NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Performance Preview November 09, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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Now, roughly six months later, NVIDIA is essentially transporting this same award-winning GPU from the desktop PC to the notebook, giving gamers on the go more power than ever before. Sounds like a pretty solid plan for success doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, getting this concept from a piece of paper into a working product that you can ship to customers isn’t so easy. Power is obviously the biggest issue graphics manufacturers like NVIDIA must overcome. If the chip consumes too much juice, battery life takes a nosedive and the system is nothing more than an over glorified desktop PC. Heat is another major concern that must be overcome. The more powerful your graphics core is, the more heat it tends to generate. As a result, a larger cooler must be used to keep heat at bay.

This isn’t a huge issue in a fully-fledged ATX desktop PC, where you often have three or more empty PCI slots worth of dead space available, but in a laptop chassis you can’t have three of four inch thick heatsinks sitting on top of the graphics core, there simply isn’t enough space.

Starting with GeForce Go 6800, NVIDIA has taken steps to ensure that the lag time between desktop and mobile releases is reduced. Part of this was the MXM initiative launched earlier this summer. If you recall, MXM is NVIDIA’s universal PCI Express interface that has been designed to make life easier for NVIDIA and its partners by rallying around a standard specification that applies to all segments of the mobile market, including the latest high-end desknote portable systems. NVIDIA’s mobile team also worked closely with NV40’s engineers while the GeForce 6800 was still in development. The end result is that NVIDIA now has GeForce Go 6800 shipping to its notebook partners today, only seven months after GeForce 6800 Ultra was launched on the desktop. We recently had the opportunity to take a GeForce Go 6800-based notebook from ProStar, the 9095, out for a spin and came away impressed by the experience.

GeForce Go 6800 Features

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The chief concession that has been made in GeForce Go 6800 is the number of pixel pipelines, the Go 6800 sports 12 pipes versus the 16 pipelines found in the desktop GeForce 6800 GT and Ultra. NVIDIA also had to reduce the core clock frequency to 300MHz, with 256MB of GDDR3 memory also running at 300MHz (600MHz effective). In comparison, the GeForce 6800 GT is clocked at 350MHz core/500MHz memory, while the vanilla GeForce 6800 operates at 325MHz core/350MHz memory.

The GeForce Go 6800 also supports DDR1 and DDR2 memory types, although we’ve been told that most manufacturers will probably go with GDDR3. In addition, latter Go 6800 models will be clocked higher, NVIDIA is shooting for clock speeds as high as 450MHz on the core and 600MHz memory (1.2GHz effective), but systems based on these faster chips won’t hit retail until the beginning of next year.

NVIDIA will need to get these supercharged Go 6800 chips out as soon as possible, as ATI intends to ship their competitor to Go 6800, codenamed M28 with similar clock speeds. Over the weekend we were given the opportunity to test a 12-pipe prototype M28 laptop manufactured by Clevo (the same ODM as the Prostar system we received from NVIDIA) that was clocked at 400MHz core/400MHz memory, future variants of M28 will eventually hit 450MHz.

ATI’s M28 is essentially the 12-pipe, PCI Express version of today’s MOBILITY RADEON 9800, giving end user’s ATI’s 2.0b pixel shaders, and 3Dc. ATI has also developed a 16-pipe version of M28, but this product will likely never see the light of day. ATI plans to launch M28 just in time for the holiday shopping season, so we’ll have a dedicated performance preview of this part online in the coming weeks.

Impressions of the ProStar notebook

Before we get started with the Go 6800 benchmarks, we wanted to include a few thoughts on the ProStar 9095 notebook we tested. Like the ASUS L5000GA we reviewed earlier this year, the ProStar 9095 featured a brilliant display. In this case, a 17” wide angle IPS TFT LCD.

IPS displays like the L5000GA and ProStar 9095 can be viewed at extreme angles without the color and brightness drop off that you’d see in traditional TN+film displays that are used in most notebooks. This makes them perfect for watching DVDs or gaming. The downside to IPS displays is that they require a more powerful backlight, which tends to soak up more power. Like the ASUS L5000GA, battery life of the ProStar 9095 was nothing to write home about, you’ve only got a little over an hour’s worth of juice before the battery needs to be charged. Frankly, the ProStar 9095 is so big and heavy (over 10 pounds) that we couldn’t imagine anyone using this laptop on the go; the system is larger than Dell’s Inspiron XPS, a notebook that is known for being pretty portly. Do not buy this system thinking you’re the one exception that’s hardcore enough to put up with the size of this system’s chassis running on your lap, trust us, you won’t. This system is meant to run in one area only: safely on your desk or on a table.

Of course, all this is forgotten once you get behind the 9095’s 17” display and boot her up. Our test sytem was equipped with a Pentium 4 3GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and of course, the speedy 256MB GeForce Go 6800 GPU. ProStar provides a DVI output on the back of the 9095 for outputting to an external display and front panel Audio DJ controls (including a snazzy LED) for listening to music while the laptop is either on or off.

Base prices start at $2,630 for the ProStar 9095 with 512MB RAM and a 60GB 5400RPM hard drive, but we recommend you move up to the 1GB configuration with a 7200 RPM hard drive (a $15 option) and the Pentium 4 3.2GHz, which adds another $40 to the price tag. This puts you in at under $3,000 for a laptop that would kill most desktop gaming PCs.

Test systems

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System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz

ABIT IC7-G Max II Advance

1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2

Leadtek WinFast A400 GeForce 6800
Driver version 66.81

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (T3 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Far Cry 1.3 (SM2.0b and SM3.0 paths used)

Notes

Unfortunately, we didn’t have as much time as we would have liked to run a full battery of tests with the M28 system, we only had enough time to run tests with Far Cry 1.3 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Hopefully we’ll get our hands on a final M28 system and Go 6800 so the two chips can duke it out again.

IL-2	Page:: ( 4 / 16 )

IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL

LOMAC

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Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D

UT 2004

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Unreal Tournament 2004

Splinter Cell

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Splinter Cell – Direct3D

Far Cry Volcano

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Volcano AA/AF

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Far Cry Research

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Research w/AA&AF

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Far Cry Regulator

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Regulator AA&AF

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Far Cry Training

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Training w/AA&AF

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Conclusion

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In terms of performance, GeForce Go 6800 is roughly 15-20% behind the desktop GeForce 6800 in most conditions, although there were extreme cases with 4xAA and 4xAF in Far Cry where that margin was greater. This may not sound like much at first, but when you consider that ATI’s current high-end mobile offering, MOBILITY RADEON 9800, was a little slower than RADEON 9800 PRO in our testing back in September, we have no doubts that GeForce Go 6800 is faster. Make no mistake about it, NVIDIA’s GeForce Go 6800 is currently the king in mobile graphics performance.

ATI isn’t going away quietly though. The Canadian company is currently preparing a PCI Express-based successor to MOBILITY RADEON 9800 that’s also based on X800 technology but with a 12 pixel pipeline architecture codenamed M28. Our testing with a prototype M28-equipped laptop suggests that GeForce Go 6800 may not hold the performance crown for very long. This is due in part to the M28’s faster clock speeds. The million-dollar question is, when will M28 ship? We’ve been told that the product will be launched later this month, with the first laptops shipping just in time for Christmas, but GeForce Go 6800 is shipping today in systems from Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Sager, Eurocom, ProStar, Voodoo PC, and others.

Of course, NVIDIA may decide to respond by introducing a 350MHz, or even 400MHz GeForce Go 6800 variant dubbed the GeForce Go 6800 GT or Ultra. NVIDIA has told us that they believe they could potentially scale as high as 450MHz with respins of their existing Go 6800 core. If this occurs, the two companies could be going back and forth with one another for the next few months.

Right now though, the current mobile performance champion is clear: NVIDIA’s GeForce Go 6800. If you’re in the market for a new high-end laptop, be on the lookout for systems based on this GPU.