Lost in a Sea of Shaders and Stream Processors

What happened to the good old days of "Pixel Pipelines" Is there a GPU for dummies guide on here cos im confused.

Used to built rigs and always went ATi ( the age of the 9xxxPro/XT ) and knew which nvidia card was its equivelent.

9800Pro V 6600GT
X850XTPE v 6800ULTRA

It was easy..

Now its all oh this has GDDR2 not GDDR3. stream processors and ring busses...

I jsut bought a XPS 15" with the 8600GTM 256Mb.

Now from what I read its better than the 512Mb one becasue it has GDDR3 and out performs the likes of a Radeon X850XTPE and 6800Ultra and is roughly speaking the Equal of the 7800GT

Then theres the 8700GTM some say it leaves a 8600GTM for dead others say its pointless as ytou need a bigger laptop which has a higher res screen so and extra oomph is wasted because you have a higher native.

Is there some kind of graphics chart that accurately compares a lot of cards?

Forgot how fun this PC Spec thing was... none of that with my PS3 and 360!!

 

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/guide-03.html

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-8800M-GTX-SLI.6937.0.html

The second one lists cards where they technically stand not by performance but it's still pretty handy

 

cheers makes good reading that!!

 

stream processors are small processors and there are amny of thewm ina vid card. they can be allocated to do anything(shading, geometry...)

 

ah right.. so a big scale of what the CELL processor uses?

 

May I suggest tom's video card/GPU chart?

While it doesn't list mobile cards, it does actually rate desktop GPUs by PERFORMANCE in both actual games and in benchmarks.
This doesn't make it gospel, but given the amount of info and benchmarks it is a MUCH better comparison than any site who lists by theoretical statistics. (which don't compare easily in most cases)


In general, mobile GPUs are roughly 1-2 steps down from their equivalent-named desktop models.

8700m GT ~= (or a little less than) 8600 GTS desktop (from personal experience when both are tweaked)
8800m GTX ~= (or a little less than) 8800 GT desktop (another poster here)


The 8700M and the 8600M are easily comparable.

The 8700M is designed for more voltage and thus starts stock with a 30% core/shader advantage over the 8600M. The 8700M is also housed usually in better cooling (17" vs 15") than the 8600M is giving it plenty of headroom. The 8600M can be overclocked to reach similar speeds to the 8700M's stock speeds and sometimes even furthur, but the 8700's superior power flow and cooling solutions usually built around it result in even higher overclocking potential.

The XPS 1530 you got has the 8600m GT with 256MB of DDR3 is reasonably good at overclocking but reaches high temps as well.

If you do not choose to overclock you can check out generally how desktop 8600 GT compare and subtract about 15%. (estimation from a few synth benches with the xps 1530 sitting a few feet from me and a desktop so this is nowhere near gospel)

You are correct that generally speaking, the 8600M performs similarly to an 7800GT.
However, the 8xxx series have superior shaders and thus do shader-intensive tasks better and have a lesser memory interface (128-bit vs 256-bit) and thus do higher resolutions and AA levels less well. Thus my comparison to the desktop 8600GT minus 15% is likely a better comparison.

All in all your XPS and 8600m GT compare reasonably well. Just don't expect enthusiast 1920x1200 at 60+ fps performance from it in the latest games. (stay under 1280x1024/1440x900wide and turn down the details like shadows and reflections)

 

Thanks very good reply! have some rep!

 

Actually if you look at Don's list at THG, it's pretty accurate and peer reviewed updating as things change over time (like some cards drop with age and no longer compare as well);

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-cards,1942-7.html