Pimp My GPU: April 2008

Vista Exclusive: 3DMark Vantage

The latest excuse to upgrade your graphics card??

A Static

I guess there's not much happening around the graphics industry right now. I looked around at my regularly visited websites and there's nothing interesting to mention about graphics card at the moment. Yes, there are reviews everywhere, but they are basically the same card from different manufacturers, so I leave that for anyone to browse on their own.

There are still many more games that I haven't played on my PC since I'm stuck with some side projects of my own. And I haven't completed Crysis till now.

We'll see this trend in the upcoming weeks.

Greatest punch line ever: NVIDIA vs. Intel

This is old news, but recently there has been 'slide show' wars between NVIDIA and Intel regarding the future of computer graphics.

Larrabee marks the end of current graphics technology. This statement really makes Jen-Hsun Huang jumps off his seat.

Then they started pointing fingers to each other, highlighting flaws from each other's camp. Now here comes greatest punch line I've ever heard in this industry:

"How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?"

Some people might say," Well, look who's talking?".

Want full stories? Head over here.

GeForce 9800 GTX arrives: NVIDIA product launching fest continues!

It seems kind of ironic to have GeForce 9800 GTX launching day happens on April Fool's Day. However, it didn't fool anyone as the card is really here among us. To make it better, it's a hard launch with immediate availability of the card in major retail stores. Gamers rejoice!

Here's a rundown on the specs of 9800 GTX:

Graphics Chip: G92 (65 nm, 754 million transistors)
No. of Stream processors: 128
Core Clock: 675 MHz
Shader Clock: 1688 MHz
Memory Size: 512 MB
Memory Clock : 1100 Mhz (2.2 GHz effective)
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 70.4 GB/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 43.2 GTexels/sec
ROPs : 16
Texture Filtering Unit: 64
Form Factor : 2-slot
Power Connector: 6-pin X 2
Max. Power Consumption: 156W

This card runs on PCIE 2.0 bus, although I suspect it still functions on PCIE 1.0.

Looking at the specs above, what can you see? Something familiar? Yes, GeForce 9800 GTX is very much a 8800 GTS 512MB, with a major difference being the core clock speed (675 against 650) and the resulting shader clock speed. The memory clock also receives a bit of a bump (1100 against 970 in 8800 GTS 512).

GeForce 9800 GTX is going to sell around $299-$349.

Reviews are already around (that's fast!), so take your pick from these various sources:

To be honest, I'm not even sure if it has been an exciting array of product launches from NVIDIA. I mean, 3 variants of G92-based cards after 8800 GT doesn't really hype things up for me anymore. What do you think?