News For Gamers: Nvidia Geforce 9800gx2, 1 Gb

[Guest Reimar]

Nvidia GeForce 9800GX2, 1 GB

January 4, 2008 20:51

The first pictures of what seems to be the GeForce 9800GX2 have just popped up on the web. We now have a good idea of what the card looks like.

We know that the 9800GX2 has 2 printed circuit boards (PCBs), as did the 7950GX2 in its time, two graphics processing units (GPUs) using 65 nm nodes (most likely G92s with 128 stream processors), 1 GB of memory (512 MB for each GPU) and two DVI outputs.

We don't know yet if the GeForce 9800GX2, which is supposed to be 30% faster than the 8800 Ultra, will support Quad SLI configurations.

The expected price: around $449 US. Expected announcement date: February 14, 2008.

7950GX2 quad SLI setup

[Mozikillah]

This thing is gonna be a beast..

Is this the one with DX 10.1

[cali]

Even though it is today's the fastest card, the 8800GTX is well over a year old and was always sort of a hack being an oversized card and the Ultra was just an overclock. We finally get a peak at the successor to this aging monstrocity and it appears to be simply two 8800GT's glued together. Nvidia has done some good work at the low end and mid range, but this is not impressive. They claim just a 30% speed improvement and you know it's bound to be less than manufacturer claims.

Less than a year ago I bought the second fastest card made, the 8800GTS 640MB. Crysis is unplayable getting just 11fps due to the high res LCD I use. I am not interested in going to low resolution, low quality settings in order to play it. I'll just let the game collect dust for a few years until there is a card that can handle it. The whole marketing promise that the power of DX10 cards would be unleashed by real DX10 games is a farce. On the contrary every game was fast until the first DX10 game came long and then it became dog slow.

[quiksilva]

Even so, what else is there on the market?

I can't help but wonder whether AMD (ATI call them what you will) will ever catch up.

They are getting their behinds handed to them from every angle!

Ps some more news on this from maximum pc

Details Emerge on GeForce 9600GT and 9800GX2

The first graphics card based on NVIDIA's mainstream D9M core has made an appearance on corporate roadmaps as the 9600GT. Reference specs for the 9600GT call for a 650MHz core clock, 1625MHz unified shader clock, and 900MHz memory clock. Best of all, the new mainstream offering will come with a 256-bit memory bus, up from 128-bit found on the 8600GT, giving the 9600GT 57.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. It's still unknown how many shaders or stream processors will show up on the 65nm D9M core, but NVIDIA did indicate DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.0, OpenGL 2.1, and PCI-E 2.0 support. Looking higher end, [H]ardOCP posted pics and specs of the GeForce 9800GX2, which will succeed the 8800 Ultra. Final specs are still up in the air, but think dual-GPUs, 1GB frame buffer, two PCBs, and 256 stream processors - tasty!

Edited January 8, 2008 by quiksilva

[cali]

I can't help but wonder whether AMD (ATI call them what you will) will ever catch up.

I was wondering the same thing. No high end card for over a year, that's unheard of. But it seems this announcement got them to reveal their secret R680 they will ship in the coming months. In one area, the R680 is a step ahead of nvidia's 9800gx2 in that the AMD card puts 2 gpu's on one circuit board rather than having 2 circuit boards. This should lend itself to a small cost reduction and performance boost, but that's just one facet and many other factors will be important in seeing who comes out with the best card.