Or $210 ~ $220 king for us Canadians.

If I was going to plop down $200+ for a new video card, I would make it an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460. According to The Tech Report and AnandTech, NVIDIA have redeemed themselves after the somewhat disappointing high end cards.

Now,  I just purchased a Radeon HD 5770 for about $174 and if you’re wondering if I would have waited for this video card, the answer would have been: “No”.

I have a new rule for upgrading video cards:

It must offer at least 200% increase in performance for $200 or less (after taxes).

That may seem like a lot to ask for, but that’s more than what I got when I upgraded from my 7900 GT.

The only thing I may regret is the inevitable shuffling of pricing which may knock the Radeon HD 5770 down the pricing ladder. However, I doubt we’ll see that price drop before we the Radeon HD 5850′s.

Saw this article on Tech Report and thought it was interesting. I’ve always wondered why PhysX couldn’t be implemented on the CPU and it looks like there’s no real reason.

In this Real Time World Technologies article, the author discovered that a majority of the code for PhysX used x87 floating point instructions.

What is x87?

The x87 floating point instructions are positively ancient, and have been long since deprecated in favor of the much more efficient SSE2 instructions (and soon AVX). Intel started discouraging the use of x87 with the introduction of the P4 in late 2000. AMD deprecated x87 since the K8 in 2003, as x86-64 is defined with SSE2 support; VIA’s C7 has supported SSE2 since 2005. In 64-bit versions of Windows, x87 is deprecated for user-mode, and prohibited entirely in kernel-mode. Pretty much everyone in the industry has recommended SSE over x87 since 2005 and there are no reasons to use x87, unless software has to run on an embedded Pentium or 486.

No Technical Reason to Run on x87

The truth is that there is no technical reason for PhysX to be using x87 code. PhysX uses x87 because Ageia and now Nvidia want it that way. Nvidia already has PhysX running on consoles using the AltiVec extensions for PPC, which are very similar to SSE. It would probably take about a day or two to get PhysX to emit modern packed SSE2 code, and several weeks for compatibility testing. In fact for backwards compatibility, PhysX could select at install time whether to use an SSE2 version or an x87 version – just in case the elusive gamer with a Pentium Overdrive decides to try it.

It may not be as effective as running on a fast GPU, but it would be better than it is now if it were properly optimized and not running on x87 instructions. Multi-threaded CPUs are already underutilized in modern PC gaming and proprietary tactics like this (intentional or not) do not help things.

Of course, this is NVIDIA’s baby and they could raise it however they wish. The real takeaway from this little debacle is the need for some kind of physics standard like what we have for graphics. I wonder who will step up.

I’m a bit late on this, but it looks like both AnandTech and Tech Report reviews are essentially saying the same thing: the AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 are better buys.

While these new NVIDIA video cards are “10 and 15% faster”, they do cost more, consume more power, run hotter and run louder than their AMD/ATI counterparts. So why bother with these new cards? There doesn’t seem to be a reason to.

I hope a price war between these two video card giants starts up. That’s when I can make a real purchasing decision because, quite frankly, they’re both a bit too expensive for my tastes.

$250 or less please. $200 would be better!

I would have loved to download and write up some impressions on the newly released Red Faction: Guerilla demo, however I’m currently breaching 90% of the bandwidth limit. So instead, I’ll be talking about my Mini 9 and my impressions of it after five months of use.

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AMD and Nvidia decided to refresh their top end lineups today with two new video cards:

• AMD Radeon HD 4890
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 275

Both video cards will debut at around $250 USD. Nothing particularly surprising from either one of them. They average 10%-15% increase in performance compared to their predecessors which means owners of the predecessors may not want to shell out the money for the minimal upgrade.

As for the winner between the two of them? It’s a tough call. AnandTech has the review for those who wish to know more.

I’m not discounting my current Dell Mini 9′s performance. It is fine for what I need to do, but that’s not to say that it couldn’t be better. For example, it struggles to decode compressed high definition video content. To be frank, the Intel GMA 950 is a poor excuse for a graphics chip.

To save the ultra portable and bite sized computing market from a future of limited video processing is the NVIDIA Ion platform which was unveiled at CES 2009. It’s powered by an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M — the exact same GPU chipset that powers the new Apple MacBooks. This little puppy includes not only a beefy GPU and Intel Atom compatibility, but also other noteworthy features such as:

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This piece of news is pretty big. If you purchase an Intel X58 based motherboard for your Intel Core i7 you will be able to use both AMD/ATI’s Crossfire and Nvidia’s SLI capabilities with the appropriate video cards. Intel chipsets tend to be the best of the bunch and with this solution, you aren’t forced to make that decision of red team or green team; now you can choose the blue team and get both!

There are many hoops for motherboard manufacturers to jump through and since they are part of the Intel “X” chipsets, they will be expensive motherboards, but this is the step in the right direction.

I wonder how long it will be until we see this capability trickle down to the more mainstream chipset offerings.