Nvidia's 9800 GTX and 9800 GX2 seem to be a waste of time & money

If you have a 8800 GTX, 8800 Ultra or 8800 GT, you might as well save
your money, don't waste it on 9800 GTX or 9800 GX2. These cards are
more or less what you already have. In some important areas, really
less. Save it for the upcoming GT200 based 9900GTX or 9900GX2. Which
will should be arriving Q3 2008.


http://www.techradar.com/news/comput...on-test-318825




Our verdict: Nvidia's 9800 GTX and GX2 on test
Are these cards a technological leap?

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The new Nvidia GeForce 9800 range is not as good as we'd hoped

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Just over eighteen months ago the much-heralded age of the DirectX10-
capable graphics card dawned, as the supreme G80-powered GeForce
8800GTX dropped into the TechRadar office. Six months later came the
updated 8800 Ultra, a card that has remained Nvidia's top end
offering... until now.

We've had to wait 12 long months for the refresh, during which time we
have been treated to a mass of mid-range cards, including the
excellent 8800GT - Nvidia's first card with a 65nm core.

But still, it's been a long time coming for the 9800 GTX and GX2.

Long time passing

Both new cards are powered by the same 65nm G92, a core that is itself
now six months old. And it's the first time that Nvidia has released a
brand new family of top-end cards based on old architecture. Replacing
the 8800GTX and Ultra is a necessity as far as furthering the Nvidia
brand is concerned, competition-wise though it's less of an issue. AMD
still hasn't managed to create anything to seriously outperform these
year-old cards, so is the lack of a new core an acknowledgment that
Nvidia only has to turn up at the track to win the race?

The GTX version of the 9800 card is a straight, beefed up version of
the G92 with higher clock speeds across the board. While it shares the
number of Raster Operators (ROPs) with the 8800GT, it does have the
old GTX's complement of shader units at 128, giving it the necessary
speed boost.

The GX2 follows the example of the old 7950GX2, strapping two G92-
stuffed PCBs together. But this time both PCBs face into the same
heatsink and are housed in a vaguely coffin-like surround. The clock
speeds are slightly slower than the GTX, but a fair bit of optimising
has gone into making this single-card SLI offering an impressive piece
of engineering.

Swiss cheese memory

The first difference you'll notice when comparing the two new cards
with their predecessors is the change in memory capacity. Both the
8800 GTX and Ultra had a 384-bit memory bus with 768MB of GDDR3, while
the 9800s make do with the same 256-bit 512MB of memory that resides
on the GTS and GT iterations of the G92-based 8800s.

Due to its two cores, the GX2 comes out tops in the memory bandwidth
stakes at 128GB/s compared with the Ultra's 103.7GB/s, but the 9800
GTX lags well behind both of the previous cards. What this all means
in real terms is that at the higher resolutions, and most especially
with full screen anti-aliasing turned on, the new cards take quite a
hit at the levels we were hoping these big-panel pixel pushers would
excel at.

The differences between the GTX and GX2, and indeed the 8800GT, are
slight; the GX2 simply relying on the brute force effect of the single
card SLI factor. Where the difference between the two new G92 parts is
most obvious though is the number of ROPs. The GTX is still hobbling
along with 16, less than both the 8800GTX and Ultra at 24, but due to
the doubling up, the 9800 GX2 has 32 ROPs. The difficulty is in
knowing how much of a benefit this multi-GPU's extra ROPs gives us as
opposed to the single card with 24.

Bigger, faster, stronger

So where do we find ourselves with the two new top-end cards? Well,
mostly in the same place we were before to be honest. There's very
little difference between this new set and the old, with the 9800 GTX
being the biggest disappointment.

It struggles to find any space between itself and the 8800 GTX (which
it's supposed to be replacing), and there's also the fact that you can
still pick up the older card - with the extra memory, bandwidth and
ROPs - for less than £200. In some places you can save yourself around
£50 and come out with an equivalent, and in some cases, faster card.
The march of progress seems to have stomped right past this iteration
of the 9800, and here at TechRadar we might just have to plump for the
original DX10 monster.

With regards to the GX2, Nvidia had to go down the multi-GPU route,
not just to prove it could produce a functional version like AMD, but
also to create a card that it could legitimately call the fastest
graphics card around.

The final verdict...

Still, the memory constraints hold the GX2 back from being the
superlative, stand out, top-end card de jour. On lower-res panels
without silicon-melting anti-aliasing, it speeds ahead of the
competition. Yet with all the bells and whistles cranked up to a
deafening roar it struggles to break-even with the old 8800 Ultra.
Again, if you shop around you can pick up an Ultra for around £350,
and be fairly sure that your card will have drivers mature enough to
cater for whatever you throw down its graphics tubes.

The long and short of it is that if you've got yourself an 8800GTX or
Ultra, and felt that twinge of envy at the announcement of this new
generation of top-end cards, then you can stop worrying. In fact, you
can probably be down-right smug as your slightly geriatric cards are
still more than capable of holding their own against these
youngbloods. Til the GT200 comes out that is...

The full version of this review will appear in PC Format magazine
issue 214 and will go on sale on 4 May.
By Dave James and James Rivington