Hmm this is what I've been waiting for, but for £50 more I'm still considering a 8800GTS. Probably best to wait till ATI come up with their R600 offerings, and see what the prices do then.
...? not really, from what i've seen it gets 6000 with an overclocked E6700, but my PC (7950GT, 3 GHz AMD CPU ) pulls in 5200, and the Conroe's extra power is whats pushing that score - up, yes, you do get DX10 stuff, but thats it.
Just looks like i need to wait for 65 nm stuff and overclock the sh*t out of it
You'd rather save 15 pounds and only have DX9 or would you rather spend the extra to be able to play games like Crysis and Flight Simulator X in full DX10 and still have the performance of about a 7950GT in DX9. Bear in mind that the drivers are still not that great as the card hasn't even been released yet.
its been released, ive seen several people who've had it, benched it and overclocked the sh*t out of it, but it really can't match the 7950GT in pace, but the DX10 compatibility could be a redeeming factor
I don't see the point in buying a sluggish DX10 card. Why pay a premium for a card capable of producing whatever fancy new effects are in DX10 when it's going to run new games so slow that you'll have to turn those effects off anyway?
Indeed, I am having trouble figuring out the point of DX10 at all. I seem to recall MS were saying that it was much more efficient than DX9 and would produce better performance, but this doesn't seem to have been borne out by the experiences of early Vista adopters.
Here's a list of games with DirectX 10 support that are out:
Microsoft Flight Simulator X
That's pretty much why you haven't seen the point yet, because it's not out there yet. Sure the 8800GTX is pretty badass in DX9 games, but just wait until people are complaining about DX9 when people play Crysis on Windows XP.
you can never use core speed to compare two cards from different series, my 9600XT ran at 500 MHz, yet my 6600GT ran at 500 MHz to, then i upgraded to a 580 MHz 7950GT and i score 4,500 more in 3DMark (That 7.8 TIMES more than my 9600XT )
questiuon is if the jumping performance from 8600GTS across several games is due to drivers or bad architecture in 8600GTS.
Sometimes 8600GTS run up to 7950GT,sometimes slower then 7900GS.This really huge difference not seen with other cards.
Hard to tell now and I would wait with buying this card.To be honest NVIDIA even didnt make the drivers for 8800 series working properly apposite to 7xxx series.If someone interested ATI X1950GT has much better performance for less money.Only drawback is missing DX10 support.
I'm perfectly happy with my 7900GS Extreme right now, and won't be upgrading for a while. Basically there's no reason to yet anyway, since I only know of 3 games registering Dx10 support - Crysis, FlightSim X and HL2: Ep2.
Until ATI get theirs out (May I believe?) and cause a bit of a price war, and a decent list of supported games appears, it's not going to be worth it. Unless of course you're one of those guys who has to have the newest of everything right away.
I also want to know what Dx9.5 is going to do for us XP users when it comes to Dx10 compliance.
XP isn't getting DX10, because M$ want Vista to sell, there is a dev version of DX10 for XP (How do you think they did the DX10 effects in Crysis on XP x64?), but its not for the public.
I think that actually the 8600GTS is gonna beat the 7900GT because of it's SM4 stuff, in 3DMark 06 SM4 scores aren't measured (as its part of Vista and DX10), but it has SM4 support while the 7xxx's don't, and as such in a DX10 game it will offer 7900GT performance (even though a 7900GT can't play it)
but the DX10 games will have for sure support for DX9 cards so you will just not have the DX10 effects.
I doubt 8600GTS is enought powerfull to run with DX10 effects and quite playable FPS.I think in this case its just more marketing stuff to sell these cards.
When DX10 games will come we will have soon 2nd generation of DX10 graphic cards.
The entire Company of Hero's is screwy... the 8800GTS doing worse than an X1900XT and 7900GTX in some cases... the X1650 XT beating the 7900GT in two cases, the X1650 Pro beating the 7600GT in some cases...
Hmm, they used the 158.16 (newest drivers, leaked beta's) for the 8600's, and Catalyst 7.1's (two versions old). I do not know what to make with any of that.
All in the same, I'd like to wait for more mature drivers, but it doesn't look good. I think some of the "issue" is that the 8600 series have 32 stream processors, one forth of the top end (128 SPs), and 128bit memory bus width, one third of the top end (384bits). Both of those combined seems to leave a horribly huge gap (8700 series with 192bit bus and 48/64 shaders pretty please?), which doesn't entirely lend to the 8600 being the killer midrange card that the 7600 (half the shaders and memory bandwidth) was.
It outruns a 8600GT in one game, as DEVIL says, I'd put that down to drivers really.
As for people saying that an 8600 wont be able to play a dx10 game at acceptable framerates, I'd wait and see tbh. I know its a previous generation, and theres all this "DirectX 10 has been built from the ground up" etc, but if you look back at the first dx9 card, the Radeon 9700 Pro, handled dx9 games fine, and lasted a fair while. edit: However, as you say pik_d, the 8600 doesnt seem to have the makings or a killer midrange card, for me the best example of that being the 6600GT in its day.
The fact is, its a midrange card which will probably hold up fairly well for quite a while, and for the people on that kind of budget, I'm sure its a very good card. Personally I'm looking to see if I can stretch to a 8800GTS, or at the very least waiting till ATI release their lineup, and see what happens then.
Well I guess everybody expected that it will be another 6600 or 7600 series which were at start very nice value for the money you spent.The 8600 perfomance doesnt looks like that and I guess its due to several factors.
128bit memory interface is nowdays getting very limited.
32stream processors are kidna funny as they have to do both vertex a pixel shading.7900GS which is close with its perfomance have 20 pixels and 20 vertex shaders.
Also NVIDIA in latest months have big problems to release drivers and if they do they are quite buggy.Its not suprise as a lot of the drivers gurus came to ATI camp.
Where ATI release every month.I cant bealive they didnt get one in over a half year.Come on NVIDIA.
I am interested what the new midrange from ATI will bring to the table as its based on R600 architecture.It has 128bit memory interface as well thought.Seems both NVIDIA and ATI understimaded this time the midrange class a bit in my eyes.
However, my 6600GT hasn't had a driver update since that one in November, while my mobile X1400 has had one a month...
The good news is that the HD 2600 XT/Pro are still rumored to have 64 stream processors, however, 128bit and lower memory clock rate than the 86GTS. How depressing these midrange cards are...
I know new NVIDIA released drivers on Wednesday but its just for 8xxx series which is kidna odd that there are so many 7xxx,6xxx,5xxx cards still around. I would not call accetable for customers.
ATI seems to cope with that now much better but as I said I am not suprised due to several drivers programmners went from NVIDIA to ATI in last monthes.
It would explain why NVIDIA struggle with any drivers release/update.
) pulls in 5200, and the Conroe's extra power is whats pushing that score - up, yes, you do get DX10 stuff, but thats it.
