Introduction

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, we have to point readers to yet another updated report on the state of the desktop graphics market. The scores are in for fanboys from both sides. Despite the generally optimistic outlook many of us had about the Radeon HD 3800 series, these cards failed to halt NVIDIA as it plowed to gain a massive 71% of the discrete graphics card market in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Overall, the desktop market has actually grown quite spectacularly, so all those doomsayers predicting the end of PC gaming may just have to wait a while longer. A small decrease in total revenue however from the third to fourth quarter hints that the growth is likely fueled by a drop in prices, the timing of which suggests that the arrival of the popular and attractively priced GeForce 8800 GT may have been the catalyst for this growth. If true, it's a pretty big sign of the market potential of consumers genuinely wanting more graphics horsepower at more sane prices instead of the super high-end stuff that costs more than an average console or even whole PC systems.

The arrival of the mid-range GeForce 9600 GT will go a long way towards pulling in the mainstream consumer. Although 'mainstream', we have seen it do quite decently in the latest games, provided that you're not overly ambitious. The 256-bit memory bus and 512MB frame memory certainly helps raise the bar on what constitutes mainstream and while ATI's Radeon HD 3800 series is capable of matching the newcomer on performance, prices have to be adjusted to stay competitive. Consumers will definitely benefit from this, though we can't say the same for ATI's (AMD) revenue.

In any case, even after our recent shootout involving a number of GeForce 9600 GT cards, there have been new review units coming our way, so without further ado, here's a slightly overclocked GeForce 9600 GT from MSI:

MSI's overclocked GeForce 9600 GT comes with its Live Update technology but some of the other usual features like D.O.T and CoreCell are not found on this card.

MSI N9600GT-T2D512-OC Technical Specifications

Graphics Engine

• NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT GPU (G94)
  • 505 million transistors
  • 3D GPU clock = 700MHz
  • 64 Stream Processors at 1680MHz
• NVIDIA Unified Architecture
  • GigaThread technology
  • Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10
    • Geometry shaders
    • Geometry instancing
    • Streamed output
    • Shader Model 4.0
  • Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline
• NVIDIA Lumenex Technology
• 16x full screen anti-aliasing
• Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
• 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering
• 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing
• 32-bit per component floating point texture filtering and blending
• Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data
• Support for normal map compression
• Z-cull
• Early-Z
• NVIDIA Quantum Effects Technology
• Advanced shader processors architected for physics computation
• Simulate and render physics effects on the graphics processor
• NVIDIA SLI Technology
• NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology
  • Dedicated on-chip video processor (VP2)
  • High-definition H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
  • Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
  • HDCP capable
  • Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing
  • Noise Reduction
  • Edge Enhancement
  • Bad Edit Correction
  • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
  • High-quality scaling
  • Video color correction
  • Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support
• Advanced Display Functionality
• Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x1600
• Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
• Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
• NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability
• 10-bit display processing
• Built for Windows Vista
• Full DirectX 10 support
• Dedicated graphics processor powers the new Windows Vista Aero 3D user interface
• VMR-based video architecture
• Designed for PCI Express 2.0
• Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory

Graphics Memory

• 256-bit memory interface
• 512MB Graphics DDR3 SDRAM
• Default clock rate of 950MHz (effective speed of 1900MHz DDR)

Display Capabilities

• Dual 400MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of 2048x1536@85Hz
• Dual-link DVI capability to drive displays of up to 2560x1600

Connectors

• 1 x mini-DIN connector (for Video-out)
• 2 x DVI-I connector (HDCP Ready)

Drivers & Software

• Driver support for Microsoft Windows Vista/9x/ME/2000/XP/XP MCE/XP Pro x64, Linux and Macintosh OS (including OS X)
• MSI Beyond Multimedia (Drivers & Utilties)

Other Information

• PCI Express x16 2.0 compliant
• Dedicated 6-pin PCIe Molex power connector required (not shared or split)
• Power supply rated for 400W or higher recommended by NVIDIA
  

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Introduction

After the mostly disappointing GeForce 8600 series last year, it was about time that NVIDIA returned to form in the mid-range segment and the new GeForce 9600 GT promises to do just that and revive the glory days of the GeForce 6 and 7 mid-range series. Based on the G94 core and hence belonging to the same successful pedigree as the GeForce 8800 GT, NVIDIA's new mid-range card threatens to spoil ATI's party by competing against the latter's Radeon HD 3800 series. With ATI responding with a round of price cuts to preserve its advantage, it seems like an excellent time for bargain hunting.

However, we won't get into the merits of going with ATI or NVIDIA today. Instead, the well-oiled NVIDIA machine and its many board partners have arranged to send us a bunch of shiny new GeForce 9600 GT cards and there are as many variations as there are brands. Which of course means that we have rounded them up in our usual shootout format. Who will be the champ of the new mid-range GeForce 9?

An important feature on these boards that we should mention first is that many vendors have utilized the audio input headers (S/PDIF) on the GeForce 9600 GT to splice the audio stream (from your motherboard or soundcard) to the video stream within the graphics card, thereby allowing these cards to output audio and video through a single HDMI cable. These cards then either have a HDMI port or include a DVI-to-HDMI adapter. From what we saw, not every vendor has bundled the necessary cables but consumers should be able to source the cables and adapters and enable this audio integration themselves if required.


ASUS EN9600 GT

ASUS' Glaciator cooler makes another appearance here and having known its quiet and cool performance, it was no surprise that it was superior to the reference design The catch as usual is that this cooler will take up more space than the single slot reference design but we doubt consumers will be too concerned with this. The clock speeds on this card however are the standard 650MHz for the core and 1800MHz for the GDDR3, as is the board design.

The ASUS Glaciator heatsink is the standout factor for this ordinary GeForce 9600 GT.

Quiet and cool, there is nothing much to dislike about the Glaciator. Conversely, it doesn't seem to be a unique cooler and similar designs can be seen from other brands.

The included package is quite decent despite lacking any frills like games or applications. At least all the expected accessories and cables are present. ASUS has quoted a standard retail price of S$299, which is in line with quite a few reference boards from other brands despite its third party cooler. Here's what we found:

Driver CD

Installation guide

User manual (on CD)

DVI-to-VGA adaptor

DVI-to-HDMI adaptor

6-pin Molex power connector

7-pin mini-DIN to Component dongle

S/PDIF cable

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By Vijay Anand
Category : Graphics
Published by Vijay Anand on Monday, 7th January, 2008







Hybrid SLI - The Much Awaited Advancement

2007 has been a busy year for NVIDIA in both the graphics and desktop solutions department and to prove that they've the momentum going strong, no sooner than a week in to the brand new year, NVIDIA announced several new updates concerning their 'secretive' Hybrid SLI technology. We've actually mentioned that the big green has been working on Hybrid SLI technology for a long time and we ourselves have been predicting such a concept even before that. The idea of SLI (Scalable Link Interface) itself was a major step in the graphics performance evolution back in 2004 and today, they are at it again to further progress this concept.

NVIDIA's Hybrid SLI is addresses two key concerns of cranking up graphics performance ever higher (as well as maximizing graphics silicon) and reducing power consumption. To deal with them, Hybrid SLI is a combination of two sub technologies - GeForce Boost and HybridPower.


GeForce Boost - The First Enabler of Hybrid SLI

GeForce Boost is a technology that provides discrete GPUs (dGPU) more graphics processing prowess when used on an NVIDIA motherboard GPU (mGPU) platform. This is the main concept behind Hybrid SLI where users were hoping to leverage performance of both a motherboard or notebook's integrated GPU capabilities in addition to the discrete GPU for a combined performance boost than any one solution alone. The closest implementation of this to date is a manual switch that toggles between either a discrete or integrated GPU option on a few select notebooks such as the Sony SZ series. With the newer NVIDIA platforms supporting Hybrid SLI, this will be a thing of the past. Our more technical readers might be wondering how two very unlike GPUs can be made to work together to boost performance as there's bound to be syncing or latency issues. For the moment, NVIDIA hasn't delved into the details, but they did attribute the bulk of this capability is thanks to the driver development team who've incorporated advanced intelligence and balancing techniques to split work load appropriately between the mGPU and dGPU respectively. Naturally, the discrete GPU is going to be doing the bulk of the actual rendering while the motherboard integrated GPU tags along to boost performance to its best ability.

How GeForce Boost works is that the driver intelligently figures out what portion of the workload is to be handled by each GPU and dispatches the respective graphics commands to both GPUs. Each GPU will work to render a separate set of frames, and the result of which is stored in their respective frame buffers. Block transfers (BLT) then occur to transfer the discrete GPU's rendered image to the mGPU's frame buffer because the primary output display will be from the integrated GPU.

After receiving workload instructions from the graphics drivers, each GPU will work to render a separate set of frames, and the result of which is stored in their respective frame buffers.

Block transfers (BLT) then occur to transfer the discrete GPU's rendered image to the mGPU's frame buffer.

mGPU then outputs the display to the screen.

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By Vincent Chang
Category : Graphics
Published by Vijay Anand on Thursday, 27th December, 2007
Rating : 4 out of 5 stars

NVIDIA's Year

As 2007 draws to a close, it's that time of the year again. Nope, we're not talking about the holiday cheer but rather, that brief moment of retrospection as we step back and review what has gone by in the past 12 months. And what better way to summarize the year than to compile lists. You should be familiar now with all the top lists that the media produce at this time of the year. We too have our own version of the best products of the year.

So it's not surprising that most publications are dishing out awards as fast as they can before the year ends. What was quite unexpected to us was this: Forbes, as mainstream and Wall Street a publication you can get, has recently named NVIDIA as its Company of the Year. Now, it's not that we disagree with the award. Rather, we were taken aback because there are many more higher profile tech companies than NVIDIA out there. Names like Apple and Intel for instance that experienced a stellar year too. NVIDIA must have done something pretty spectacular to have earned this accolade.

One of the reasons why this year belonged to NVIDIA lies in our hands now - the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. While this GPU probably came too late this year to make too much of an impact on its market share, it does bring a level of performance unprecedented for its price and should ensure steady growth through the early months of 2008. No doubt, ATI has its own price competitive Radeon HD 3800 series to match but it has long lost the initiative and the market share reflects this, with 62% of the PC desktop graphics for NVIDIA.

The Leadtek WinFast PX8800GT 256MB.

Of course, NVIDIA too has had its woes, though it's a happy problem of not having enough G92 based graphics cards to meet demand (akin to the lack of Wii consoles to satisfy all demand). Nevertheless, it has gone ahead with the 256MB version of this popular GPU as it has previously announced and you should already be seeing this on retail shelves. Does having 256MB of memory cripple the fast GPU? We'll take a look after the technical specifications below:

Leadtek WinFast PX8800GT 256MB Technical Specifications

Graphics Engine	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT GPU (G92) 754 million transistors 3D GPU clock = 600MHz 112 Stream Processors at 1500MHz NVIDIA Unified Architecture GigaThread technology Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10 Geometry shaders Geometry instancing Streamed output Shader Model 4.0 Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline NVIDIA Lumenex Technology 16x full screen anti-aliasing Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing 32-bit per component floating point texture filtering and blending Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data Support for normal map compression Z-cull Early-Z NVIDIA Quantum Effects Technology Advanced shader processors architected for physics computation Simulate and render physics effects on the graphics processor NVIDIA SLI Technology NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology Dedicated on-chip video processor (VP2) High-definition H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing HDCP capable Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing Noise Reduction Edge Enhancement Bad Edit Correction Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction) High-quality scaling Video color correction Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support Advanced Display Functionality Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x1600 Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability 10-bit display processing Built for Windows Vista Full DirectX 10 support Dedicated graphics processor powers the new Windows Vista Aero 3D user interface VMR-based video architecture Designed for PCI Express 2.0 Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory Advanced thermal monitoring and thermal management
Graphics Memory	256-bit memory interface 256MB Graphics DDR3 SDRAM Default clock rate of 900MHz (effective speed of 1800MHz DDR)
Display Capabilities	Dual 400MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of 2048x1536@85Hz Dual-link DVI capability to drive displays of up to 2560x1600
Connectors	1 x mini-DIN connector (for Video-out) 2 x DVI-I connector (HDCP Ready)
Drivers & Software	Driver support for Microsoft Windows Vista/9x/ME/2000/XP/XP MCE/XP Pro x64, Linux and Macintosh OS (including OS X) PowerDVD 7.0 Orb Neverwinter Nights 2
Other Information	PCI Express x16 slot required Dedicated 6-pin PCIe Molex power connector required (not shared or split) Power supply rated for 400W or higher recommended by NVIDIA0

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