Can th 7950GTX really be upgraded to an 8800??

That's a quote from a topic in the "what notebook to buy" forum. So if I am reading this correctly, if I bought a dx10 game at best buy or somewhere, it would still play on the 7950 card? What does the poster mean by "but not hardware like the 8XXX series"?

And also if I read this correctly, it is saying that the 7950 and 8800 are interchangable on a nb? In other words, the one could be upgraded to the other?? If that is true, how safe is it? Could something like the 17" Sager handle an 8800 card when it was orriginally built to handle the 7950?

 

well the 5790 is mxm-iv, which means thats other mxm-iv MAY fit in them, so as of now, yes, the 8800 may be able to upgrade into the 5790, other motherboards need to have MXM-IV to be able to do this, perhaps MXM-II or III will allow for it too but dont know for sure

 

The Sager website says that yes, you will be able to upgrade to 8 series cards down the road. I don't know if I believe that, but it's nice to think that we can. And no, 7 series cards don't run DX10 but that shouldn't be an issue for a while as most games will allow you to choose between DX9 and DX10.

 

Yes, the Clevo M570ru uses MXM-HE, upgradeable gpu...

No games will be unplayable with a DX9 card... at least not for many years!
(Im not talking performance-wise)

 

On Xotic PC, it also says the sager's 8700 GT card could be upgraded. So that card (supposedly) is also upgradable to an 8800 card?

 

Well, the 8800 isnt out yet... but chances are its going to be available in mxm-he... prices are not known tho

 

The 7950 will not be able to process DirectX 10, but for games that have the support built in it will kick down to a DirectX 9 mode (but that's only if the game was built to run with DirectX 9 as well - and at some point down the road some of the companies will not make DX9 coded games any longer).

As to the interchangeability of the cards that is still up in the air. Primarily because the 8800 card hasn't been released yet, and the mobile specs/requirements are unknown. In addition many companies embed the 8x00 chip on their own cards, and you'd have to buy a chip that is also built on one of their cards to replace it.

 

No games will be released without DX9 support for many many years (at least 2-3 years).

Since the M570ru uses MXM-HE, it will be upgradeable because there will be new MXM-HE cards released.

 

Benchmarks are a funny thing. Clevo supposedly said the 8700m was slower and Nvidia says it outperforms the 7950. What were they benchmarking exactly, would be the question to ask.


Whoever wrote that is speaking as a 7950 fanboy right there. No 7 series card is "DX10 compatible." Yes, they can play games as DX9 and the game might have DX10 effects that won't be used, but then if the card doesn't use those effect, it's not DX10 compatible, now is it? I'd expect DX10 only games within 2 years, as my guess. That would give most gamers a chance to flip into Vista, DX10.

Can it be upgraded to an 8800? Again, I don't like his post. No one knows exactly what the 8800 will be and what specs it will have. Only engineers at Nvidia know, and I don't think they're posting here on the board Maybe those sites just mean you're 8700m can eventually be upgraded to an 9700m, for example but not to an 8950m? There is a lot of uncertainty about what you'll be able to do and what exactly Nvidia will offer, so I would be very careful buying based on the promise of upgrading.

Edit: I will say this. If you want to game, get a desktop. You can build one far better than any notebook out there, and far cheaper than the high-end brand name notebooks like Alienware. It gives you the chance to upgrade over the years. You can add speaker systems even for enhanced gameplay. So yea, but a desktop and use the extra money you have left over to purchase a medium range notebook which will serve your mobile needs (for work, school, etc) and allow you to moderately play games while traveling.

Spending two times as much on dual 7950 cards that likely get drushed by a desktop card just doesn't seem worth it, especially considering you have to pay more to get it.

And in my opinion if you MUST have a gaming desktop, this isn't the time to buy one. Wait until the first high-end DX10 cards come out, along the lines of 8800m, 8950m. Don't worry about upgrading...imagine what it might cost to replace those dual 7950s with 8950s even if you were able to do so? DX10 is here now and gamers should prepare for it with DX10 cards.

 

Do you really think Nvidia will say "Dont buy our newest product! stick with the old one, its still better!"

"DX10 Compatible" as in "You still can play DX10 games... you're not unable to play any future games... and yes, its in DX9 mode... so what?"

I doubt there will be any DX10 only game until the 7950GTX is just not fast enough for it.

And people sometimes need a laptop so they can carry it around...

 

So is there still no word yet on when the 8800 is going to come out?
Do you guys think it will be available on nb's around the $2000 range, or will it be more for $2500+ comps?

 

They took long enough for the 8700, keep waiting.

 

And Clevo would tell you that their cheaper card outperforms their more expensive card if it were true? As far as I've seen, the 7950 is more expensive than the 8700. There is less incentive for companies to sell you the cheaper card.

Furthermore, the 8700m isn't designed to replace the 7950 GO, Nvidia isn't trying to market it as such. And I imagine Nvidia knows more about their architecture than Clevo or you for that matter

Stretch is however you want to, the 7950 is NOT DX10 compatible and never will be. I never said it would't play DX9 games. It doesn't play DX10. Calling it DX10 compatible is misleading and a pure trick for 7950 owners to stretch the truth.

And so what? It means you're knowingly buying outdated hardware, that's all. And if you buy it now, what do you think happens 2 years from now?

FYI: Desktop 8600 isn't more expensive than the last generation 7950 card. Same example in notebooks. Selling the newest card doesn't mean they are making more money off of it. Higher-end new gen cards still sell for me.

 

No word at all. No announcements even to its existance. My advice is to not buy anything until you absolutely have to, and hopefully by then, the 8800 or higher is available.

 

about 2-3 weeks ago, the 8700 was still more expensive than the 7950GTX, they must have lowered the price because of the poor performance...

Saying the 7950GTX is not compatible with DX10 makes people believe they can't play games DX10 games at all, It makes them believe they wont be able to play future games, which isnt the case.

Clevo released the benchmarks... and it shows a great difference.

the 7950GTX is far from being outdated... it still smokes the 8600 and 8700, which are not high end GPUs. The story will be different when high end 8 series will be released.

 

And maybe resellers are just getting stuck with their 8700 because every1 buys the 7950GTX. So they put the price down.

 

Nvidia should just skip fabbing a 8800m series and just make a mobile version of their new 98xx series. The new 98xx series will have a nice die shrink to 65nm along with some other goodies. Not to mention the 8800 series poor performance in the DX10-slap-on titles we have today. That is, if the rumors are to believed.

 

Why would the 8600 be more expensive? Its very far behind the 7950GTX and its a low end card... You cant base yourself solely on the fact that one starts with a 8 and the other one starts with a 7... and that one is DX10 capable. Thats from from being important.

 

Hah...well I can't help it if people don't read the game box, but whenever DX10 games are available as DX10 exclusive, the 7950GTX won't work, and therefore, people need to understand that the 7 series doesn't support DX10. Not compatible. It works with DX9 games and the DX10 transition in PC games has already started with Bioshock coming out and the patch add-ons in other titles.

It is also sort of counter productive because you pay top dollar for the "best" gaming card out there and it won't be able to play these new games in their full detail. It sort of loses the point of it, right?

My questioning Clevo benchmarks isn't any different than you questioning Nvidia's benchmarks for the same reasons, incentive to charge higher prices. A recent configuration was showing me the 7950 was being charged like $400 to add a 2nd one. I haven't seen any 8700m configurations so it's hard to say what the price is of it, but I doubt it exceeds that $400 price point.

 

DX10 exclusive games wont hit the market for a very long time... why would a company throw away most of its market?

Also, even the 8600GT wont be able to display all the DX10 eye candy... not powerful enough, so there's really no point of getting a DX10 card IMO. I rather have high FPS than have all the eye candy and get very low FPS...

The way I see it:
Do you want a low end card that has the possibility to display more video effects but not the power to do so?
Or do you want a high end card that can't display the extra video effect but has all the power you need for about 2 years?

 

Hah...we agree on that last statement That's why I think it's best to wait a bit. In a few months, the 8800 or higher will be out and doing amazing stuff. 9 series rumors for the winter are also on the boards as you probably saw. If those are true, the DX10 experience will probably really kick in on the 9 cards. I'm really interested in what the 9600GT and 9600m might be able to do.

Some have speculated the 8 series might get stronger with DX10 experienced developers too. This could be very true, in which case, along with driver support, the 8600m would itself become a bit better.

 

Yea but the question is... Will the 9 series be available in MXM-HE? Or is it just going to be the 8 series and a new MXM will be required for the 9 series?

I would suppose they were bright enough to make MXM-HE future-proof for at least 2 years... but who know..?

 

They should make the graphics card something like an express card slot where you can just push it in to upgrade...haha. There is too much uncertainty still since you never know if or to what exactly you'll be able to upgrade to or how much it will cost to do so.

Until they perfect that, and they have improved though, desktops are always a more attractive gaming option.

Supposedly some quad core laptops are showing up though, so that's pretty cool.

 

The Sager 5790 we were looking at has the 8700GT card. How much better is that than 8600GT? Would it be worth it to wait for the 8800 card for this computer?

 

Ive read a post on this forum saying that the 8700GT is only an overclocked 8600... but that's to be confirmed.

 

thats basically true.

i mean, it has a larger heatsink and fits the larger interface only. so its not just an overclocked 8700m gt. but the specifications are the same aside from the clocks.

 

So the conclusion of this thread is, that if you can wait for HighEnd DX10 Cards wait - if you need your Gaming Notebook now - buy it with a Go7950GTX which can still handle with all games within about 2 years. (Even if they are DX10, they will all have a DX9 option. With the DX9 option you cant have the DX10 effects, but you still can play the game...)

 

The 7950GTX can striclty only play Directx 9 games, not Directx10. Notebooks like the Sager NP5790 have a mxm graphics card. So they can eventually be upgraded. But a Dell m1710 for instance isn't mxm, which means you couldn't ever upgrade it to a 8700gt- 8800 and so on..............

 

See, that makes people believe they cant play the games... but they still can, just without the extra effects of DX10.

 

games that come out for the next x months will have dx 9 and dx 10 rendering paths.

 

1-2 years probably.

 

Most of today's games still support DX8

 

I don't know about that. Pick a game that came out the last year and let's look at the requirements. I bet it says DX9. Games 3 years ago said DX9

Especially any of the big name games. Let's pick, say, Supreme Commander and Oblivion and go check at EB Games online.

 

Isn't the 8700 GT supposed to be like a DX10 version of the Go7900?

 

Depends who you ask....Nvidia states their benchmarks show it exceeds the 7950GTX and is now the strongest laptop card available.

Some people argue that Nvidia is lying (especially 7950GTX owners) but to be honest, why wouldn't Nvidia want to keep charging $350-$400 for single 7950GTX if they were calling it "obsolete merchandise?" The "incentive to lie" argument doesn't add up in my opinion.

But as to your question, I'd say it easily matches and/or surpasses the 7900GO card. I think almost everyone would agree on that.

 

Even if you don't want to believe it, Real World benchmarking i.e. Gaming scores have proven the 7950GTX to be ahead of the 8700M GT. Believe it or not but Real World Gaming = Real Facts.

 

DX9 has been around for well over 4 years now, and many games still support older DX versions. Any Source-engine game can go back to DX7 (Half-Life 2: Episode II included), and games like Call of Duty 2 and Call of Juarez support DX7. Rome: Total War and Tomb Raider: Anniversary can be played in DX8. And that's just games I could think of off the top of my head. Point being, not every game is DX9-only right now. Also, for many recent games there are no non-DX9 video cards that are powerful enough to play them anyway, so there would be no point in adding older DX support.

Few people have DX10 video cards (although that number grows daily), and even fewer have DX10 cards and Vista. Look at the latest Valve hardware survey and see that the number of people with DX10 cards and Vista is less than 2% (of an already relatively small market). It would be financial suicide to release a DX10-only game anytime in the forseeable future. By the time there are DX10-only games, the 7950 GTX won't be powerful enough to play them anyway.

 

ya guys forget something here, it might not be a dx 10 comp card but... if you have vista and dx 10 installed it will still run games in dx 10 mode, just with most of the cool eye candy missing, it was the same thing back in the dx 8 - 9 days. hence the reason ya can run dx 9 games only on really old dx8 cards, they will run slow and not be nearly as nice looking but they will run ( cept some wierd cards ) the dx 10 should kinda have a legecy mode built in to it to support older cards even if they dont support all of the dx 10 features


but then again I could be completely wrong, I just know that I play dx 6 or less games on my dx 9 card and with dx9 installed, and I also know someone who has a dx 8 card but has dx9 installed and plays newer dx9 games ?

 

That's true. I'm using Vista, so the software DX version I'm using is DX10. If I played some theoretical future DX10 game, it would probably play, but there might be some weird glitches and such. For example, when you try to run Oblvion with a non-DX9 card, it looks like this:

And you have to use the Oldblivion mod to insert custom home-made shaders that are compatible with older DX versions.

Or when Half-Life 2 Episode 1 was first released, there was a glitch where the spiffy looking reactor core:

appeared as a wireframe if you didn't have an SM3.0-compatible video card (they patched it shortly after to add shaders for the reactor core that older cards could display).

 

Although you guys have DX10 software with vista vista resorts to DX9L to render DX9 games and below and only that. Just because you have the software does not mean you can run the game if you dont even have the hardware. Ex: When the Lost Planet DX10/9 demo came out I tried running the DX10 demo because i had vista and It refused to run, giving me a rendering error. DX9 ran fine.

 

According to who?

http://www.tech2.com/india/news/graphics/nvidia-launches-geforce-8700m-gt-mobile-gpu/7042/0

The GeForce 8700M GT will be the top chip in NVIDIA’s Mobile stable replacing the existing GeForce Go 7950 GTX. NVIDIA claims 3DMark05 scores of 10,371 with the GeForce 8700M GT on default settings. In comparison the GeForce Go 7950 GTX scores 9,395 in 3DMark05. The GeForce 8700M GT is also 27-34% faster than the GeForce Go 7950 GTX in Half Life 2: Lost Coast and Far Cry.

Believe it or not, but there are some stats to back it up, even if you don't want to believe it. I don't blame you....if I had a $400 laptop card in there, or two of them, I'd be the same way. I don't have either the GO 7950 or the 8700m, so I'm actually a pretty neutral source on this. Therefore, I look at the benchmarks and the performance in real games.

Needless to say, I imagine it being much better when you apply 3dmark06 because the 8 series has newer capabilities built-in.

As a prospective buyer right now, I wouldn't buy either one because of the huge problem with each one respectively.

Ohh and someone who posts 3fmark benchmarks in his sig, I would think, does care about benchmarks and not just real world performance What scares me is that comparing that article to your numbers, it shows that the 3dmark06 score must've dropped dramatically from the 05 score, because in your SLI setup, you barely exceed the 05 score listed in that article. The other thing to infer though is that SLI is simply unreliable and poorly implemented right now (which I think is true for desktops too).

 

Not sure who is right but you could easily compare both by looking at the performance of the desktop 7950GT (same as Go 7950GTX) and the desktop 8600 GT (same as 8700M GT) since they have the exact same specs. And the 7950GT is easily better than the 8600 GT in real games... http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=710&model2=855&chart=277

 

On what resolution? What notebook setup? Of course a 8700 is close to a 7950 on low resolution...
IMHO those are no stats to back up anything.
And 3dmark06 is a biased benchmark for DX10 cards...
But that's only what I think

 

Good lord, as far as unbiased, you are far from it. And as far as my scores those are 3DMark06, and 06 is about 50% less in scores than 05. I.e. I get 16k in 3DMark05 which about a 50% increase between having 1 7950GTX vs having 2. Which if you know anything about SLI, 50% is a good increase.

And if your not going to buy either, then why the fark do you care? And why are you bothering to comment? Just trolling?

Again, if you believe it or not the 7950GTX does outperform the 8700M GT. This becomes more true at higher resolutions. 128 bit bus < 256 bit bus.

GeForce Go 7950 GTX
Memory Interface.......Memory Bandwidth(GB/sec)...Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec)....Vertex Shaders....Pixel Shaders...Core Clock (MHz)..Memory Clock (Mhz)
...... 256-bit........................ 44.8................................. 13.8........................... 48...................16.................575......................700
GeForce 8700M GT
Memory Interface.......Memory Bandwidth(GB/sec)...Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec)....Vertex Shaders....Pixel Shaders...Core Clock (MHz)..Memory Clock (Mhz)
...... 128-bit........................ 25.6................................. 10.0........................... 16...................16.................625.......................800

For a 17" laptop the best bet IMO is to wait until Christmas when the 8800's are release and hope that they are made available for your particular notebook. If you just have to have DX10 gaming atm, then the 8700M GT is the best choice for you. If you don't care about DX10 then the 7950GTX is currently the best choice.

Nuff said.

 

In real world gaming the 7950 gtx is still king period.

 

just to show that at least some DX10 games also have DX9.0c support, here's a thread from the Bioshock forum showing the system requirements

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1579&highlight=system+requirements

 

@ sasanac
That's old news
Every so called DX10 game will have DX9 support for some years.
One might even say the DX9 support/optimization will be better than DX10 sup/opt for some time...

 

lol yep it is but just helps proves a point to some who've posted in this thread who might have missed it! and yup I reckon you could be right about DX9.0c support etc being better than DX10 support etc for a while.. it always takes time for new technology to bed in.

 

isnt open gl out there to emulate the effects of DX10 in games like bioshock?