nVidia (my favorite GPU producer) released the GeForce 9600 today, signaling the birth of the next generation of graphics cards, the 9 series. The 9’s are nVidia’s second generation of DirectX 10 GPUs, and are slated to become of the most powerful cards on the market.
Currently nVidia’s top-notch cards are still the GeForce 8800’s, but the 9600 is supposed to be a mainstream card, not for enthusiasts and gamers. When the 9800 debuts, it will most likely reign supreme in the world of GPUs.
This, of course, doesn’t benefit my project in any way, since all new cards are PCI-Express only, no AGP or PCI love whatsoever. Oh well, they’re still fun to drool over.
Hmm. I don’t see many compromises to make this a ‘mainstream’ card. If you look at the low-end 8800GT cards and compare them to the same 9600GT in that price class, they’re nearly identical. They’re close enough in spec (for any average person) that I’d be willing to look at some 9600 cards later on. Both have 512 meg board mem and the all-important 256-bit memory bus (the 7800, my current card, is 256-bit, but everything after that until the 8800 was 128 or 192 – wtf?).
The important thing to note about the new card series, though, is that they should be using the new, cooler, chipset (same as the 8800GTS series, which is actually someplace between the GTX and GT in power *roll*). That would be the real draw to someone like myself, who’d like to keep the heat down in the summer. 😉
–TSK
Source: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3234
Hmm. I don’t see many compromises to make this a ‘mainstream’ card. If you look at the low-end 8800GT cards and compare them to the same 9600GT in that price class, they’re nearly identical. They’re close enough in spec (for any average person) that I’d be willing to look at some 9600 cards later on. Both have 512 meg board mem and the all-important 256-bit memory bus (the 7800, my current card, is 256-bit, but everything after that until the 8800 was 128 or 192 – wtf?).
The important thing to note about the new card series, though, is that they should be using the new, cooler, chipset (same as the 8800GTS series, which is actually someplace between the GTX and GT in power *roll*). That would be the real draw to someone like myself, who’d like to keep the heat down in the summer. 😉
–TSK
Source: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3234