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[First Look] Nvidia GeForce 9800GX2

perox said:
I'll be waiting for the true next gen, not two 8800GT's stuck together.
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9600GT is meant to be out the same time. 9800GTX a bit after them. But rumour is its just a refresh of the 8800 cards.
 
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ojrules said:
sorry havnt read the rest of the thread, does this mean you can run this card in intel boards, aka running sli on an intel board
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It just like the 7950GX2.

Two cards wacked together, joined by a little bridge and I belive the 7950GX2 had some kind of chip on it which made it do SLI between the two cards instead of the motherboard.


If you meant will it work on an Intel Crossfire motherboard then the answer is yes.
 
So basically the 9800 series is a refresh. Just like the 7800 to 7900 series was?
Why didn't they just do that with the g92 core already. As many people have said having two different types of 8800GTS was confusing. Then the fact that the 8800GT was faster than the 8800GTS 320mb made it more difficult.
They should have just moved to the new number earlier.
 
I wonder if this will work on my mobo with a Corsair HX520W.

IMO I can see the 3870X2 being a winner here especially if this uses SLi and the 3870X2 uses crossfire the 3870X2 will proberbly be cheaper too.
 
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That means my old Hiper Type-R 580W should have done it but people would rather run a HX520w than that so its proberbly going to run since the real minimum psu they usually require is usually below what they say.
 
I guess, I always took the minimum wattage specification to be what it'd be rated at on a rather mediocre PSU. A Corsair HX520 or VX550 should be able to handle it. I mean come on, they rated the X1950 Pro for 30a but we all know that's a bit of an overestimation.
 
They proberbly rate it like that to be sure you have a good 30% head room so you dont stress the PSU maybe.
 
How come with SLI you lose half the RAM, it seems a bit rubbish, They know more than me obviously but why is SLI so hard, you would have thought it should be easy to make the GPUs render every other frame or half the screen each or something but I guess it aint quite so simple. :p
 
It's all about speed of access really and simplification. Two GPUs accessing and changing a single set of memory would be vastly overcomplicated, so it's just simpler to duplicate the data over two sets of memory rather than to confuse the whole issue by giving each GPU just what it needs.

Edit: Not to mention that the CPU overhead (i.e. the CPU would have to calculate where all the data goes) would probably nullify any potential benefits of that.
 
MHayes said:
How come with SLI you lose half the RAM, it seems a bit rubbish, They know more than me obviously but why is SLI so hard, you would have thought it should be easy to make the GPUs render every other frame or half the screen each or something but I guess it aint quite so simple. :p
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You don't lose half of the RAM really, cos you don't gain any in the first place.
Each GPU still has its own Memory bank to save the textures etc. You just duplicate this on to the second card, so the second core knows what to do.

As above it would be very complicated even with 2 gpus on the same PCB/card for them to share the memory.
 
i am actually likeing the cooling on these cards like the new GTS, the square long cooler looks fairly good, no rounded plastic around the fans no nothing, the cooler looks good imo :)
 
I think it looks awesome, if one's 30% up on an ultra then two in SLI will be pant fillingly quick...if only I wasn't having an extension built on the house...:(...more overtime perhaps?
 
setter said:
think ill wait for the proper 9800gtx, personally i think nvidia should scrap sli and theese silly gx cards, ive used sli twice (6800gt/7900gt) you only see a return @1920x1200 and above
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My 50% performance boost over the 7900GTX with my 7950GX2 in crysis in the benchmark thread running 1280x1024 says otherwise and thats with fairly broken SLI support...

I usually play at 1440x900 for multiplayer games and 1920x1200 for single player and in most games that support AFR I see 70+% gains at 1440x and 90+% gains at 1920x.

The 6800 was pretty much first gen SLI and didn't really work too well I agree but if you weren't seeing decent gains with 7900 series and upto date drivers then it was user error.

I think nVidia has been working upto this new GX2 for awhile the last few driver versions have included "new AFR" which seems to be an attempt at getting everything working under AFR with close to double the performance of one card.
 
Rroff said:
My 50% performance boost over the 7900GTX with my 7950GX2 in crysis in the benchmark thread running 1280x1024 says otherwise and thats with fairly broken SLI support...
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I ran crysis with 8800GT SLI and the gain was minimal, that was at 1920x1200.

As to SLI'ing the 9800 GX2 I think it would be a brave man, aside from the power requirements you just know there will be issues with this setup, driver problems, poor support etc (based on previous sandiwch SLI).
 
Yeah crysis + SLI is broken... I eventually got it tweaked to give me 70-80% gains at 1920x but at 1280x I wasn't seeing any performance gains over a single card until I really put some time and effort into playing with the SLI profile settings... until nVidia fixes it the real gains are probably untouchable by the man on the street.

With 2x 8800GT in SLI tho you are probably hitting other bottlenecks as well not just SLI issues that are stopping you seeing real gains.
 
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