Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
two things strike me, firstly the 9600gt scores around the same as the 8800gt in some situations, have to remember that since nvidia "refreshed" their 8800 series with the gt/gts cards suddenly all reviewing of all major sites suddenly all but ignores AA these days. partially to be fair as engines are supporting it less and in the future we should be seeing engine done AA to a higher quality(thats what dev's want anyway, so manybe sans AA numbers aren't that bad, though few games are like that now). The general concensus is that its not the lack of shaders on the 9600gt, but its the lack of rops on the higher end cards that are limiting the higher cards. which will mean, by all accounts the higher end cards with more shaders and stuff might just be completely limited by clock speeds and rops + space on die for more rops.
We could see a 9600gt performing not far off a 9800gtx.
Either way, what seems to have delayed ATi, which was trying to get the 2900xt out on 65nm, and what seems to be killing nvidia adding more real usable power is their move to 65nm.
It would seem to me that more than anything, its the 65nm process thats to blame more than anything else. simply not a big enough drop, the technology isn't there to use it that well, or god knows what.
As for the x2 vs a gtx, it would be fair if thats what prices dictate. ATI moving to a dual core card means nothing, it means they adapted to the market. a need for cheaper cards, a push for "green" running, and so they switched up, hit a 55nm process with incredibly good prices, decent speeds and low power. It would have taken them a lot longer to make a double sized core and it would have been hard to make, blooming big. they did what they needed too.
With the 9600gt, the pricing, that there will be a 9800gt most likely, maybe a gts, the gtx isn't going to come in any cheaper than £200 is it. The X2 after prices drops that ATi introduced is aimed at the £220-245 bracket(have to see where everyone puts it and how much nvidia sells and where it settles in price). A 9800gtx2 will almost certainly be faster, but well £250, £300 maybe? then the simple question is, other than crysis, which no one is playing, can the 3870x2 perform more than fine? yes, would i pay an extra £30-130 for performance i would only see in a game i thought sucked and won't play again? no.
I think as we hit smaller process's, in reality there needs to be newer tech to counteract signal interference, power usage and so on. The future looks certain to be multiple cores. the sooner both companies really use crossfire/sli as standard as the top end card the sooner you'd hope they'll come up with crossfire chips on die/card and drivers to scale much better than they do now. hopefully.
A native multiple core chip though has the advantage of stupidly faster core to core communication, which should massively help scaling issues and compatibility with some games.
frankly i can see nvidia putting 2x9600gt's on a card for the 9800gtx2, to keep it competitively priced as i think it might not make a huge amount of difference. in which case, you could just buy 2 9600gt's now.
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