Computer Advances

I have had a while to look around and test some of the top of the line graphics cards out there and I have come up with this.

1. 8800GTS 512- beats the GTX and is close to the Ultra, which is still running $600.

2. HD 3870- just short of the 8800GT, but what do you expect for something $50 cheaper.

3. 8800GT- slightly slower that the GTX for $200 cheaper.

4. 9600GT-Very close to the 8800GT.

5. HD 3850- good card for a cheap price.

6. HD 3870X2- beats the ultra in most tests for $100 cheaper.

7. 8600GT- very good card for about $110.

8. 8800GTX- It has got a lot cheaper, but it is still about $400.

9. 8600GTS- little faster that the 8600GT, but $40 more

10. 9800GX2- fastest card out, but it is about $600! Who would want to pay that much.

So, 8800GTS 512 is a great card for the money and I use it every day to play games on a 50' flat screen. Works like a beast!

Author: Cameron Wilmot

Nvidia will release its newest graphics card on April Fool’s Day roughly one week from now.We have already established it will basically on paper be an overclocked version of the G92 8800GTS 512MB with three-way SLI support.Picture of the card which leave nothing to the imagination have emerged from a couple Chinese websites and the pictures have been posted on the VR Zone forum.

Author: Cameron Wilmot

Images have recently surfaced that pretty well conclusively confirm the specifications of Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce 9800GTX graphics card.The card which was exposed is called EN9800GTX and it features all the usual goodies – PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10.0 (still not DX10.1) and OpenGL 2.0 support, 512MB of GDDR3 memory and triple-SLI. This specific card is based on the reference model from Nvidia which mean it carries default clock speeds. In Typical ASUS fashion, they will probably launch a factory overclocked “TOP” model sometime after the launch (April 1st).
At least on paper, it looks like nothing more than an overclocked G92 8800GT 512MB. The price tag is expected to be around $350 USD which is a reasonable price but if you were expecting a new card with ultra high performance improvements, it doesn’t seem like that will be the case at this stage and from what we have seen and heard so far.As you would expect, we have 9800GTX samples already on the way and testing will begin very soon!

Author: John Freeman

There are some slides going around the net from a presentation Intel made about the upcoming Larrabee Core architecture. The schematic indicates that a key feature of this future product will be multiple x86 cores scalable to TeraFlops of processing power without a simple scalar stream processes, but rather the cores will work in an integrated way, offering “Global Illumination” and “life-like rendering”.Both features are part of the DX 10.1 capabilities, and are at the forefront of the graphics technology arena. Intel also claims that Larrabee will function with both DirectX and OpenGL.
If Intel gets this right (on paper at least it seems good), then the entire graphics industry will get a shake up. Nvidia and AMD have scoffed at Intel’s revelations, saying that nothing is new, and they have those capabilities already in their products. Intel on the other hand feels they have the correct formula to make some serious inroads to the GPU market with this new offering.Some of the key differences are as Intel says the “triangle/rasterisation” and “rigid pipeline architecture”. These characteristics of ATI/AMD and Nvidia GPU’s are holding back the capability of those GPU’s to perform as both CPU and GPU together, and also further complicate the physics processing options.Intel claims their product would most likely be the best choice for the dual capabilities as well as for possible physics and other computational co-processing options, more so than the current solutions provided by ATI and Nvidia.You can read all about it at the Custom PC website.

Written by Andreas G 19 March 2008 11:57

GeForce 9800GT is the successor the quite popular performance segment card GeForce 8800GT. The latter is based on the G92-270 core, and has been stripped of one shader cluster, which means that it has only 112 shader processors. The price and relative overclocking potential of the card has made it a sales success and one of the most common cards among mid-range benchmarkers. The GeForce 9800GT has been said to be quite similar and according to the review published by Chinese it168.com, it is.
The card has 112 shaders operating at 1625MHz, GPU running at 650MHz and memories clocked at 2000MHz, but the big difference between 8800GT and 9800GT is suppose to be the 3-way SLI support. The lack of 3-way SLI support is something we really missed with GeForce 8800GT, and it's nice to see that NVIDIA listened when we pointed this out.
Other than that, there are the same differences between all GeForce 8 series and 9 series cards; new and improved PCB and better power circuitry.