RSSNVIDIA launches new GPUs, ATI lies in wait
By Tim Conneally | Published June 17, 2008, 5:55 PM
Today was originally scheduled to be the date that both NVidia and ATI launched their next-generation graphics products, but NVidia had the only one that made it out the door in time.
NVidia's GeForce GTX 200 GPU series (comprised of the 260 and 280 units) has now been made available. The 280 is equipped with 240 cores, and offers 1 GB of frame buffer memory, while the 260 has 192 processors and 896 MB of memory. They cost $649 and $399 respectively through such sites as Amazon, Newegg, TigerDirect, MWave, MCIX, and ZipZoomfly.
As Tom's Hardware reported earlier this month, AMD delayed the launch of its Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards from today to June 25 so it would not lose any of its "face time" to NVIDIA. Instead, the company today showed off its "Cinema 2.0 Experience", an ecosystem built around the forthcoming RV770 cards that are capable of performing 1 teraflop/sec. of graphical computing. The demo system in San Francisco featured two of those graphics cards, driven by an AMD Phenom X4 quad core processor and AMD 790 FX chipset.
An example frame from AMD's demonstration of ultra-realism from its upcoming ATI RV770 GPU.
The Radeon HD 4800 series will replace ATI's current 3800s and are expected to begin at under $200. Certain sites have had spec sheets posted of ATI's products since April of this year.
and the only game that will currently make use of the graphics power that these cards claim is Crysis. All the other games still work quite well with a 8800 series card with 512MB.
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i think the problem is, speed is relative,
the company has to account for lowend through to highend, and the biggest difference between them, isn't always hard core speed, but rather onboard features, highend cards has the very latest, and best inovation R&D has to offer, but mid-range cards can sometimes have the relative speed, as highend, but doesn't have all those features that makes the game fly,
but i do agree, some kind of universal standard is needed, but saying it is easy, trying to solve the problem, is hard, but considering the costs of midrange and highend cards, it pays for consumers to ask and do a little research before parting with there cash,
i did, and i found out, before paying for it, that a GTS is a cut down version to a GT,
the other problem, is of course, people's systems are different, testing a card on one system, can show different results to the same card being tested on another type of system.
it's a tricky one to solve, that's for sure,
i do think though, that the box should show 2 things clearly to the coustomer,
1 - year (showing the generation year of the card)
2 - wheather the card is a lite version, or a sister of some kind. GT,GTS, GTX, ect. is silly, makes sense, but still silly, and does not help the coustomer at all,
but both of these would hinder sales on old stock because people would think twice about paying for a card when they see a year of 2004 on the box,
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Not really. The bigger the number, the faster the card. As simple as that. They usually bork it up with all the GTS, GTX, GT, XL, LX, Pro, Ultra, godknowswhatelse Superclocked, Overclocked attached to model numbers. This is what usually really confuses users...
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If ONLY the performance ratings actually reflected that!
http://www.tomshardware....dr-sm3-0-score,538.html
Without a performance chart one hasn't anything more than a guess.
Even Tom's Hardware has lamented the screwy labeling system.
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Both manufacturers need to come up with a naming convention that reflects some sort of semblance of relative performance.
Even the die-hard GPU fanatic is unable to keep the models straight.
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