GEFORCE 8600..How Good will it be?????

Hi, iv started hearing rumours of the release of the Geforce 8600 in march.. There have benn "unofficial specs" released that look promising.. Has anyone looked deeply into this?.. as i am curious to see how it will perform beside the 7600.. And soon after the 8600 is released..so too will the "Geforce GO 8600"..

The Nvidia 7000 series were no major leap ahead of the 6000 series but the 8000 series looks to be a huge step forward with the 8800 outperforming the best of the DX9 cards comfortably! How will the full series of 8000 cards perform??
Should be interesting!

 

There's no way to determine how 'good' its performance will be if we know nothing about the card to begin with other than the model name.

 

Ah but Chaz you are forgetting the crystal ball we have here at notebook review, let me just clear the mists......

I see the performance of a geforce 4mx and the power consumption of two 8800GTXs

On a more serious note, some rumours have SUGGESTED half the speed of the 8800GTX for the desktop 8600 so I would GUESS a bit less than that, ofc this could easily be wrong.

 

i think it would be significantly better then the 7600 but FAR below the performance levels of half the 8800gtx

i mean, a single card scores 10k in 3dmark06

half of that is what a 7950gtx would score in a notebook

i'd think that the 8600 for the laptop would maybe be around the 3500-4500 range since unified shaders are much more efficient then the dedicated ones. but then again, nvidia's shaders are rather simple.


its all guesses and its pointless since we have no specs

 

The coolest thing coming out looks like the 8800 320mb version. Supposedly its going to come in at the $300 mark, maybe less.

 

I don't like how they didn't stick to video memory amounts like 128, 256, 512, 1024.

 

Because of the memory controller being 6x64bit (or 5x64bit) rather than 4x64bit. You cant get the traditional memory sizes on a 384bit (or 320bit) mem bus.

 

This usually reliable site http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=4834 has released the specs for the 8600 along with a few other sites that share the spec details.. Specs for the 8600 look good, but would anyone here be able to readily identify what they might translate into for performance?? What are the specs like compared to the 7600 for example..?

And i would be surprised if the 8600 would be VERY weak in comparison to the 8800.... There shouldnt be such a hugh gap in performance between a HIGH performance and a MIDRANGE card.
After all the 6600 was never "too" far behind the 6800 along with the 7600/7800..
The 7600 stood strong beside the 7800 on its release..!

 

Well numbers for the 8800GTX are out, those were the specs I was thinking about, these are not confirmed. Look at the numbers and it seems that with around half the shading power and half the memory bandwidth you are looking at half the performance of a similar architecture in this case about half as powerful as the 8800GTX for the 8600U which is inline with the 6600 to 6800 comparison you made.

 

True as the 8600 has half the Unified Shaders of the 8800GTX, despite that, the 8600 will still outperform a 7900GTX in DX9 mode no problem. I'm currently awaiting the specs of ATi's DX10 cards, as of right now, I do know that the first one is equiped with 64 shaders, but can outperform the 8800GTX with it's higher clock speeds in the core and shader pipelines if I'm correct.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm so excited to see what kind of mobile DX10 GPUs are in store for us notebook users in the oncoming months If these new GPUs as well as the notebooks coming out are all modular in design, then I may just forget about getting a desktop

 

*fingers crossed for go 8600 to miraculously beat all cards due to some freak accident at the manufacturing plant that incorported a technology for data to be carried by LIGHT itself*

 

Even if I know that these are all speculations and hypotheses, I think that a GeForce Go 8600 or a Mobility Radeon X2600 will perform better than a Go 7950GTX in DX10 only games, and slightly worse than a Go 7900GS in DX9 games.
This because a 7600 Go or a X1600 perform just like a 6800 Go in newer games (SM3.0), and slightly worse in the older ones.
My two cents.

 

This is a desktop card..?!...

 

DirectX 9 cards like the GeForce Go7900 can not and will never be able to run DirectX 10 games unfortunately. DirectX 10 cards like the GeForce 8 series can run DirectX 9 games though, just so we can clear this up.

 

8600 is a 256 bit interface card.

It would be about like a 7900 go. But it also might be in 17 inch only laptops

 

that would be totally ok with me!!

 

Just off the top of my head, I get the feeling that a realistic comparison between the G80's unified shader design and the old dedicated pipeline design would be a 4:1 ratio. As in, the GeForce 8800GTX with 128 scalar units would perform similarly to a 32 pipeline traditional clock give or take clock speed differences and memory contraints (and the GeForce 8800GTX is no doubt bandwidth constrained). So I would guess the 64 scalar shader implementation of the desktop 8600 Ultra would perform like a 16 pipeline DX9 card. That would put the desktop 8600 Ultra performing somewhere between the desktop 7800GS (16 pipeline) and desktop 7800GT (20 pipeline) but less than the desktop 7900GS.

For notebook though, I'm not sure if they could fit a mobile 8600 Ultra equivalent in the same power profile as the Go 7700 if they continue to use a 90nm process. 64 stream processors seem quite power hungry and a 256-bit memory interface doesn't help things either. If they stick to a 90nm process, they might make the 64 stream processor, 256-bit version something like a Go 7600GT, something more exclusive and make the 48 stream processor, 128-bit version the primary Go 8600 type or they might just stick with a 48 stream processor version just clock it higher than the desktop 8600GT (since 350MHz is very low) to make up the difference. Of course, it would just be better if they are launching at 80nm, but I don't think that's been confirmed yet.

 

Hope the 8600 lives up to its hype...I really need to replace my Geforce 2 card.

BTW: Not trying to hijack this thread or anything but whats going to be after the 9xxx series? 10xxx series?....

 

Using the performance difference between the 8800GTX and 8800GTS as a baseline, I'd expect 8600 Ultra performance to sit right around where the 7900 series is right now. This is also given nVidia's track record on mid-range parts.

Hopefully they'll clock the SOB high enough to make it a monster contender like they did with the 7600GT.

 

Obviously you can't have DX10 effects, but... if I disable DirectX10 effects?
Some DX9 games can run also on DX8 Cards, even if at really low framerates...
CoD2 has a DX7 setting...
I talked about "DX10 only" games to distinguish them from the first generation of DX10 games like Crysis.

 

I'd imagine the vast majority of games coming out in the next few years will have a DX9 version if they are DX10; the adoption rate for DX10 will probably be pretty slow.
A DirectX 9 card cannot run a DirectX 10 game no matter what you disable. DX10 is not backwards compatible. Jalf did a good job here of explaining it.