XFX Introduces 9600 GT in India

XFX today announced the arrival of its latest premium product XFX GEFORCE 9600 GT.

This new card supports next-generation GeForce graphics with PureVideo HD technology, which enables the PC to play HD DVD and Blu-ray video playback with brilliant clarity. This card is also the first product in the 9600 GT series to offer up to 90 percent greater performance than any GeForce card in its class. It supports Microsoft DirectX 10 support, NVIDIA’s Quantum Effects technology, Lumenex engine as well as Unified Architecture ensuring optimium game performance.

It standard runs at a core speed of 650 MHz, with XFX overclocked versions available in the Extreme and XXX editions pushing 680 MHz and 700 MHz. The 9600 GT is HDMI capable with the use of HDMI certified components. The 9600 GT XXX edition is fully HDMI certified and includes a HDMI component kit and Company of Heroes DVD as a bonus game bundle.

The 9600 graphics card is available with Rashi Peripherals and its nationwide branches across India at an estimated street price of Rs. 13990 with a 3 year warranty.

Gigabyte Introduces Powersaving G31 Motherboards

GIGABYTE has announced the launch of the G31 Series of motherboards based on the Intel G31 chipset. These motherboards use the Dynamic Energy Saver technology and deliver huge power savings and better power efficiency to computers. Two models will be available in this series – GA-EG31M-S2 and GA-EG31MF-S2.

"GIGABYTE Dynamic Energy Saver Series Motherboards are able to provide exceptional power savings of up to 70% improved power efficiency without sacrificing computing performance, our entry model GA-EG31M-S2 is DES compliant", said Rajan Sharma, General Manager – MB and VGA BU – Gigabyte India.

The motherboards from the G31 Series are compatible with high-end processors including Intel Core 2 multi-core and 45nm processors and come equipped with a dual Channel DDR2 800 memory which gives performance to the most demanding applications on your PC. It also has the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 that supports Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and Windows Vista Aero experience, which improves realism and delivers excellent graphics performance. The EG31M-S2 Series also has the Ultra Durable2 design for its CPU VRM (Voltage Regulator Module). This ensures better cooling, lower power loss and longer lifespan for computers in daily operation, and boosts system stability under extreme conditions.

The Gigabyte GA-EG31M-S2 is priced at Rs. 5500 while the GA-EG31MF-S2 is priced at Rs. 6000. The motherboards are distributed by Avnet (India), Ingram Micro and Redington.

Gigabyte Introduces 9600 GT 512 MB GPU

Gigabyte today announced the launch of their new graphics accelerator, the GV-NX96T512H-B. The new card features the GeForce 9600 GT chipset with 512 MB GDDR3 memory, 64 stream processors as well as support for HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). The new product is compatible with the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture, is equipped with DirectX 10 support and adopts the latest Unified Shader architecture with full support for SM 4.0.

The new card features NVIDIA's latest advanced technologies including GigaThread technology, which, through the use of a massively multi-threaded architecture, is able to create thousands of independent, simultaneous threads, providing processing efficiency for advanced, next generation shader programs. Additionally, the GIGABYTE GV-NX96T512H-B supports NVIDIA’s Quantum Effect technology, enabling a new level of physics effects to be simulated and rendered on the GPU. The card also features the Lumenex engine, which introduces 16x Anti-aliasing and 128-bit floating point High-Dynamic-Range (HDR), for ultra realistic rendering of lighting effects.

The GV-NX96T512H-B is available for Rs. 12,500

Nvidia Responsible for 29% of Vista Crashes

In a recent revelation that should come to no surprise to anyone, Microsoft has released documents that show drivers for Nvidia PC graphics cards were the cause of roughly 29% of logged crashes in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system.

This story which was reported by Ars Technica, goes on to say that Nvidia drivers caused 479,000 crashes out of a total of 1,663,748 logged by Microsoft in 2007. This was closely followed by Microsoft's own drivers followed at 18% while ATI clocked in at fourth with 9.3%, and Intel was at fifth with 8.8%.
This information came to light, when 158 pages of internal emails was made public as part of a lawsuit that is currently under-way against Microsoft. The suit contends that Microsoft was partially responsible for the rise of prices of computer hardware during the important Christmas/New year buying season of 2006.

Given the fact that Nvidia is today’s easily the world’s largest manufacturer of discrete external graphical display solutions, their figure of 29 percent should come as no surprise. I personally was a victim of this as an Nvidia user.

High-end Graphics Card Overview

You have deep pockets, yearn for the best experience in the game and still confused as to which graphics card to buy? Had it been a Monopoly in the graphics card business, then there wouldn't be so many problems. But, two graphic cards companies namely ATI and NVIDIA are continuously churning out new cards just to outdo each other in terms of performance. Before, we discuss about the current situation of high-end cards, let's just travel back in time and see the fight between these two companies, as it will help you get a better idea of which is a better company. Initially 3DFX was the king in the graphics accelerator business. But, the NVIDIA Riva TNT graphics card simply bashed the best offering from 3DFX then. And NVIDIA kept on churning out newer generations of graphics cards every six months and 3DFX was unable to keep pace with NVIDIA and finally just shut down and sold its business to NVIDIA. This was the time when NVIDIA's monopoly began. The NVIDIA dominance continued with the GeForce 256 and GeForce 2 GTS. That was the time most graphics card companies started shutting down. All but one, ATI. The only reason why ATI was still operational was because their workstation graphics cards were selling well and NVIDIA didn't have a workstation graphics card yet. When NVIDIA released GeForce 2 GTS, ATI unleashed the first Radeon card codenamed R100 and was eventually called the Radeon 7500. But, in terms of performance, it was a step behind NVIDIA's offering. Though ATI never had major success with the Radeon 7500, their R200 a.k.a. Radeon 8500 did started making a dent in NVIDIA's sales figures. During that time, NVIDIA released the GeForce 3 series, which boasted of DirectX 8.0 support and had never before seen features. ATI Radeon 8500 was one step ahead of the GeForce 3 in terms of features like the support for DirectX 8.1 and Trueform, but lacked in performance. But the performance difference was marginal and people started accepting the Radeon 8500 for getting the extra features and more importantly the superior image quality, which was ATI's forte. But, during that time Quake 3 was considered the benchmark for the graphics card. The company, which scored the most in Quake 3 was considered the ultimate winner. ATI were not known for good performance in OpenGL-based games. And since Quake 3 was an OpenGL-based game, ATI had to do something or else they would have lost the battle. Obviously making a new graphics card at that time was not possible. Here's when a new era dawned, which is known as Driver Optimization. The graphics card drivers were specially optimized for a particular game, which made the game run faster, but at the same sacrificed on some features such as image quality. ATI suddenly took the performance crown from NVIDIA and upon investigation; it was found that ATI was cheating with its drivers. There was huge outcry and ATI had to pull back the drivers. So, the performance king was still NVIDIA. Then NVIDIA released the next generation graphic card GeForce 4 Ti, which was basically a small upgrade to GeForce 3 series. This widened the performance gap a little more in favor of NVIDIA, but their success was short lived. ATI released a graphics card codenamed R300 four months after the GeForce 4 Ti. This graphics card is none other than the Radeon 9700, and in terms of performance, it was giving double the scores of the GeForce 4 Ti in certain benchmarks. NVIDIA for the first time lost the performance crown officially.

You have deep pockets, yearn for the best experience in the game and still confused as to which graphics card to buy? Had it been a Monopoly in the graphics card business, then there wouldn't be so many problems. But, two graphic cards companies namely ATI and NVIDIA are continuously churning out new cards just to outdo each other in terms of performance. Before, we discuss about the current situation of high-end cards, let's just travel back in time and see the fight between these two companies, as it will help you get a better idea of which is a better company. Initially 3DFX was the king in the graphics accelerator business. But, the NVIDIA Riva TNT graphics card simply bashed the best offering from 3DFX then. And NVIDIA kept on churning out newer generations of graphics cards every six months and 3DFX was unable to keep pace with NVIDIA and finally just shut down and sold its business to NVIDIA. This was the time when NVIDIA's monopoly began. The NVIDIA dominance continued with the GeForce 256 and GeForce 2 GTS. That was the time most graphics card companies started shutting down. All but one, ATI. The only reason why ATI was still operational was because their workstation graphics cards were selling well and NVIDIA didn't have a workstation graphics card yet. When NVIDIA released GeForce 2 GTS, ATI unleashed the first Radeon card codenamed R100 and was eventually called the Radeon 7500. But, in terms of performance, it was a step behind NVIDIA's offering. Though ATI never had major success with the Radeon 7500, their R200 a.k.a. Radeon 8500 did started making a dent in NVIDIA's sales figures. During that time, NVIDIA released the GeForce 3 series, which boasted of DirectX 8.0 support and had never before seen features. ATI Radeon 8500 was one step ahead of the GeForce 3 in terms of features like the support for DirectX 8.1 and Trueform, but lacked in performance. But the performance difference was marginal and people started accepting the Radeon 8500 for getting the extra features and more importantly the superior image quality, which was ATI's forte. But, during that time Quake 3 was considered the benchmark for the graphics card. The company, which scored the most in Quake 3 was considered the ultimate winner. ATI were not known for good performance in OpenGL-based games. And since Quake 3 was an OpenGL-based game, ATI had to do something or else they would have lost the battle. Obviously making a new graphics card at that time was not possible. Here's when a new era dawned, which is known as Driver Optimization. The graphics card drivers were specially optimized for a particular game, which made the game run faster, but at the same sacrificed on some features such as image quality. ATI suddenly took the performance crown from NVIDIA and upon investigation; it was found that ATI was cheating with its drivers. There was huge outcry and ATI had to pull back the drivers. So, the performance king was still NVIDIA. Then NVIDIA released the next generation graphic card GeForce 4 Ti, which was basically a small upgrade to GeForce 3 series. This widened the performance gap a little more in favor of NVIDIA, but their success was short lived. ATI released a graphics card codenamed R300 four months after the GeForce 4 Ti. This graphics card is none other than the Radeon 9700, and in terms of performance, it was giving double the scores of the GeForce 4 Ti in certain benchmarks. NVIDIA for the first time lost the performance crown officially.
In reply, NVIDIA had no other option but to get a newer graphics card out. Till that happened, NVIDIA also started playing the same old dirty trick, drivers optimization in order to boost the performance of the GeForce 4 Ti series up to acceptable levels. But still Radeon 9700 was the performance king. NVIDIA in a hurry released a graphics card codenamed NV30 also known as GeForce FX 5800. But the card had a lot of problems such as overheating and large amount of noise emitted by the fan. Also, the graphics card had a two slot design, which many people didn't appreciate it. In terms of performance it was on par with the Radeon 9700 series. So it made more sense to buy ATI's solution as it didn't face the problems NVIDIA had. NVIDIA quickly released the GeForce FX 5900 which removed most of the problems. But ATI also got a newer card in the market, the Radeon 9800 whose performance was on par with the GeForce FX 5900. The rivalry continued with newer cards coming from both the stables, ATI's 9800 XT and NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. NVIDIA lost a huge market share at that time and ATI's position as a graphics card manufacturer got stronger. At the beginning of 2004, both the companies were ready for a new battle, but this time the table turned. Both the companies were going to release their graphics card simultaneously with no details emerging on their specifications. When the specifications were out, ATI's high-end card had 12 pipelines, where as NVIDIA's high-end card had 16 pipelines. ATI knew on paper itself that they had lost and quickly made a 16 pipeline card. The most powerful AGP card from ATI is the Radeon X800 XT, which has the 16 pipelines whereas the Radeon X800 Pro has 12 pipelines. In NVIDIA's case, the GeForce 6800 Ultra has 16 pipelines and the GeForce 6800 GT also has 16 pipeline but with lower clock speed.

The graphics card business extended from sub $400 to sub $500. The high-end card from both these companies now cost nearly $500. In terms of performance, the Radeon X800 XT and GeForce 6800 Ultra were quite evenly matched. But in the second best category i.e. Radeon X800 Pro and GeForce 6800 GT, the GeForce 6800 GT beats X800 Pro in most benchmarks hands down. Then when DOOM 3 was released, the performance of NVIDIA's cards was noticeably better than the ATI cards, mainly because the game was quite heavily optimized for their cards. But in the mean time, ATI also played by the same rules and got Half-Life 2 benchmark scores in their favor. NVIDIA made several presentations about how X800 technology is outdated when compared to theirs like the feature of Pixel Shader 3.0, which is absent on X800 cards. It's just tit for tat; ATI did the same during the Radeon 9800 and GeForce FX 5800 days. The rivalry still continues, but in the end, games getting optimized for specific cards is what is hurting the end user. The message given by the companies was clear, if you want to play DOOM 3, get NVIDIA's cards and if you want to play Half-Life 2, get ATI's cards. But at the end of the day, if you play DOOM 3 on ATI's high-end card, you still will be able to play on full graphics and very smoothly. Same goes for Half-Life 2 on NVIDIA's card. It is just that one card gives better frames than the other in that particular game. So, as of now, which is the best graphic card to buy? We have run benchmarks on such types of graphics cards over the past few months. It seemed like ATI's X800 series would excel in Direct 3D-based games and NVIDIA cards would shine in OpenGL games. In OpenGL-based games such as Call of Duty, the Asus 6800 256 MB V9999 GE beat the X800 Pro by a score of 154.8 FPS to 150.2 FPS in 4x AA/8xAF (Anti-Aliasing/ Anisotropic Filtering) at 1280 x 1024 resolution. The funny part is that the Asus 6800 256 MB V9999 GE is based on GeForce 6800 core with only 12 pipelines and 5 vertex shaders. The actual competitor to the X800 Pro is supposed to be the GeForce 6800 GT, which has 16 pipelines and 6 vertex shaders. NVIDIA's cards showed their power in OpenGL-based games. But when it came to Direct 3D, ATI still continued to lose against the NVIDIA solution. In the Far Cry Benchmark, the Asus 6800 V9999 GE scored an average of 54.09 FPS in 4xAA/8xAF in 1024 x 768 modes, where as ATI's X800 Pro managed a score of 46.32 FPS. In the same benchmark Gainward's 6800 GT scored 61.4 FPS. Don't forget that even Far Cry runs better on NVIDIA cards due to support of Pixel Shader 3.0, which is not at all present in the ATI cards. But the true strength of ATI's card is seen in the 3D Mark 2003 and 3D Mark 2005 benchmark. The Asus X800 Pro scores 4584 in 3D Mark 2005, whereas NVIDIA's chip based XFX 6800 GT scores 4433. When we move up to the most high-end cards such as Radeon X800 XT and GeForce 6800 Ultra both of these cards are evenly matched. But, since most of the games are based on Direct 3D than OpenGL, ATI edges ahead on points, however the 6800 Ultra isn't too far behind. But in games such as Far Cry and DOOM 3, it takes the honors. This is our own list of cards in terms of performance. Please keep in mind the Radeon X800 XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra are very difficult to find in India. 1. ATI Radeon X800XT 2. NVIDIA Geforce 6800 Ultra 3. NVIDIA Geforce 6800 GT 4. ATI Radeon X800 Pro 5. NVIDIA Geforce 6800
Now the other major factor determining which graphics card to buy is the cost and the availability. As I already mentioned, the Radeon X800 XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra are very difficult to find in India. So the next best graphics chipset that comes to mind is the NVIDIA 6800 GT. Now the prime companies dealing in that chipset and in India are Asus, XFX and Gainward. In terms of cost, the XFX 6800 GT is the cheapest at Rs. 25,000. However, the Gainward 6800 GT Golden sample is not only a great performer, but also the most overclockable having the capability of reaching 6800 Ultra speeds and beyond and that too for just Rs. 2,500 more. And considering the fact that the 6800 Ultra and ATI X800 XT cards, the performance of which it matches and even exceeds at times, sell for over Rs. 37,000, it makes the Gainward card an amazing deal. So we term the Gainward 6800 GT Golden Sample as the Best Buy amongst the high-end cards currently available here.

Does nVidia itself makes Graphic Cards? or only GPUs?

nVidia does not actually make the graphics cards; they make
the GPUs, which are then integrated with cards by 3rd-party resellers.
According to the nVidia rep, even if they show the nVidia name, the
cards are *always* from another company, such as MSI, eVGA, or PNY.
I can attest from my own experience that the identity of the 3rd-party
company is not always easily discernible by inspection of the box or
the card.
(Note that when purchasing a video card, you need to determine whether
your system requires a AGP or PCI-E card interface:
from t-break: PCI-E Bandwagon, you can see a picture showing both
types of card connectors:
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=321
Other products made by nVidia include MCPs (media and communications
processors) and AMD chipsets for motherboards.
You can see the full line of their products here:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/products.html
For nVidia Support:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html
nVidia Contact information:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/contact_information.html
Search Strategy:
nVidia
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nVidia
Google Image Search
"AGP * vs PCI-E" OR "PCI-E vs AGP"
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22AGP+*+vs+PCI-E%22+OR+%22PCI-E+vs+AGP%22
Before Rating this Answer, if you have any questions about the
information that I have presented, please post a Request for
Clarification, and I will be glad to see what I can do for you.
I hope that this Answer provides you with exactly the information
which you were seeking!
Regards,
aceresearcher
Clarification of Answer by aceresearcher-ga on 17 Dec 2006 17:52 PST Hello again, leonchik!
To assist in identifying 3rd-party manufacturers of nVidia computer
graphics video cards, I am including the following list of these
manufacturers:
AOpen
ASUS
BFG Technologies
Chaintech
Club 3D
eVGA
Foxconn
Gainward
GALAXY Technology
Gigabyte Technology
Inno3D
Leadtek
Matrox
MSI
PNY Technologies
Point of View
PowerColor
S3 Graphics
Sapphire Technologies
XFX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_hardware_manufacturers#Graphics_card

Intel® GMA X3000 onboard graphics subsystem

Can "Intel® GMA X3000 onboard graphics subsystem" that found on new
intel motherboard DG965WH be compared to any PCI-E graphic card?

The GMA X3000 is an onboard graphics output device, on board graphics
has historically been much slower and less feature packed than their
alternative PCI-E or AGP brothers.
This remark on a review of a trade show sums this up.
"Admittedly the X3000 sounds impressive - by Intel standards mind you
- with support for Shader Model 3 and DirectX 9.0c. Mainly though it's
positioned as an output device for media PCs, and integrates features
like hardware de-interlacing for video."
This basically says that Intel made this device as a means to display
graphics and cope with low end graphical demands but nothing much more
beyond this.
This graphics card was only finally released (including all system
specifications for manufacturers) on the 8th of August this year so
the chances of finding any final release or fully completed
motherboard benchmarks is going to be hard.
As taken from here
http://www.techpowerup.com/archive.php?15379
"Intel has updated the final specifications for G965 and Q965 Express
chipsets. Intel originally intended to use same integrated graphics on
both G965 and Q965 Express chipsets, but this update shows that they
have decided to use two separate graphics core—GMA X3000 for G965
Express and GMA 3000 for Q965 Express. G965 Express with its GMA X3000
graphics core will support DirectX 9c, DirectX 10, OpenGL 1.5,
Hardware vertex and pixel shager model 3.0 features. The GMA X3000
will have a 667 MHz graphics core clock with support for high dynamic
range and Intel Clear Video Technology for enhanced video playback."
It will also be able to cope with the Aero interface of the new
Windows Vista when it is finally released.
This website is the offical Intel white paper on the graphics device
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma3000/gma3000.pdf
One section of this white paper reads
"The Intel® G965 Express chipsets that incorporates Intel® Graphics
Media Accelerator X3000 runs at 667 MHz and supports a dual channel
memory bandwidth of up to 12.8 GB/s and dynamic video memory of 384
MB"
As you can see, the Nvidia 7900GT that you were thinking of purchasing
yesterday is a much better graphics card with its 512MB of dedicated
video memory (on the X3000 I believe the memory is shared with your
system memory reducing your 2GIG of system memory down to 1.62gig).
The 7900GT has a memory bandwidth of 42.2 GB/s almost 4 times faster
than the X3000.
On board graphics cards have never been as powerful as their PCI-E or
AGP counterparts but for what they are they will easily suffice for
watching movies and playing low end games and high end games at much
lower settings.
The X3000 graphics processor is not a low quality graphics processor,
when compared to the 7900GT and the 7600GT you would be much better
off opting for the 7900GT graphics card.
I hope this gives you enough information.