nvidia "8600"

8600Ultra
========
80nm TSMC GT Process (300Million Gates)
64 Streams ( 4 Clusters)
16 Texture Units
16 ROPs
256-bit (64-bit x 4)@ 1400MHz (44.8GB/sec)

8600GT
========
80nm TSMC GT Process (300Million Gates)
48 Streams ( 3 Clusters)
12 Texture Units
12 ROPs
256-bit (64-bit x 4)@ 1200MHz (38.4GB/sec)

8600GT will probably be same speed as 7950GT or a little faster.
8600Ultra will be faster than 7900GTX and X1950XT :)
 
but nvidia's offerings will be cheaper, and most games are better suited in nvidia cards, but you right, ati has a history of powerful cards BUT they luanched a little later then the nvidia, thats where nvidia scores, and nvidia's midrange is much better then ati's, as a result nvidia makes more sales,
 
Not really. If you come out later than the competition, you can always set your clocks to a level where you just edge them out. ATI has been late at every turn since 2003 with Radeon 9800XT. Even missing an entire cycle with no 7800 equivalent card.

I'm confident the ATI part will be crazy fast but if it'll be faster than 8800GTX I'm not sure in fact it's unlikely to beat the GTX except in bandwidth limited situations. In the mid-range ATI finally got their head screwed on right with the X1650Pro and XT which are arguably better cards than the 7600GT/GS variants. :D
 
scotty777 said:
but nvidia's offerings will be cheaper, and most games are better suited in nvidia cards, but you right, ati has a history of powerful cards BUT they luanched a little later then the nvidia, thats where nvidia scores, and nvidia's midrange is much better then ati's, as a result nvidia makes more sales,
Click to expand...

I think AMD has a lot coming out over the next year that will be surprising us, we just have to wait and see.
 
What do you guys think the price (in SA) of the midrange 8 series cards will be? I think I'm due for an upgrade from my 6800GT..
 
Well for 8600Ultras you should be paying R1,700 or so, but not R2,000. For 8600GT should be R1,400 not more, but in SA you are charged about 2X store price anywhere else so you'll end up paying about R2.6K to R2.9K for a 8600Ultra and R2,000 to R2,100 for 8600GT.
Why because distributors this side a a monopoly which nobody seems to care about :/
 
It has been recently reported that 8600 will in fact not feature a 256-bit bus but the traditional 128-bit that has been with us since 2001. :(
However both core clock and memory clocks have changed for both 8600GT and 8600ULtra.

This is sad news because it means despite the high 900MHz Memory clock for the 8600Ultra, memory bandwidth has almost halved from an impressive 44.8GB/sec to a paltry 28.8GB/sec. For the 8600GT it's even worse as the already lower 38.8GB/sec is now crawling at 22.4GB/sec.
Core speeds however have increased to 650MHz for the Ultra and 550MHz for the GT, but curbing the would be increased fill-rates is a reduction in ROPS from 16 to 8. :( The only good news is that fill-rate and obviously shader performance has increased quiet substantially over the previous 350MHz/500MHz spec for the cores.
10.8GT/sec for the ultra and 8.8GT/sec for the GT

However AA is once again lost to the mid-range crowds as there's no way 4XAA will be playable in any current title or future one at that with such a low bandwidth.

Given the size of the card pictured it makes sense that indeed this 128-bit news is fact as a 256-bit bus would have at least made the card some inches larger. :/ Add to which its much easier to outfit a PCB with higher speed ram than increase the bus width. GDDR3 right now can scale to almost 2.2GHz and it's cheap. Maybe that's why the $179 and $149 prices :(
 
oh come now nvidia, thats a little dick on there behalf, i mean people would have been happy paying $200 for a 8600gt with the 256-bit bus, seriously, i mean the winning fact that the bus was 256-bit made a lot of people happy, and now the bandwith has dropped dramatically, i mean if what you said it true about the midrange gpu's having a 128-bit bus then thats 5 years of the same slowness, argh
 
lol as i said wait for ATI, Nvidia has no clue. The only reason they rushed release and production is to make some sales because they know AMD/ATI will kill them yet again.
 
lol, not in the midrange produdts buddy, look at the 6600gt, it's cheaper then a 1600pro and performs better in games, the 7600gt came out and that screwed ati untill a good 6 months later, they realsed the x1650xt.
 
Nah all this is speculation so far as we can't be sure. It still may be 256-bit simply because right now you can get an X1950GT for about $180 and that houses 384million gates and is 256-bit.
We'll just have to wait and see.

Having said that, The last time ATI beat nvidia was with 9700/Pro in 2002. Every Quarter after that nvidia has been outselling ATI up until ATI was no more. Besides outselling they've been first to launch and hit retail for the last 4years. As a result before it's buy out ATI had long been ejected from the top 1000 companies in the world, while nvidia went all the way up to #716.

Unfortunately ATI couldn't market themselves out of a paper bag (Much like AMD unfortunately) and were always late with little to no availability. Add to which they've never beaten nvidia in the mid-range market since nvidia's TNT. All of this resulted in AMD buy :/ Despite the fact that ATI has been technically more sound than Nvidia since 2002 really... :/ (save for X8XX series)

ATI never lacked engineers (they inherited some of the best from ArtX which brought back ATI from near extinction) but leadership.
 
scotty777 said:
lol, not in the midrange produdts buddy, look at the 6600gt, it's cheaper then a 1600pro and performs better in games, the 7600gt came out and that screwed ati untill a good 6 months later, they realsed the x1650xt.
Click to expand...

We shall have to wait and see :)

p.s. i prefer Nvidia so i am not an AMD fanboi incase anyone thinks anything different :p

Nvidia has now dropped spec on the lower 8XXX range so they now match cards we already have today. There are presently 2 games being created for DX10 (that i know of) Crysis and Alan Wake, Crysis will only be available after March if we are lucky and i have no clue about Alan Wake and personally i do not care about Vista and DX10 as there will be no games available when it comes out.

I do not want a pretty operating system i want one that works with the least amount of hassles.
 
but there's no doubt that ati does make awesome high end cards, and this is the downfall of ati, because they spend all there time andf money on there high end cards, they just slap together there midrange and budget cards, this is apparent with the x1600pro and xtx
 
he he there will be more than 26 games by the end of this year that will be DX10 aware (that does not mean their natively SM4.0 but they can take advantage of the API)

Since GF8 driver for Vista leaked I've been on Vista ever since. Indeed it is faster than XP so there's no reason to go back to XP. In tests I did, Vista is up to 35% faster in HDR than XP (207fps vs 317 :) )

Once again original and new spec are speculation still it could be either. Rerasons for 256-bit exist reasons for 128-bit as well.
Having said that 8600 in which ever form should handle 2XAA with minimal performance hit.
 
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