brand G80 product you'll buy, as all of them are the same, literally. There will be no pre-overclocked version and they all will look and perform the same. This is a serious issue for NVIDIA's board partners as they will be fighting with each other, hard! Now initially I figured this is a bad thing but it really isn't. The end user should  be allowed to overclock thus the manufacturers will have to do their best to sell their product. So in the end that means more gadgets and goodies added into the bundle. Look at Sparkle, newly designed box, including the free game and top title Call of Duty 2. That's golden stuff. Card wise it really does not matter who you buy it from. So look at the price, warranty and bundle for the G80 series if you are in the market for this product.

BFG then. The 8800 GTS. I have to tell you that I'm really fond of BFG products ever since we started working with them. Agreed, their bundle usually is a little more summier, in this case also no free game included. But usually they have a slightly better price. It's obviously a quality board offering serious performance. BFG will offer you both the GTS and GTX models with 449 and 599 USD prices accordingly.

My congratulation go out to NVIDIA for releasing a very electrifying product, it offers staggering performance and image quality. As it seems, Moore's Law still applies for NVIDIA which means that in roughly 12 to 16 months we will have pass one Billion transistors for a single GPU.

I'm wrapping up the review now as my fingers start to hurt. GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS based graphics cards are available soon from leading e-tailers and retailers.

Gosh, how I love the graphics industry, I love silicon! And the G80 is my new best friend. I can make up a thousand puns (Ed: in fact you already have) and one liners but for once let me state it as simple as it is. GeForce 8800 GTS & GTX are just good... really really good.

Hilbert

Note ** Some information on the GeForce 8800 GTX recall. There has been a production error with the first btach of 8800 GTX cards. As a result all cards have been returned before they hit the stores, the ones that you'll find in the stores however are 100% okay. Here's something NVIDIA asked us to let you guys know:

Today NVIDIA announced the hard launch and immediate availability of our new flagship GeForce 8800 GPUs. Some recent reports on the web mention a BOM error (wrong resistor value) on initial GeForce 8800 GTX boards.  All boards with this problem were purged from the production pipeline.  Product on shelves is fully qualified and certified by NVIDIA and its board partners.   We and our board partners stand behind these products and back them with our full warranty.

Adam Foat, Product PR Manager