Buying card: Nvidia 8600 vs. 8800?

Yes, yet another graphics card thread, sorry. Looking for the latest gossip on these two cards.

I am buying a graphics card, and was all set to get Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX when I came across this thread: /111/30/228610/1.html

Now I'm wondering if it's going to take another 6 months to shake down the drivers for the 8800 series, and maybe I should just get an 8600 GTS. Opinions?
.

I just got a BFG Tech 8600 GTS OC this week. Excellent card. Didn't think the 8800 was worth the extra $$, and may go SLI with another 8600 down the road.

I've got two 8600's running with SLI and they work like a dream......

regardless of the driver shakedown, if you can get the 8800gtx, for a good priceI'd go for it, one simple reason

long term compatibility

you'll be able to stick it out with the 8800 much longer than you will with the 8600, and as new stuff pops up the price should drop, and you'll have a shot at adding a cheaper second card for SLI (assuming your MB supports 2) for a competitive upgrade, without going all out for a new card.

while the core numbers are slower for the 8800gtx (compared to the 8600gts), the memory and memory bandwidth more than make up for it, with 2 to 3 times more output (nevermind the extra room to grow for newer games).

and games like SL with LOTS of streamed textures will benefit more from it (whereas most games are a bit more streamlined in their graphics)

8600 GTS in SLi....good, stable and am overall happy.

But in hindsight, wish had gone the 8800GTX route as there is a world of difference between the 8600GTS spec and the 8800GTX spec

And now, compared with when I purchased my 8600GTS's, the price difference between the two cards is far less prohibitive.

So, for me, I'd say go for the 8800GTX with a longer term view

A friend just got the Asus EN8600GT Silent 512 MB. He gets 35fps and up at 512m draw distance and maxed out graphic settings. Windlight is running smoothly on Ultra setting. I was thinking about getting the 8800, but I think this 8600 is good enough at half the price or even less - and I won't need a better power supply to run it, I would need one for the 8800.

Although there were nightmares with the drivers for many months.....Early adopters of the 8800's went through hell for a long time. Nvidia who kept silent and angered buyers for a long time, finally got it together with the drivers and now they are wonderful. 8600 users were having the same driver issues in Vista and XP as well.

8800's with SLI now are great. Only thing that I have as an issue with now, is when using fraps with SLI/Vista in World of Warcraft, there is a total FPS drop, forcing me to disable SLI when recording, but miraculously the problem does not happen with Second Life. Also going SLI its really best to have a 750--1000w power supply. Also whatever the problem was with the 8800's and Windlight seem to have been fixed by LL as well in the last 2 releases.

Huh, so Asus licenses Nvidia GPUs, learn something new every day. Does ASUS claim any improvements over the Nvidia cards, or are they cheaper, or .... why should one get them from Asus?

There are several different companies that make Nvidia video cards. Asus, BFG and EVGA are some of them. They basically all run the Nvidia standard. The differences between manufacturer are fairly minor (though some will argue that customer support is better with one company than another.)

I'm running the 8600 and get good frame rates and high quality. It's "close" to 8800 performance for a bit less cost. If you're on a budget, it will do just fine. If cost is not so much of a concern, get the 8800 - it is definitely faster, and will have a longer usable lifetime, as noted above.

got the bfg 8800 gts oc2 and must say i haven`t had a single glitch with any game or sl with the latest nvidia drivers all the time

Unlike ATI, which does manufacture cards (or at least has cards manufactured for them that are sold under the ATI brand name) as well as letting other companies make ATI-based cards, there ARE no NVidia-manufactured cards other than reference cards given to hardware manufacturers and early reviewers. Any NVidia card you buy will be made by somebody else; EVGA, BFG, and Asus are three of the larger makers.

Every NVidia-based card I have ever seen uses the NVidia reference design with essentially no changes; in other words, different brands of cards will have identical board layouts and component placement. (This is good in at least one way; because they all use the same board design, you won't have any trouble connecting cards from different suppliers together in SLI. There might be issues if the two cards don't run at the same clock rate however.) The differences between brands are in cooler design (some companies have more efficient fans than others, and some like Asus also offer fanless cards with big heat sinks), overclocking choices (some manufacturers are more aggressive than others), manufacturer support, availability, and price. Quality of components could also be a variable (leading to differences in longevity of the cards), but I haven't seen much difference between the major brands.

i Use Nvidia 8800 and love it..I wouldn't recommend ATI well i'll not say what I wouldn't recommend it for but used in a PC isn't at the top of my list

~Lana Tomba

I'm now running 2 8600 GT's with 512 mb in SLI. Love them, love them, love them. Maybe I should have sprung for the 8800 series, but I just couldn't work out the extra cash right now. I'm working out kinks in the system right now - the whole thing is new, and other than a few weird glitches, it runs everything fine. HL2 is running at max settings. I can't find the install disks for FEAR, but SL is no prob at any setting. I'll try Windlight this week, probably.

I do not recommend the NVIDIA card under WIndows Vista. I found that SL runs better on my onboard VGA card than the NVIDIA. Support on the cards is terrible. I switched to ATI, which I am more or less happy with. (demanding customer)

Hmmm. At what point do we hit the diminishing returns on cost versus FPS in SL?

Or put another way, where is the best price/performance?

I am looking to make an SL-centric desktop machine, since I don't play other video games on the computer. I want to spend "just enough" to get the best SL experience I can.

Is one 8600 sufficient? Two? An 8800? Two?!?

How is client FPS affected (if at all) by server FPS metrics? Is there a correlation?

What about regions with lots of avatars, or complex builds? Is the slowdown a graphics card issue, or a server issue? Or a combination?

How does the graphics card on-board memory size factor in, really, with SL? I've read some claims, but seen no real evidence.

If you wanted to go shopping at Last Call during the crazy sale, what graphics card setup would do you the most good?

I don't think there is yet a setup that will guarantee that you will NEVER have graphics card related lag in Second Life. Dual 8800s would get close, though. Graphcs card related lag depends on how much content there is for the card to draw. Larger draw distance, high levels of detail, and lots of complex prims all contribute, as do some of the optional "eye candy" effects in the viewer.

Curved surfaces have a lot more vertices to draw than flat ones, so sculpties and twisted torii are the hardest prims for your system to draw, and plain old cubes are the easiest. To be fair to sculpties, one sculpted prim is harder to draw than more other prims, but an effectively used sculpted prim might replace dozens of ordinary prims and reduce the total drawing load.

As for the closing sale at Last Call, nothing you could do at the client end would have helped. For starters, the sim was full 90% of the time, so you couldn't even get in. When you did finally arrive, you had to wait 10 minutes for all the textures to stream in from the asset server; in a big store like that, plus all the avatars around you, there were a LOT of big textures to receive. When the place finally stopped being gray, you discovered that the server was running at a time dilation of about 0.2, so any attempt to walk around was seriously lagged.

The possible causes of lag:

1. Graphics card -- vertices to draw (discussed above)
2. CPU -- avatar and texture animation, flexiprims
3. Server -- prims (especially physical prims), avatars, scripts
4. Asset server -- database that supplies textures, animations, sounds, other things
5. Network -- download of textures, animations, sounds, and prim data. Streaming
music and video. SL voice.

If you're trying to solve a lag problem, it's useful to know which source or sources are causing it. Currently, only very low-end systems are likely to suffer much CPU lag, but the other four sources are alive and well. You can usually figure out whether the graphics card is a prime factor by reducing your graphics settings; if the lag doesn't improve, the problem lies elsewhere. Builders can improve server and asset server lag by reducing the complexity of builds. If you are suffering network lag, you can help by turning off streaming music and SL voice, if you can live without those things; decreasing draw distance also helps because it reduces the amount of data you receive from the server.

Dumb question: What is "SLI" or "SLi" that you all are talking about?

Not a dumb question at all. I don't remember exactly what the initials stand for, but it's a system whereby two video cards (or actually three in some cases) share bandwidth and basically pool their power to work together to render the video more efficiently. It's an nVidia thing. You need two identical SLI ready cards and, obviously a mother board with the right slots that's SLI ready as well. You usually need a bridge between the two cards, but not always. It tends to use more juice as well, so your power supply has to be up to it.

So could "SLI" mean "Series Linked Interface" or something? Like, they're linked in series? Or are they linked in parallel? Or am I just trying to apply the wrong sort of physics to the system?

Answer to the Question:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface

Fwiw, it seems to me that lag caused by lots of avatars in a sim will not be addressed completely by your hardware - much of that is server-related.

I am able to visit the large sales and get out quickly with the world's smallest laptop by following a few non-hardware related rules:

1. No attachments at all. Yes, system hair and no scripts.

2. Draw distance 150.

3. Navigate within store using pose balls or other sittable objects. Do not attempt to walk or fly, if possible.

4. On arrival instore, shout: "For less lag, remove attachments and turn off AO's!"

5. If store has demos, make two trips and try everything on outside of the sim.

Did this yesterday for the free hair at RAC. 84 people in the sim, people crashing left and right, avatars stuck in glue, my friend with an 8600 GTS was there for half an hour and still unable to get the "buy" dialog. I was in and out in 5 minutes. Never moved off the TP-in point.

Buy what the money let you buy... starting from a 8800GTX's series. Then it means:

1. 8800 GTX
2. 8800 ULTRA
3. 8800 ULTRA XXX (Extreme Edition)

...from now on you can only continue with SLI or QUAD-SLI (if they put it already on sale):

1. 8800 GTX * 2 (SLI....) or *4 (QUAD SLI...)

....and so on.

Do not buy an ATI card for Second Life, they'll give you many troubles (with Second Life) and will never match the hi-end nVidia cards (for now).

Since a single 8800 would cost a minimum (GTX) of 350 euro (european market), the price (especially if you go for a SLI/QUAD solution) would come into the decision, i suggest you to go for a single gfx card (ULTRA would be enough).
SLI also isn't so reliable (it does NOT give you a +100% performance, but much a +50% or so... so you gonna "loose" money here), also the durability of a SLI setup isn't good enough (in a relative short amount of time, you would see you SLI rig overtaken by the next hi-end *single* card). I've had in the past SLI solution with different nVidia cards, then i abandoned it for a series of reason (first of all: you cannot even use two monitors while SLI is enabled... and you have FOUR video outputs there!).

In the end: buy a 8800gtx series card... and enjoy it!

I have an 8800GTS and my partner has an 8600GTS. Neither of us has any problem with SL. However, if you play other games, you will benefit a lot from the 8800. For SL? I'm not sure you're going to see much difference.

Just a little known fact:

The 8800 was created directly after the 7900 as the next "step" in cards.

The 8400, 8500, and 8600 were created soley due to the cries for a "midrange" card in price.

The 7900 card was "beefed up" and designated 8400, 8500, and 8600.

So if price is your holdback, go with a 7900. If you want performance, go with the 8800. I'd reccomend the 8800GT-512 or the 8800GTX if you can afford it in your budget.

~Jessy

One short thing to toss in.

get X not S

\/
/\

v
^

It makes a difference.