nvidia geforce gtx 280 versus geforce 8800 gtx

Hi all

Touch testing the new nvidia geforce gtx 280.
Just thought I’d let anyone out there who is thinking of buying one,
so you can check out my results before you make a purchase.
I’ll update this post when I get my results.

BFG Geforce 8800 versus BFG Geforce GTX 280 OC

Hope this info is helpful to some of you!
Otherwise I’m wasting my time posting :unamused: :wink:

Okay, this card was indeed worth the upgrade.
In about a weeks time the EVGA GTX 280 FTW (best factory overclock) is coming out.
At that point I’m swapping out my BFG version for that one,
so if you are thinking about getting a GTX 280, I’d wait a week a purchase the EVGA GTX 280 FTW .
It’s not a massive leap forward on all fronts, but it certainly is on some.
There is also 1 gig of texture memory, which shows up in full (yummy)

I tested this on three basic .toes

  1. Geo.toe
  2. ParticleComp.toe
  3. MovieComp.toe

for each of three toes there are two different version,
the original version, and one that I made that would make my 8800 GTX crawl.
These crawl version will have “Boost” added to the end of the name.

1) Geo.toe
This is a scene that has one poly circle, ran through a few copy sops, one point light, and the geo all shares the same phong material.
BTW, Touch is soooooo much better with multi-threading sops on the cpu (thanks guys!)
So this scene has 109760 points, and 3920 primitives.
Unlike the other scenes, there was no difference at all between the two cards.
Perhaps because the CPU is doing most of the work?
12 fps
84 frame time

GeoBoost.toe

Same for both cards
320000 points
8000 primitives
4.3 fps

2) ParticleComp.toe
This is a particle scene, with an udgodly amount of tops.
A particle system set to “birth 10”, “life 10”.
101 points, and 1 primitive.
_____________8800gtx____________GTX 280 OC


fps:____________15_______________20


ParticleCompBoost.toe

birth: 3600, Life: 20
72003 points, 1 primitive
____________8800gtx______________GTX 280 OC


fps:_________7-15__________________9-20

3) MovieComp.toe
This toe (especially the “boost” version) is where the 280 really beat the pants off 8800!
This toe is a lengthy high resolution .avi file, ran through the largest networks of tops.
resolution 720x480
_____________8800gtx_____________GTX 280 OC


fps:__________18__________________25-30

MovieCompBoost.toe
This is the same scene with a “resolution” top added at the very end of the top network.
resolution 8192x7680 (Yowza!!!)
_______8800gtx GTX 280 OC


fps: ______________ .8 _____________ 15-20
gpu memory used:___954_____________954

Quite a fps boost!
Perhaps this had to do with the added texture memory.

Well thats all
Hope it helps someone out there in touchy-internet-land.

Jim

Ya, if you see no speed increase going from an 8800 to a 280, then your system is bound by CPU operations and the GPU is underworked.

Thanks Jim, this is really helpful. even though I’m not shopping for cards right now.

It makes me think that it would be great to have a set of test .toes like this thaht each thrash a different aspect of the card to get some comparisons.

The cards in laptops (or lap-crushers really) seem hardest to predict performance wise because the makers are so bad at keeping up with driver updates etc.

Rod.

Hi Jim,

Yes, I agree this is really helpful. Can you post your speed test .toe’s ? I’d like to run some comparison numbers on my system, just got a few 9800GTX’s. In theory they should be the same as the 8800GTX, but seem faster.

Thanks,
Jeff

Do you one better!
I compared the 9800 GX2 (two 9800 gtx’s stacked) with a standard 8800 gtx
about four months back.
Touch could only leverage one of the card boards,
so it was like having one 9800 gtx.
My overall impression is that the older 8800 was the superior card
and that the 9800 gtx series was not worth the upgrade (I returned mine).
If you want to see the results, the name of the posted topic is below:

Nvidia 9800 GX2, will Touch be able to handle both cores?

Hey Jim,

Yeah, I remember that post, just thought I was seeing faster speeds, now that I’ve run some more tests I think the speed is pretty much identical, just less memory.

I ended up going with the 9800 over the 8800 because they run a bit cooler and the case is pretty tight. And U\unfortunately didn’t know about the 280 coming out when I bought the cards. And even more unfortunately installing the cards in my case requires a permanent mod to the power connectors so I can’t return them. Ah well, they’ll serve me find for now, always good discipline to make things run within limitations . . . though the 8800/9800’s are still pretty damn fast.

Thanks again for the info . . . the need for speed is indeed a noble quest,
Jeff