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Supposed First DirectX 11 Benchmark Released for Download

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:15:45 -0500

If you have a shiny new DirectX 11 card taking up space in your case, this may be of interest to you. The first DX11-specific benchmark has been released by Unigine Corp. The demo is called “Heaven” and runs on the company’s proprietary Unigine engine.

Unigine have released two previous GPU benchmarking demos called “Sanctuary” and “Tropics”. Like those programs, the new DX11 benchmark is available for free. Heaven has support for OpenGL, DirectX 9, 10, and 11. So regardless of your hardware, it should run as long as you have at least 256 MB of VRAM. There’s even support for AMD’s new Eyefinity technology.

You will, however, need .NET framework 2.0, OpenAL, and your card’s latest stable drivers. If you want to take your card for a spin, you can get the Heaven demo here.

ATI Graphics Scout Gets Debugged

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:50:42 -0500

AMD's new ATI Graphics Scout is a visual wizard designed to help you find the "perfect" ATI GPU for your needs. Graphics Scout provides feature selections in four categories: video applications, pictures and photos, games, and office applications. Select the most important feature or features in some or all categories, and Graphics Scout (which resembles a Star Wars R2-D2 with a flat-panel upgrade) suggests a suitable match.

Earlier this week, The Inquirer complained that Graphics Scout was pushing out some questionable suggestions. Thankfully, as an update to the original story indicates, ATI's been making some changes, and in our tests today, it made recommendations that make sense:

When we selected video editing, photo editing, DirectX 10+ gaming, and Microsoft Office applications, it suggested the top-of-the-line HD 4890.
When we changed our mind and selected big-screen TV connections with Blu-Ray support, photo viewing and editing, online gaming, and web browsing, Graphics Scout suggested the mid-line HD 4550.

The ability to move up and down the GPU line to see what upgrading or downgrading the recommended selection is handy, as is the ability to compare any other card with the recommended card. For its intended UK audience, Graphics Scout is great, as it provides links to various UK dealers. For users in other countries, it's still useful, but you'll need to use a site such as Cnet's Shopper.com to find actual products for sale. Take Graphics Scout for a spin and tell us if you think it's on the money.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

Will Smith — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:00:00 -0600

We’ve made no secret of the fact that we love the pulse-pounding speed that ATI’s Radeon 4870 X2 boards deliver, but there’s a new speed king in town—the GeForce GTX 295. On paper, the two GPUs on the 295 fall somewhere between the GTX 260 and GTX 280, but this board delivers a crushing performance blow to ATI’s fastest part.

The GTX 295’s GPUs feature 896MB of GDDR3 memory and the full complement of 240 shader cores previously seen only on GTX 280 boards (current GTX 260 boards have just 216 shader units). However, the core and memory clocks are a touch below those of the single-GPU GTX 280 boards—576MHz and 999MHz respectively. Additionally, the new GPU is Nvidia’s first to step down from a 65nm to a more efficient 55nm process. The benefit? Mega-speed in one double-wide card. Even with the process-size shrink, the card requires a new mid-mounted cooler—that’s right, the heatsink/fan is sandwiched between two boards, each with its own GPU and memory.

Naturally, the card is outfitted with all the accoutrements we’ve come to expect, including a pair of dual-link DVI ports and a single HDMI port. Like the rest of the cards in the GeForce G200 series, the GTX 295 also supports general-purpose GPU computing, using both the open OpenCL platform as well as Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA platform. While we’re optimistic about the promise of general-purpose GPU computing, we don’t see any proprietary API gaining enough traction with consumers and developers to make a long-term impact. The same is true for Nvidia’s PhysX accelerated physics API. With just a handful of games supporting PhysX acceleration, and then only for superficial eye candy, we’ll continue to base our purchasing recommendations on performance in popular games rather than proprietary APIs that may or may not gain mainstream popularity.

Finally, the boys in green strike back at the 4870 X2

So where does that leave the GeForce GTX 295? With this board, Nvidia has shown that it can build kick-ass technology and doesn’t need to hide behind proprietary APIs to protect and expand its market. The GTX 295 is demonstrably faster than the Radeon 4870 X2 in every benchmark we use. And that makes our recommendation easy, without even considering PhysX or CUDA. Expect a street price of around $500.

Super RV770 in Diamond's Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition

Chris Moody — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:19:36 -0500

The buzz is flying about AMD’s “Super R770” and the possibility that it will snatch the GPU crown from Nvidia’s GeForce GTX series. As Editor-in Chief, Will Smith reported at the end of June, “ATI eschewed the huge, hot monolithic GPU for a more compact, but modular core. With twin goals of decreased power consumption and more efficiency per die area, ATI looks poised to dethrone Nvidia” and later said, “The Radeon 4870 runs nearly as fast as a GTX 280 in most benchmarks for about 60% of the cost.”

The "Super RV770" will arrive with water-cooling pre-installed and an unlocked BIOS, which enables the GPU to be pushed all the way to 950 MHz and the memory to 4.8 GT/s According to some sources, you may be able to push the GPU beyond 1 GHz, using TEC elements, and keep the temperature of GPU low. Don’t look for this unit in retail; it is an AIB/OEM-only product.

So how long do you have to wait? Diamond already has one ready to come out, the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition. According to TechPowerUp.com Smoothcreations will be offering a water cooled edition soon in it’s systems. Check this out from Diamond's press release:

The HD 4870 is a smoking gun dual slot card, PCIE 2.0, with 512MB of DDR5 memory and a clock speed of 800 MHz. The memory speed is 1100 MHz and is designed with 800 stream processors. The HD 4870 provides plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX™ upgradeability with up to quad-GPU support. Continuing with ATI’s Power Play and 55nm processing technology, this card is the fastest and efficient. “The Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition was clocked to kick some ass”. We didn’t just want a fast card out in the market, we wanted the fastest card that could kick the living daylights and bust some performance records, say Mario Gastelum, Director of Product Development & Engineering. “we wanted a card that kicked the competitions teeth into the curb”, and that’s exactly what our engineers accomplished”. “The firmware was custom designed to enable end users to go beyond the normal over clocked speeds and allow them to push their cards for higher performance via the catalyst control center.” The GPU’s custom firmware has been unlocked to push cards to GPU settings of up to 950 Mhz and Memory of up 1200 Mhz.

We’ll be the judge of whether it “kicks some ass” or not, thank you very much. I certainly like what I am hearing about it, and I can’t wait to see how it compares to Nvidia’s GTX 280. ATI Fanbois may have something to crow about at last.

EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC Edition

Michael Brown — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:06:23 -0500

There’s never been a better time to be in the market for a new videocard. Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT, represented here by EVGA’s overclocked SSC Edition, is one reason this is true.

We awarded AMD’s Radeon 3870 a Kick Ass award in our January 2008 issue when it was selling for $260. When the 9600 GT hit the market, the average street price for cards based on the 3870 plunged to $206. EVGA’s implementation of the 9600 GT was selling for $215 when we benchmarked it, but the average price for cards based on that part was just $182.

The 9600 GT is based on Nvidia’s G94 GPU, a cut-down derivative of the G92 that forms the more powerful 8800 GT and the even faster 8800 GTS (the version with 512MB of memory, not the ones with 640MB and 320MB frame buffers). By “cut down,” we mean all three chips share the same basic architecture, but the 9600 GT has 64 stream processors compared to 112 procs in the 8800 GT and 128 in the 8800 GTS.

EVGA upped the core clock to 740MHz (from a stock 650MHz) and the 512MB of memory to 975MHz (from a stock 900MHz). Nvidia’s ace in the hole is its ability to run the stream processors at a higher clock rate than the core, which helps explain how the 64 processors in the 9600 GT can outrun the 320 stream processors in AMD’s Radeon HD 3870. EVGA bumped them from a stock 1.625GHz to 1.835GHz.

If your interests lie more in film than gaming, you’ll be pleased to know that the 9600 GT has the PureVideo HD circuitry that allows it to offload from the host CPU all the decoding work needed to play high-definition movies on Blu-ray and soon-to-be-obscure HD DVD discs.

MSI R3870 X2 T2DIG

Michael Brown — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:54:01 -0600

AMD’s Radeon HD 3870 is a fine GPU for the money. It doesn’t outperform Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX, and it lags far behind the extravagant 8800 Ultra, but it does deliver a phenom— er, make that a tremendous price/performance ratio.

So what happens when you put two of these parts—each with its own 512MB frame buffer—on a single board? You get a Radeon R3870 X2. The result isn’t as spectacular as you’d expect, but MSI’s implementation delivers plenty of bang for the buck. This card isn’t an Ultra killer by any means, but with a price tag of just $450, it doesn’t need to be.

There’s nothing mysterious about the R3870 X2—the two GPUs are exactly the same as those on a single-GPU card. Each one has 320 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface, support for AMD’s Unified Video Decoder (for offloading HD and Blu-ray video-decoding from the host CPU), and dual-link DVI with HDCP on both links (to support the native resolution of 30-inch LCD panels).

If you care as much about high-definition video decoding as you care about gaming, you probably know that neither Nvidia’s 8800 GTX nor its 8800 Ultra supports those last two features. And unlike Nvidia’s new GPUs that do fully offload HD video decoding, the R3870 X2 supports the incremental updates to DirectX: Direct3D 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 (although we believe this support to be unimportant right now).

MSI set the GPUs’ cores to run at 828MHz and the memory at 955MHz, a fraction faster than AMD’s reference-design specs of 825MHz and 900MHz, respectively. As with AMD’s 3870 X2 reference design, MSI’s board has two 512MB frame buffers, one for each GPU. AMD’s reference design and MSI’s implementation both use GDDR3 memory, compared to the GDDR4 memory found on single-GPU 3870 cards. AMD tells us there’s nothing about the design that would prevent its board partners from using GDDR4 memory or from increasing the size of the frame buffers (although we suspect there wouldn’t be a tremendous difference in performance from either design change).

A PCI Express 1.1 bridge chip sitting between the two processors effectively creates CrossFire on the card (with 16 bi-directional lanes for each GPU) without the need for a CrossFire chipset on the motherboard. There is, however, a single interconnect that will allow you to build a CrossFireX rig with four 3870 GPUs onboard, but that does require a CrossFire chipset. The board itself supports PCI Express 2.0, but AMD tells us that putting a PCI Express 2.0 bridge chip between the two GPUs would have delayed the product and wouldn’t have yielded much of a performance boost anyway.

Having all the components on a single board strikes us as a much more elegant solution than sandwiching boards together, which Nvidia did with its since-discontinued 7950 GX2. It also allows AMD to use a single cooler, which is located at the very end of the board and exhausts outside the case, for both GPUs and both frame buffers.

You’ll need both the six-pin and eight-pin power connectors if you intend to overclock a 3870 X2 board.

Having a single fan not only renders the card nearly as quiet as a single-GPU configuration but also avoids the need for twice the electrical power. The R3870 has two auxiliary power sockets onboard, one six-pin and one eight-pin, but only the six-pin socket is needed for normal operation. If you intend to overclock the board, you will need to send power to both of them. In our tests, our 3870 X2 test system consumed about 170 watts at idle and around 275 watts under load, compared to the 3870’s 117 watts at idle and 208 watts under load.

We periodically update the games we use for videocard benchmarking, but we’ve stuck with the Shader Model 3.0 tests in the artificial benchmark 3DMark06 as a means of providing continuity. The results we’ve seen with the 3870 X2, however, indicate that the benchmark has finally outlived its usefulness: The 2x performance boost it delivers there doesn’t jibe with the frame rates we saw in actual games. In fact, there was virtually no performance scaling in Crysis at all with the 3870 X2 when compared to a single Radeon 3870.

The 3870 X2 is a good solution, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem with dual-, tri-, and quad-GPU systems: Their performance doesn’t scale with every game—including high-profile titles like Crysis that you’d buy these cards for in the first place.

HIS Radeon HD 3870

Michael Brown — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:04:13 -0600

This is the second Radeon HD 3870 we’ve reviewed, and we like it just as much as the first. It doesn’t outrun Nvidia’s G92-based 8800 GTS 512 (reviewed above), but it’s a great value among midrange videocards.

This model is based strictly on AMD’s reference design, so it doesn’t feature HIS’s IceQ 3 cooling technology. But the fan on the double-slot cooler is plenty quiet for any application, save deployment in a home-theater environment. This is made possible by the die shrink and 55nm manufacturing process AMD uses to build the Radeon HD 3870, which consumes much less power and generates considerably less heat than its predecessors.

The Radeon HD 3870 supports PCI Express 2.0, but it also boasts several features that Nvidia can’t match at any of its price points. One of the most interesting of these is an HDMI adapter that plugs into the card’s DVI output. The GPU can send the 16-bit PCM stereo or 5.1-channel digital audio stream from a DVD, HD DVD, or Blu-ray disc right alongside the digital video from the same source.

If your display is equipped with good-quality speakers and HDMI inputs (or if you’re using an A/V receiver with HDMI inputs and outputs), this adapter can eliminate a few cables from your configuration. As innovative as this feature might be, we think few people will actually take advantage of it. Most of these cards will be used in gaming PCs—which generally include monitors with DVI inputs and speakers with analog-audio inputs. The 3870’s support for Direct3D 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 is equally esoteric in light of game developers’ widespread reluctance to embrace even DirectX 10.0.

The benchmark charts reveal that the Radeon HD 3870 can’t outrun Nvidia’s G92-based GeForce 8800 GTS, but since it’s $85 cheaper, it doesn’t need to.

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT SSC

Michael Brown — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 13:12:41 -0600

Previous generations of Nvidia GPUs (AMD’s, too) presented buyers with a difficult choice: You could get great 3D performance for gaming or you could offload high-definition video decoding from the host CPU, but you couldn’t have both. Nvidia’s 8800 GT not only changes that situation, it does so at a competitive price.

The 8800 GT delivers stronger 3D performance than the industry’s previous sweet spot (the 8800 GTS with a 320MB frame buffer), it delivers more memory than that board, and it clubs AMD’s far-more expensive Radeon HD 2900 XT over the head for good measure (although AMD has responded with the Radeon HD 3870, see page 80). Nvidia managed to cram 754 million transistors into this beast thanks to a die shrink and a 65nm fabrication process (previous 8800-series GPUs were manufactured using a 90nm process).

The new part packs 112 stream processors, 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and a 256-bit memory interface into a GPU that requires a single-slot cooler (the fan howls like a banshee on startup but goes whisper-quiet as soon as Windows launches). Reference-design boards will run their cores at 600MHz and their memory at 900MHz; EVGA pumps these numbers to 700MHz and a cool 1GHz, respectively. The company also commands a premium price for the speed boost: While the average price for more typical boards was running around $270, this SSC Edition was fetching $330 at press time.

As mentioned above, the new GPU is capable of offloading the entire HD decode process from the host CPU, and it also provides HDCP decryption on both DVI links. This latter feature renders the chip capable of displaying Blu-ray and HD DVD movies at the native resolution of a 30-inch LCD. It’s also compliant with PCI Express 2.0 (see the White Paper on page 72 for more details). We didn’t test this card in that type of motherboard—no one’s shipping one in an SLI configuration just yet—but the new architecture offers double the bandwidth of PCI Express 1.1 (8GB/s in each direction).

AMD moved to GDDR4 memory several iterations back, but Nvidia continues to stick with GDDR3—and the decision doesn’t seem to be costing its cards anything in terms of performance. Interestingly, AMD has retreated from its 512-bit memory interface, building a 256-bit interface into the 3870 (same as the 8800 GT). But there are still two other features that could hold the 8800 GT back when it comes to competing with AMD’s Radeon 3870: First, these cards have only one SLI connector. Nvidia’s other cards, from the 8800 GTS on up, have two SLI connectors, even though only one of them is used in dual-card mode. Why worry about it? Nvidia will inevitably debut an SLI version that enables you to run more than two GPUs on one motherboard (remember quad SLI?), and that’s why the other cards have two SLI connectors. You’ll never be able to run more than two 8800 GTs in one box.

The other advantage AMD will soon offer is the ability to run more than one monitor in CrossFire mode, although that will likely require AMD’s new RD790 chipset (which hasn’t been released). Nvidia’s SLI system shuts off the second monitor when running in SLI mode (as does the current version of CrossFire).

While we’re looking at the future, we should also consider the fact that, unlike the Radeon HD 3870, the 8800 GT does not support Microsoft’s Direct3D 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. Given the tepid response that most developers have given Windows Vista, and Microsoft’s continued insistence on tying DX10’s fortunes to its new OS, we don’t think this shortcoming matters much at all.

It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to unabashedly recommend a videocard priced this low. We just couldn’t get excited about the anemic 8800 GTS; and until now, AMD has had nothing meaty to offer. But the 8800 GT is an absolutely fantastic value, delivering great gaming performance and features that can’t be found in Nvidia’s higher-end boards. If you can swing the price, you’ll get a better gaming experience from a GeForce 8800 GTX or an Ultra (although we don’t think the latter is worth its premium); but if you’re rolling with a lower budget, the 8800 GT is a slam-dunk winner.