7950gtx V/s 8700 Gt

Now I am not trying to start a debate here. Who me? Never.. Yet comparing the 7950 to the 8700 is like comparing apples to oranges. One is old technology and the other is the future one.. Now which one runs faster on 1900X1200? Really, does anyone care? What? Is it bragging rights that the 7950 (old Technology) runs a bit faster with optimized drivers for older games? Given what I have seen so far, the 8700 at 128-bits holds its own against the 7950. The link by narsnail http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3074&p=8 is inconclusive.. Until it is compared to the 9750 with newer titles there is really no comparison to be made and eventually you will not be able to compare the two.

When I bought my 9260 almost 4 months ago, I knew that Nvidia was working on a DX-10 card. Still I bought my 9260 and my 7950 and I don’t regret it (except for the bios, but that’s a whole other story). I asked the Sager salesperson about a future upgrade and he said yes you should be able to upgrade to a DX-10 card. Well I guess he was not lying. Looks like the 8700 will be offered in SLI as well http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2486686&postcount=1 Now if you are going to keep waiting till this GPU comes out and that CPU comes out etc. you will keep on waiting and never buy a computer..lol

When I first turned on my 9260, I went holy crap where is my magnifying glass.. I was squinting like Clint and could not make out a thing..lol So I went down to a lower resolution at least on my desktop. Them aging eyes are not as good as they once were.

As for games, well I played games at 1900X1200, 1600X1200 and1600X1024 and could not tell a difference.. Mean while it is like: Kewl the grass looks almost real and it sways back and forth. Bang Bang, Ba bang bang bang, ba ba ba ba baaang, Big Bada Boom, KA BOOM you’re dead. Oh crap I did not save before I got blown to smithereens. Great now back to opening the hatch, climbing out the vents, jumping across the bridge and YES I WILL SAVE THIS TIME, then I’ll show you bastads what I can do..LMAO. Man the characters look almost real except for the artificial hip movement and the twitching lips, wait your head is not screwed on right, I can see the line at the bottom of your skull, let me move a bit to the right maybe the clipping will go a way and my cell phone will get a better reception while I am at it..

All I am saying is that every once in a while we stop and checkout the graphics and say to ourselves, man this looks nice and then back to.. you guessed it KA BOOM.. If you take a game like Clive Barker’s: Undying, it has some of the nicest graphics I have seen and the most believable character movements and it came out in 2001, I think. If you have played it, you know what I am saying, if you have not played it, it is worth getting and playing, it will give you a few goose bumps as well.

If I were to buy a laptop now, no questions, I will get the 8700 because eventually the manufacturers and the developers will dictate the market (hey I thought Glide was great, remember the Voodoo days) and we end user will ultimately pay the price. Nividia, at the moment, has no competition, so the 8700 could be the norm for a while to come or until ATI gets off their asses and do something. My guess would be that Nvidia might come up with a beefed up version of the 8700 with 256-bits and a higher clock speed..

 

I have a 9260 on back order with SLI 7950's. With the recent announcement by Xoticpc I plan on revising my order to a 9261 with SLI 8700's. To me there's no reason not to upgrade. The 8700's are very capable and using two in SLI alleviates the memory bandwidth bottle-neck due to the 128-bit memory bus.

Also the Vista driver model is more efficient than previous Window's versions. It's also very new which is why we are seeing such a slow ramp-up with regards to driver development. I believe that some time in the next year we'll see Vista surpass XP in performance. I believe that we'll also see improvements in 8700 performance.

Regardless I want the latest technology and the 8700's are it .

 

You are absolutely right in everything you said Kozi and a wise choice to upgrade to 9261.

In a couple of months or so I am planning on getting it touch with Mr. Eurocom, since they offer trade ins for laptops, and see what kind of wheel’n and deal’n we can do. On second thoughts maybe I should jump on it now before I loose too much money on the 7950..

 

how is my link inconclusive? the cold hard fact is that the 8700gt is a HIGH MIDRANGE card and lags behind at high resolution. now say you get these 8700's in SLI and im sure they will be powerful. considering the cost of 7950gtx's are the same almost as an 8700(mayb $100 diff, seen less in some places) and you cannot guarentee that it will provide a 100% performance increase over just one. and considering one 7950gtx can do what two 8700gt's could do(they might be better?) at high resoltion i dont see that as a good investment. personally if i wanted directx 10 that bad i would also get 8700gt's in sli but i think directx 9 will be around for atleats two more years and i think directx 10 will be more optimized by then. thats my two cents.

 

I've been pretty much sold for quite awhile on getting a dual 8700 setup when it became available.

I have no illusions that technically speaking, dual 7950's are more powerful, but I tend to be in the "cutting edge graphics" camp as opposed to the "all out FPS horsepower" camp.

Based on what I've been able to gather with the limited real world benchmarks on the web, a dual 8700 setup should be able to put out VERY playable FPS at high resolution with all of the DX10 eye-candy. No doubt that the dual 7950's will put out signficicantly higher FPS numbers, but obviously, only in DX9 (and I'm guessing that more and more games will cripple the best-of-the-best graphical goodies if not in DX10...why?...not for any real technical reasons, but simply in order to push DX10 ).

Ulitmately, I can live with playable FPS vs. out-of-this-world FPS if it means I can play games like Crysis in all of it's graphical DX10 glory. Ya, I'm a sucker for the hype and gladly plead guilty...just show me where to sign on the dotted line

Long-term, I'm hoping that regardless of what choice one makes now, the D901c will be able to upgrade to 8800-level graphics (256-bit minimum) down the road...in SLI of course!

 

I still don't understand your logic Narsnail... what classifies it as a "high midrange" card? Hell, why not call it a "low enthusiast" card... again makes no sense.

Unless you're saying any card that doesn't outperform the 7950 in 3DMark06 is midrange?

I also agree with WackMan that your link is inconclusive... it doesn't feature a 9260 with 8700 nor a M570RU with 8700. I'd like to see the results on those platforms.

You're also assuming that the drivers for 8700 are as mature as the 7950 which has been out for a while now.

Don't get me wrong! I'm not saying the 8700 is a clear winner over the 7950. But I am saying the 8700 is a damn good card... good enough to be enthusiast.

Combine that with DX10 support, lower power, improved video processing... it's a winner.

 

it isnt enthusiust because of the low bus and that is the only reason, had it had a 256bit bus it would destroy the 7950gtx. please give it up with the 3dmark06 score aswell, it means nothing. also i dont know what your getting at by it not being a 9260. it doesnt matter. the most important part of a graphics benchmark is the GRAPHICS CARD. the only difference from x205 to the 9260 is the desktop processor(whihc doesnt matter really, if it was a mobile processor compared to a desktop prcessor with the same speed wht would be the difference? maybe 200mhz FSB?) and possibbly the ddr2 800 ram. I am not saying it is not a good card. because it really is and considering it is midrange,has half the bus, and can compete well with the beast of a 7950gtx at a decent resolution is comendable. Im just sick of these constant posts about the 3dmark scores being better than the 7950gtx, and becuase its newer it better.

and from your point of view the power and video prcessing may be a plus, but to me its not so that is why we are clashing so much on this subject

 

No offence meant, but your argument regarding the low bus is irrelevant...

What ultimately determines whether the 8700 is truly an enthusiast's card or not is...well quite simply...the final reckoning of the number of enthusiasts that decide to buy it

We live in interesting times...as a single card, it's pretty much an established fact that the 8700 is not an enthusiast's card...what remains to be seen is how the sales figures stack up when it's available in SLI.

 

how is it irrelevant? it is the whole point i kepp going on about this. they crippled this card with that bus and EVERY enthusiust card has a 256bit bus. An enthusiust would be playing at the highest resolution possible with all the settings maxed and this card cannot offer that. It could offer it at say 1280x800 but not 1920x1200.


http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=39568

now please read this. your going to come back saying it is listed under performance. that is why it is a "high" mid range card if you didnt understand my logic.

 

That's just silly because a 7800 is listed under enthusiast... and the 8700GT beats it in performance. Same with the X1800.

You're playing word games... maybe I could say no card is enthusiast unless it has a 512-bit memory data bus .

If you don't want the card, then don't buy it. But saying that it can't perform at high resolutions is not true. There are others in this forum with a M570RU and 8700 running Oblivion at max settings at 1920x1200. And it sounds like they dig it.

 

if you can prove this to me, that it can run at high res's on maxed settings then i will drop this. but the benchmarks i have seen have given evidence it is not that strong at those resolution, im working off what i got here.

 

Here's some posts from the NBR Sager forums:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2486251

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2455888

And a little hint as to why the 8700 may perform better as we start to see the newer games:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2477020

I wouldn't be so quick to call this a non-enthusiast card just because the memory bus is 128-bit. This is a new architecture designed around DX10 and I think we'll see it pay dividends as game development shifts and drivers improve.

 

I simply entered "DX9 vs DX10" in Google, and the first site in the list was:

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9550

which shows some screenshot examples between the two. I have seen other comparisons over the past several weeks that make it perfectly clear that DX10 versions of games will have higher graphics quality over their DX9 counterparts.

Since an enthusiast is one who is usually driven by both quality (DX10) and quantity (maxium FPS), we're at a rare point in mobile history where I suspect the enthusiast community will be split...for the absolute highest in mobile graphics "quality", the way to go right now is dual 8700's...for the absolute highest FPS performance, the way to go is dual 7950's. Sadly, there's no way to have both at the moment in a notebook...

And just to throw more fuel on the ongoing fire at the center of this argument...let's look at things in another way: Many "enthusiasts" will be jumping into the quad-core arena, while others will stick with dual-core Extreme's...yet another segment will be satisfied with run-of-the-mill non-extreme, non-quad, dual cores (and let's not even get into the overclocking possibilities )...

Anyway, based on your viewpoint, Narsnail, which segment of the CPU owners above are bona-fide "enthusiasts"?

(Perhaps none of the above if you reckon that a QX CPU is the mimium requirement to qualify .)

Oh well, it's too bad someone can't figure out a way to enable DX10 graphics on the 7950...if it were technically possible, this discussion would be moot

 

i know the difference, ive seen it before, i do not think those people are lying about their results though, i would like to see some fraps and settings screens JUST to confirm, but you can consider this officially dropped from me.


also this is a great comparison for driectx 10 to directx 9, very high end systems though.
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6179006/p-3.html

 

But Kozi, you're comparing different generations of cards. When it came out, the 7800 WAS an enthusiast level card, just like the X1800, and as far as I know they both have 256-bit memory buses. The 8700GT, while only having a 128-bit bus is a current generation video card (as is evidenced by the model number), which is why it can beat the other two even though it's not considered a high-end card, while the others were (at one point in time). If you look at any self-respecting gaming hardware site, none of them will call any card with less than a 256-bit memory bus anything higher than a "mid-range" card. That's just the way things are.

EDIT -- I see things have already been taken care of. Man, step away from the keyboard for a few minutes and look what happens...

 

haha see he agrees tooo he is also correct which is what ive been trying to say for the last bit, but i couldt justify it.

 

8700 is a mid range card. The 8800 is a high end card. How hard is that to understand.

 

apparently very hard because probably 10% of posts i make are saying it is mid range and no one wants to seem to agree, cept you two, as you can see on the previous page.

 

The 8800 is not a laptop card. The mobile 7950 is not the same as the desktop 7950. Saying the desktop 8600 is not enthusiast is not relevant because we're discussing the mobile market. Remember that the desktop 8800 is nearly 180W. Not a meaningful discussion for notebooks... there's not even a desktop 8700.

Just saying "it's not high end" doesn't cut it. You have to back it up and so far the only data that's been presented is the memory bus width.

However I've already pointed out that the 8700 is a different technology with polygon shaders instead of pixel shaders... different architecture... etc. It's posted at the nVidia website as their "enthusiast" card. It performs similarly to the 7950. It has been mentioned favorably at 1920x1200 resolutions by folks in these forums.

Simply stating that you think is mid-range is meaningless. If I make a singular statement that it's "enthusiast" then that's equally meaningless. But I haven't (see notes above).

I think it's performance is enthusiast for the mobile market. I also think two in SLI would be very exceptional indeed as it mitigates the card's weakness which is memory bandwidth.

 

It's not "silly." The guide is accurate. The groupings are only classifications. For performance, refer to the larger chart farther down.

The Nvidia GeForce 8700M-GT is a top-of-the-line mid-range card. PERIOD. That is automatically determined by the 128-bit bus which degrades its performance significantly at higher resolutions and/or if AA/AF are applied. The Go7950GTX, which is a proper high-end card with a 256-bit memory bus, does not take nearly the performance hit at higher resolutions.

Look at the benchmarks in these forums.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168990&highlight=8700m+go7950gtx

 

Hahaha...I can't fathom why it's such a big deal how the 8700 is classified...

Chaz appears to have come up with the best compromise...it's high-end

...just don't forget that it's also just a mid-range card

(EDIT: Oops...Chaz edited his post...the 8700 is no longer "high-end" in his books

Sigh...technology changes too dang fast )

I make no claims as to what its generally accepted "classficiation" should be amongst the forum brethren...all I can say is that this "enthusiast" is extremely "enthusiastic" about a dual 8700 setup in SLI

 

Exactly... I can't wait .

 

Something to think about regarding this topic.

it seems that some of you think that 800x600 vs. 1680x1050 vs 1920x1200 are the same.

while at some point the image and effect quality could remain the same, but your viewing area are for sure different (if the game are coded correctly)

you will get a larger view of the world if the res. are higher. just like a wide screen movie being played on a standard TV, the two sies are crop out.

take WOW for exeample, you will get to put alot more hot key and customized UI on a 1920x1200 res vs anything smaller.

so if you are truely an enthusiast gamer you would want to use the highest res and highest fps available, and the 8700M just can't cut it with the 128bit memory bus.

and trust me when i said this, i have seem many people and close friends that think 15fps = normal and playable, as it allows them control the game better .