vince3 opened this issue on Jul 04, 2007 · 35 posts
svdl posted Sat, 07 July 2007 at 11:50 AM
The 8800 series will not be as cheap as 30 pounds in the foreseeable future. The trick with the nVidia numbering is that a higher number not necessarily means higher performance.
The first number (the first 8 in 8400,8800) means chipset generation. A higher number means a newer chipset, but not necessarily a much faster chipset.
The second number has to do with variations within the same chip generation. Higher numbers generally mean higher speed. Funny thing is, nVidia usually comes out with the fast versions first (they did so with the 6800, 7800 and now the 8800), demanding very high prices - which the richer gamers promptly paid. Later nVidia releases lower "second numbers" (6600,6200, 7600,7400,7300, and now 8600, 8500, 8400), same chipset, but lower performance, less memory, and less pricey.
So a 8400 based graphcs card is cheap indeed. And I can assure you that a 7600 will outperform a 8400 by a significant margin.
Lastly, there's the suffix. LE, GS, GT, GTX, GX2, whatever. The LE stands for Light Edition. It means the same graphics chip, but at a lower frequency, maybe with some pipelines disabled, while GTX (and Ultra) stand for the fastest version of this graphics chip.
Yes, it's a jungle. I do not now all the specs by heart, but what you should check for is the bandwidth of the graphics card. That's a good indicator of actual performance.
Example: my older 7800GTX has a bandwidth of 38 Gbit/s. The only current nVidias that surpass this are the 7950 GTX (similar bandwidth), 7950GX2 (2 7950's on one board) and the 8800 based cards. (GTS has 64 Gbit/s, the Ultra has over 100 Gbit/s)
The 7900GS in my other machine has 22 Gbit/s, so has the 8600GTS in the third machine.
For 3D work I'd recommend a graphics card that has a bandwidth of at least 20 Gb/s, and more is better - but pricier.
In short, the price for speed (in pounds per Gb/s) isn't going down all that much, despite the plethora of new and fancy graphics cards and chips..
The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter