HotHardware sends word of their Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe review. It seems that high-end graphics cards are always in the lime light upon the initial launch of a new graphics processor architecture from any of the major players. Although there's a limited number of potential consumers, relatively speaking, for these flagship enthusiat-class boards, they pave the way for their more modestly priced siblings, in terms of setting the standard for the base GPU architecture and how it performs versus the competition. We're sure many of you wouldn't think of dropping over $500 for an uber-class 3D card like a GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition or Radeon X800 XT Premium Edition, but there are some who will spare no expense, and these cream-of-the-crop video cards drive stakes in the ground of the fiercely competitive 3D graphics hardware landscape.
We have learned that ATI's R480 will be native PCI Express only and that at least in 2004 you won't see an AGP variation of the card. The R480, ATI's flagship chip, will replace X800XT and X800XT PE and it will be offered in two variations with two different clock speeds.
nVidia will soon introduce a card that will be hidden under the GeForce PCX 6200 marketing name. This card is PCI Express ready, of course, and it is clocked to a 300MHz core and a 500MHz DDR memory. It will come with 128MB of 128 bit memory and will support DVI and TV out, if partners decide that they need that.
Also Gamers-Depot has been taken a look at the Chaintech Apogee AA6800 Turbo Edition. The list of add-in board partners for nVidia GPUs is extremely vast and encompasses a wide variety of companies – all of which seem to build parts aimed at varying geographic locations and demographics. Chaintech, based out of Taiwan, is one such retailer that started making a splash in North America stores a couple of years ago and has built a reputation of offering leading-edge performance at prices that often best its competition.
The GeCube Radeon X800 PRO has been reviewed by Hexus. The generational leap in performance from the old guard, Radeon 9800XT and GeForce FX5950 Ultra, to the new range of Radeon X800 and GeForce 6800 challengers, is massive. You might not notice it that much at 1024x768 with little or no AA and AF applied, but as soon as you crank up the resolution and AA and AF levels, the new boards come live, trouncing the outgoing performance champions by a long long way.
AMDZone has reviewed the Sapphire Radeon
X600 XT 256MB PCIe graphics card. The advanced graphics port first showed up long ago after the bottlenecks of the PCI interface were reached by the first
graphics cards to fully stress the memory bandwidth of the interface. At the time, there was a lot of hype but no real performance difference between the two
but in time the superior AGP interface eventually showed it's worth and became the only interface available for graphics cards until now with native PCI
Express for ATI graphics cards.
ATI's Radeon X600 XT is not too different from the design of their Radeon 9600 XT video card. The card its self
is more the size of a Radeon 9600 PRO and features the smaller fan of that unite.
Well it seems Overclocker Cafe has done a review on the Chaintech GeForce AA6800 Turbo. The GeForce 6800 line as we all know, is broken up into three products; the 6800, the 6800 GT and the 6800 Ultra. Priced at $300, $400 and $500 respectively on average, the entry level 6800 card has gained a lot of attention from those of us not related to Donald Trump. Offering excellent performance across the board, especially in Doom 3, the GeForce 6800 is "the" card to have.
Back in June we reported that ATI was taking the bridging direction with its graphics, and now we have some further proof. ATI hit nVidia very hard for its AGP to PCIe bridge cards but now has decided to button its lip about it. It learned that nVidia made things right as it is already shipping its bridge chip-based cards and passing SIG tests. With this bridge chip you can make PCIe and AGP cards from similar silicon.
Digit-Life has put up a review on the new ATI Radeon X700XT. So, not so much time has passed since the release of the nVidia GeForce 6600 series, and now ATI is announcing its "Canadian answer". The X700 series also comprises several video cards, united by the same codename of the chip - RV410.
We said previously that even though NVIDIA partners overclock their cards to 500/1100MHz, Gainward will go even higher. It's traditionally faster cards will end up with the interesting Gainward PowerPack! Ultra/1960PCX XP "Golden Sample" GLH name where GLH stands for "Goes Like Hell". This card will end up working at a 540MHz+ core and 1200MHz GDDR3 1.6ns memory. It will have 128MB of memory and will go to selected press this week, while end users will be able to get it for €349 next week. An AGP version will be available in early November.
We had a chance to talk to an important nVidia chap who happens to play a very big role in its software department and we learned quite a few things about its coming 65 series driver. We were told that the nVidia 65 series of drivers will end up with WHQL stamp for all of its products. He implied that nVidia driver has to get stamp for all chips from the oldest TNT–TNT2, to the most recent Geforce 6800 Ultra.
ATI's next fastest graphic thing will be based on 0.11µ (micron) architecture. This is the natural direction for ATI to migrate from 0.13µ low K marchitecture to pure 0.11µ without low K. When you make things smaller you can possibly clock a chip even higher, but we don't have any idea what frequency ATI is aiming for. That's exactly where its R480 chip is at this time.
Teamhardware had a look at the new Futuremark's 3DMark05. About the same time last year Futuremark released 3DMark03. Now a year later they've released version 2005. Again this program can help you to measure the 3D performance of your system. Like with the older version the program runs series of tests to come up with a score which you can compare with other systems. When we did a first look at 3DMark03 our test system was somewhat outdated and we couldn't run every test. Now with the Radeon 9600 XT in our system we can run every test albeit not very fast.
PCStats has reviewed the Albatron GeForce 6800GT. The nVidia GeForce 6800 GPU is a powerful chip, as are videocards based on it like the Albatron GeForce 6800GT. The 'NV40' GPU is the backbone of the 6800-series, and comes in a couple flavours; 6800 (12 pipe lines), 6800GT (16 rendering pipelines, 350MHz core), 6800 Ultra (16 rendering pipelines, 400MHz core), and the as of yet unavailable 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition (16 rendering pipelines, 450MHz core).
A new version of RivaTuner has been released. The purpose of this utility is to give you access to all the undocumented features of ForceWare and Catalyst Drivers. Drivers have a lot of undocumented registry entries. Some of them don't affect anything, but there are some that are very useful. In general, they cannot give you big Performance Boost but they can improve Image Quality and solve some Compatibility Problems. RivaTuner will help you to change all undocumented registry entries.
A new review at Bjorn3D has seen the daylight. What you will find on our
review bench today is a high-end PowerColor X800 Pro Limited Assassin Edition from Tul. Tul Corporation is a
Tier-1 provider of ATI-based graphic cards.
Tom's Hardware Guide has put up an article on the newest graphic cards. After nearly 10 months, they're back again with an updated version of THG's VGA Charts. This time around, not quite as many new products were launched in 2004. While an abundance of new products flooded the market in 2003, the two market leaders ATI and nVidia held back this year, at least with respect to the number of products launch. At the same time, performance-wise, both graphics processor makers have made great strides with their enthusiast line of products. The performance leap, in fact, was almost desperately needed, as games continue to become more and more demanding with ever-intensifying use of pixel and vertex shaders.
Today AnandTech has posted an review on the Linux behaviour with the newest graphic cards, their drivers and their performance. The focus of this analysis is not to fire up glxgears, and see which program runs it faster. Instead, we want to look at some common graphics intensive applications for Linux and determine how well they run, particularly in relation to their Windows counterparts. We are interested in more than just the benchmark results - getting there is half the fun, and coincidentally, half the weighting for a purchase decision for many of us. Invariably, we will draw some conclusions from one GPU family to another out of the eleven cards that we have chosen to compare today.
What about Rage3D's coverage
in Futuremark's 3DMark05? Another year, another 3DMark. Futuremark is back at it
again with 3DMark05, this time with the same company name! If 3DMark was
a game, it would be a highly-successful game franchise. This is actually the 5th
release of 3DMark, 6th if you include Final Reality. Over 24 million copies of
3DMark03
have been distributed worldwide! This amazing achievement shows both the growing
popularity of 3DMark, as well as the rising awareness of graphics
performance.
XGI, the Taiwanese graphics chip maker, wants to return to market with a stronger family of products. This time, XGI is talking about its chip codenamed XP47, a native PCI Express thing that will have support for Pixel Shader 3.0.
nVidia has an answer for ATI's Hypermemory. nVidia is not ready to talk about it publicly, but we already know quite a bit about it. That's because nVidia is already talking with its big customers about it and telling them how great this marchitecture will be. It will use the PCIe bi-directional bus to use system memory RAM as graphics memory.
ByteSector has put a nice
review together on the ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro. ATI has been an industry leader in
computer graphics for many years now. They currently lead the market with their
top of the line X800 graphics card and have just released their All-in-Wonder
version of the X800, but who has an extra $600 sitting around to spend on the
top of the line graphics card? The solution, jump down one level to the 9800 Pro
VPU and grab an All-in-Wonder graphics card for less than $400! The Radeon 9800
VPU has many of ATI's latest,
non-HD, features available at your finger tips.
Absolute Insight has once again put the Catalyst, Omega, and DNA drivers in the gladiator arena to duke it out for the championship title. Will ATI's latest Catalyst 4.9 reign supreme, or will it be another stalemate? ATI claims to have dramatically improved performance in both Doom 3 and UT2004 with their 4.9 release.
The ASUS Extreme AX800 XT 256MB PCIe graphics card has been reviewed by Hexus. ATI has been slow in getting its Radeon X800 XT AGP cards out to partners and the retail market. Slow is perhaps being kind. Reviewers first passed judgement on the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition over five months ago and we're still waiting for retail to become widely available. That, frankly, is simply not on. Enthusiasts are given a taste of gaming nirvana and then subjected to an interminable wait. ATI is having another bash at releasing an R420 variant. This time the fun is packaged in PCI Express (PCIe) format, perfect for that high-performance PCIe PC you're thinking of building.
Here is the latest version of the 66.xx Series of NVIDIA ForceWare Drivers.
Non WHQL Certified Beta
Operating System: 2000/XP
International Language Support
Supported cards: All GeForce Cards
Disclaimer: Use at own Risk!
Not Supported by NVIDIA
There are
basically 2 versions made available, one for English only use and one for International use, both with Full Installer that can be run to install the new
NVIDIA ForceWare Drivers.
Unika 8800GTS PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
