9800 GTX and 3-way SLI: TEST

So, now that we have the 9800 GTX in the mix, what has changed? Honestly, not as much in terms of performance stack as in price. Yes, the 8800 Ultra is better than the 9800 GTX where memory bandwidth is a factor, but other than that the relationship of the 9800 GTX to the 3870 X2 is largely the same. Of course, NVIDIA would never sell 8800 Ultra at below the 3870 X2 price of $400 (the binned 90nm G80 glued on there didn’t come cheap).

The smaller die size of the G92 based 9800 GTX takes away one victory AMD had over NVIDIA: the more expensive 8800 Ultra was slower than AMD’s top of the line. Without significantly improving (and sometimes hurting) performance over the 8800 Ultra (because they didn’t really need to with the 9800 GX2 in their pocket), NVIDIA has brought more competition to AMD’s lineup, which is definitely not something they will be happy about.

It is nice to have this card come in at the $300 price point with decent performance, but the most exciting thing about it is the fact that picking up two of them will give you better performance than a single 9800 GX2 for the same amount of money. Two of them can even start to get by in Crysis with Very High settings (though it might offer a better experience with one or tow features turned down a bit).

While our very limited and rocky experience with 3-way SLI may have been tainted by the engineering sample board we used, the fact that we can get near 9800 GX2 Quad SLI performance for 3/4 of the costs is definitely a good thing. The fact this set up MUST be run in an nForce board is a draw back as we would love to test in a system that can run every configuration under the sun. We’re getting closer with Skulltrail, and we aren’t missing the fact that there are concerns among our readers over its use. But we’re confident that we can push performance up and turn it into our work horse for graphics, especially now that the VSYNC issue has been cleared up.

While testing this group of cards has been difficult with all the problems we experienced, we are very happy to have a solid explanation for what was causing our decreased performance we were seeing. Now all we need is an explanation for why forcing VSYNC off in the driver causes such a huge performance hit.

Vi måste säga att det är mycket blandade känslor när vi skall sammanfatta nyheterna med Geforce 9800 GTX. Kylningen var det mest positiva i det hela och den känns överlägsen Geforce 8800 GTS 512 MB på alla punkter. Minnena är 0,8 ns och det gör att 9800 GTX även kan köras med högre minnesfrekvenser.

Trots höga frekvenser och mycket bra överklockningsresultat ger inte alltid Geforce 9800 GTX en märkbar prestanda ökning jämfört med 8800 GTS 512 MB. Tyvärr har Nvidia nu flera modeller som ligger nära varandra i både pris och prestanda. Den största konkurrenten är dock Radeon HD 3870 X2 som ganska ofta är bättre men det är i regel med liten marginal. Det beror även på vilka inställningar man använder. Med tanke på att denna modell är billigare blir det svårt att utse någon klar vinnare av dessa. Överklockar man korten händer det ofta att Geforce 9800 GTX får en bättre prestandaökning än Radeon-kortet.

Vi är förstås besvikna över att Nvidia valt att inte förbättra specifikationerna speciellt mycket. Men kortet har faktiskt en del fördelar jämfört med 8800 GTS 512 MB.

NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX is a product borne from the knowledge that the company has no real competition in the discrete graphics-card market at around the £200 mark.

Evangelised as the successor to the excellent GeForce 8800 GTX, the new SKU is, in fact, a backward step in some respects. It features significantly lower memory bandwidth and a smaller frame-buffer - both of which are cost-cutting measures to keep production values down.

The GeForce 9800 GTX can be thought of as an incremental upgrade to the 8800 GTS 512; the architecture is practically identical, save for three-way SLI support, slightly faster clock-speeds and a few features borrowed from other 9-series cards, such as HybridPower and a software-upgraded PureVideo HD engine.

Now we can see why NVIDIA was keen to stop its partners releasing hugely-overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS 512 cards a few months' back, because such a move would have rendered the new GTX redundant. Why buy this card when a partner-overclocked 'GTS 512 is shipped with higher core and shader speeds but with a lower street price?

Priced at around £220 for a default-clocked model, the 9800 GTX comes in at around the same financial outlay as the erstwhile GTX, yet, on balance, it's no faster than a design released 18 months ago.

NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX undercuts ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2's pricing but generally matches its performance. In that respect, it's a reasonable card, but we really had hoped for more, much more, from the all-new GTX.

Looking to spend around £200 on a card? We'd recommend readers look for a factory-overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS 512 for around £180 and put the ~£40 saving towards some other part of your system.

We could make a case for users that absolutely need provision for three-way SLI, but they're few and far between, frankly.

What really needs to happen for the GeForce 9800 GTX to become an appealing proposition is for partners' pricing to be slashed to sub-£200, with all other high-end 8-series cards falling further down, right in step.

BFG's card is based on the reference design and, as such, all previous commentary applies to it, too.

Bottom line: the GeForce 9800 GTX should have been called the 8900 GTX 512. The card's performance is no better than the SKU it effectively replaces and too close to one that's significantly cheaper and readily available in factory-overclocked SKUs.

Mmmmmmmh yes, I like it. Granted this card is nothing new in terms of performance, and is surely bound to disappoint the ones that had high hopes and expected a new faster single GPU based flagship product. That's the only real distress we can think of, but yeah we are still at the same performance level as year and a half ago.

Why am I positive about this product then ? For one sole reason only ... the price.

In Guru3D's GeForce 9800 GX2 article I preached that gaming is getting too expensive and in able for the graphics industry to survive the prices need to be addressed. And today is where I have to fall on my knees and have to show our appreciation to NVIDIA for making a really nice move.

Suggested retail prices for the 9800 GTX cards will be $299-349 / 249-300 EUR. And that's just really good. As you guys probably know, I reside in the Netherlands and have called a couple of e-tailers. Quite a few of them expect the price to drop towards 250 EUR in the first month of the release of this product. Now you have to agree with me; that's just a really fair price for this product.

With today's games the GeForce 9800 GTX obviously will eat pretty much anything you throw at it and then shout "dude get me some more!"

Framerates are great which means you can enable heaps of eye candy. You start playing your games with a monitor that supports 1600x1200 and then enable 4xAA and 16xAF. Some examples you ask ? Well, Call of Duty 4 at 1920x1200 pushes out an average framerate of 45 FPS, and that's with all eye-candy enabled. Another new title, Frontlines Fuel of war (Actually bundled free with this Point of View card), the game is rendered at 43 FPS again at 1920x1200; with the highest image quality settings set in-game. That's just an awesome gaming experience man. With the card also comes Hybrid SLI functionality, with the to be released Hybrid mainboards (simply put integrated graphics in the mainboard) the 9800 GTX can be switched off when not used. Cool feature. Also cool is HD decoding. In combo with PowerDVD this card will eat High-def content alive, not only that, it improves image quality as well.

The end result is that Nvidia has taken care of business with this GeForce 9800 GTX. It delivers very good performance, better than the 8800 GTX' (by an average of 7%) and close to the 8800 Ultra (especially without antialiasing). The performance is also good enough to put the 8800 GTS 512 MB out of the running, with a little surprise: Despite an identical GPU and similar throughputs (+4% in the raw-processing-power department, +13% for memory bandwidth), the gain in actual gaming is sometimes as much as 40% (average 13%). That's because the GeForce 8 drivers were older at the time of our test, and will catch up when Nvidia finally gets around to updating them (a beta version of ForceWare 174.74 has just been released).

This is by far one of the toughest cards that we have had to draw a conclusion on since we started reviewing video cards when the site started back in 2002. The GeForce 9800 GTX is not faster across the board than the GeForce 8800 GTX that came out back in 2006 as the benchmarks showed. To many readers this may be a disappointment and we'd be lying if we said it doesn't bother us too. When it comes to just raw gaming performance the GeForce 9800 GTX is more of an evolutionary advancement than revolutionary. If you are looking to play at high resolutions with high anti-aliasing it seems that the GeForce 8800 GTX is still the best choice in the majority of the game titles we looked at here today. This shouldn't come as a shock to many as the GeForce 8800 GTX does have more memory on a wider bus.

Gamers and enthusiasts that recently picked up the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB video card really should have anything to be upset about with the launch of the GeForce 9800 GTX. The GeForce 9800 GTX is slighty faster, but with nearly the same specifications many GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB owners will be able to overclock up to these levels without much trouble at all. The GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is going to have to drop in price as at $299-$349 the GeForce 9800 GTX will cut into the same general pricing market, so that card should offer a very sexy price versus performance ratio in the coming weeks.

When it comes to price we have something better to talk about as the GeForce 9800 GTX has an MSRP between $299-$349, which is far less than the GeForce 8800 GTX when it came out a couple years ago at nearly $600. In all honesty the GeForce 9800 GTX costs far less to produce, so it should cost less! The GeForce 9800 GX2 that we reviews a few weeks ago is still the enthusiast card to have and the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 just got some tough competition.

The Palit and XFX GeForce 9800 GTX video cards both are great video cards with really no difference between them other than the bundle and price tag. The XFX GeForce 9800 GTX had by far the best bundle of the two, but it will cost you a bit more when you go to check out. If you are wondering where SLI and Triple SLI performance numbers are at you'll have to wait. NVIDIA forgot to send us a third graphics card, but they overnight mailed us one yesterday. Now we just have to re-test it and re-do all the charts!