By now enough time has passed that I can come back here and hopefully answer/not answer a few questions :)
In the 8+ years I've been running this place, I don't think I've ever pulled an article before. I can't be too specific here, but some folks needed to be kept anonymous and I had to make a decision for the greater good in the long run. I apologize for remaining quiet about it for so long, but it was necessary.
With that out of the way - there's a lot to talk about.
I finally managed to pry a pair of 7800 GTXs away from Derek's hands and I've been working to answer the question of how fast of a CPU need to feed these things. There are a number of variables that have to be taken into account, most importantly being the resolution you're running at. The thing that's truly new about a card as powerful as the G70 is that you really start being limited by your monitor in what resolutions it supports. While owners of large analog CRTs have a lot of flexibility with what resolutions they can run at, LCD owners can't; so if you've got a G70 hooked up to a 1600 x 1200 panel you'll have to make different CPU decisions than if you have a 1920 x 1200 panel. I'm trying to simplify the decision making as best as possible and for this round I'm only focusing on single card solutions, but if there's demand later I can tackle SLI requirements.
I finally hooked up the G70 to the 30" Cinema Display and gave Doom 3 a whirl at 2560 x 1600. What I find most interesting is that once you start getting far above 1600 x 1200 it's no longer about making the game look good, it's about making the game look good on your monitor. For example, there's not too much difference playing Doom 3 at 1920 x 1200 vs. 2560 x 1600, it's just that the former looks great on a 24" monitor while the latter looks great on a 30" monitor. The quest for perfect image quality stops being about resolution and starts being about screen size; almost in a way similar to how consoles used to be, where your only hope for a "better" picture was to go to a larger screen, since you couldn't control resolution.
The pendulum will swing away from ultra high resolutions as games become more and more demanding. There are still some titles that even the G70 can't handle at above 1280 x 1024.
Monday's Athlon 64 Memory Divider article has got me thinking a lot about multitasking and its impacts on higher speed memory. Theoretically there should be some pretty big differences between DDR400 and DDR500 once we get into the heftier multitasking scenarios, but I want to get an idea of exactly how widespread that need is. My initial tests only revealed one scenario where there was a tangible performance boost, but I think they warrant some additional testing. After I'm done with this memory divider stuff I'll head on to that.
Many of you have asked for a Battlefield 2 CPU scaling article and I'm more than happy to oblige, so I've started working on the planning for such an article. Right now I'm stuck trying to figure out how best to make it a manageable benchmarking task, as I'd like to be able to provide accurate CPU/GPU recommendations for each performance class. I think I'll inevitably have to limit what GPUs I cover, but I'll do my best to include the ones you guys want the most.
I've been stuck on a H.264 kick for a while now, so I figured that doing a CPU comparison involving H.264 would be something interesting to do. My only question, other than Quicktime 7 and Nero, what are you folks using to encode H.264 on the PC?
Remember Gigabyte's i-RAM from Computex? Well, one should be in my hands very soon and given the interest in it, it's going to receive top priority as soon as I've got it. Which begs the question, are there any particular tests you all would like to see? I'll admit, I am a bit surprised by the positive response the i-RAM received; I expected people to be interested in it, just not this interested in it.
In the 8+ years I've been running this place, I don't think I've ever pulled an article before. I can't be too specific here, but some folks needed to be kept anonymous and I had to make a decision for the greater good in the long run. I apologize for remaining quiet about it for so long, but it was necessary.
With that out of the way - there's a lot to talk about.
I finally managed to pry a pair of 7800 GTXs away from Derek's hands and I've been working to answer the question of how fast of a CPU need to feed these things. There are a number of variables that have to be taken into account, most importantly being the resolution you're running at. The thing that's truly new about a card as powerful as the G70 is that you really start being limited by your monitor in what resolutions it supports. While owners of large analog CRTs have a lot of flexibility with what resolutions they can run at, LCD owners can't; so if you've got a G70 hooked up to a 1600 x 1200 panel you'll have to make different CPU decisions than if you have a 1920 x 1200 panel. I'm trying to simplify the decision making as best as possible and for this round I'm only focusing on single card solutions, but if there's demand later I can tackle SLI requirements.
I finally hooked up the G70 to the 30" Cinema Display and gave Doom 3 a whirl at 2560 x 1600. What I find most interesting is that once you start getting far above 1600 x 1200 it's no longer about making the game look good, it's about making the game look good on your monitor. For example, there's not too much difference playing Doom 3 at 1920 x 1200 vs. 2560 x 1600, it's just that the former looks great on a 24" monitor while the latter looks great on a 30" monitor. The quest for perfect image quality stops being about resolution and starts being about screen size; almost in a way similar to how consoles used to be, where your only hope for a "better" picture was to go to a larger screen, since you couldn't control resolution.
The pendulum will swing away from ultra high resolutions as games become more and more demanding. There are still some titles that even the G70 can't handle at above 1280 x 1024.
Monday's Athlon 64 Memory Divider article has got me thinking a lot about multitasking and its impacts on higher speed memory. Theoretically there should be some pretty big differences between DDR400 and DDR500 once we get into the heftier multitasking scenarios, but I want to get an idea of exactly how widespread that need is. My initial tests only revealed one scenario where there was a tangible performance boost, but I think they warrant some additional testing. After I'm done with this memory divider stuff I'll head on to that.
Many of you have asked for a Battlefield 2 CPU scaling article and I'm more than happy to oblige, so I've started working on the planning for such an article. Right now I'm stuck trying to figure out how best to make it a manageable benchmarking task, as I'd like to be able to provide accurate CPU/GPU recommendations for each performance class. I think I'll inevitably have to limit what GPUs I cover, but I'll do my best to include the ones you guys want the most.
I've been stuck on a H.264 kick for a while now, so I figured that doing a CPU comparison involving H.264 would be something interesting to do. My only question, other than Quicktime 7 and Nero, what are you folks using to encode H.264 on the PC?
Remember Gigabyte's i-RAM from Computex? Well, one should be in my hands very soon and given the interest in it, it's going to receive top priority as soon as I've got it. Which begs the question, are there any particular tests you all would like to see? I'll admit, I am a bit surprised by the positive response the i-RAM received; I expected people to be interested in it, just not this interested in it.
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klah - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
Battlefield2: Please include some tests from real 64-player maps online as well as any recorded timedemo or 'single player vs. bot' tests you have planned. Also take a look at this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid...i-RAM: bit-tech stated that you may be able to use 2+ in RAID to increase the capacity from 4GB to 8GB+. Make sure you receive 2+ units to test this possibility. Also let us know if the unit(s) you receive has the Xilinx DSP or Gigabyte's DSP.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31/gigabyte_r...
#17:"And the 7800gtx only has single-link DVI output connectors."
Check the EVGA forum, they have stated that their 7800gtx card has a functional dual-link connector and can successfully run the 30" display at its native 2560x1600 res.
phil holder - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
Some content creation stuff using after effects and photoshop would be good. Also for the Ae tests if you do any would it be possible to do some proper compositing tests. everone who test AE always seems jsut to import something and render it out as media. this isnt how it is used in industry.I read the missing article and have to say on some points it is interesting on others it seems just silly to me. Sure the initial performance of these part will be low, the thing about them is there is so MUCH room for optimisations. Looks what the PS2 is doing now, for something so limted in many ways it is crazy. I think it will take a couple of years to get wanywhere near the true grunt of of these boxes, and that even in 5 years people will still be coaxing yet more out of them. And in a sealed system like this that is the more crucial thing.
Fil
Pete - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
I don't get it because the article was already public it is not clear who you are protecting. It is still out there on the web so MS or whoever the "bad guy" is here has all the information they need. I hate the fact that Anand is being censored but it is more disappointing that he is letting it happen instead of writing a tell all taking MS / Sony to task in addition to their poor CPU performance but to their strong arm tactics as well.I have been a reader since the very early days and this is very un-Anand like behavior. Is it any co-incidence that War of the Worlds is playing now?
ViRGE - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
Perhaps along with CPU results in your H.264 article, you could include a page or so on what the latest info is with H.264 acceleration support for video cards is? A section on tweaking systems for maximum performance(HD H.264 videos kill my 3400+) would also be nice.Oh, and for BF2, you can try the Battlefield Recorder - it's not a perfect item since you wouldn't really be benchmarking the physics or similar overhead, but it's close enough.
Furen - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
It's better to have more physical memory than to use an iRam as a swap file simply because the iRam artificially limits the ram's speed to the maximum controller speed (I'm guessing it's SATA IO native so 300MB/sec, compared to the 3.2GB/sec of DDR400) but the iRam is great for things that you load up rather often or are very disk intensive(like bf2). Also, you can throw your old ddr at the iRam, while you wouldnt want to use your ddr266 in your brand new system. The one thing that worries me about the iRam, however, is the capacity. Having 4 dimm slots seems rather weak since I'd want to use old 512mb and 256mb modules on it, not brand new 1gb dimms.A5 - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
I'd like to see the CPU test done a Radeon 9800 Pro...not that I have one or anything ;)Mad Nebraskan - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
In regards of Gigabyte's iRAM drive, I'm very curious as to the long term stability of information stored on the drive. Since errors are known to creep into memory (i.e. the need for ECC), how long will my all-RAM WinXP boot disk last before I have to restore it from backup? That might be a tough thing to answer in the limited time you'll probably have for testing the product, but it would help to determine if the product is useful for making a really, really fast swap file drive or a solid-state OS that needs refreshing every 3 months.JAS - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
I've been using QuickTime 7 to encode H.264 movies with wonderful results. Now, I'm going to give Sorenson Media Squeeze 4 a try. Both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows versions are available.anonymous1 - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
hey, I would like to know how you connected the G70 to the 30" Cinema Display. I thought 30" Cinema Display uses a dual-link DVI cable for its native resolution. And the 7800gtx only has single-link DVI output connectors. Do you use both outputs with an adapter or do you happen to have the quadro version (G70-gl)? Maybe you could explain your solution.thanks
Ian - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
Anand,Thank you for your follow up. I am glad you addressed the topic instead of acting like nothing happened. I salute your candor even though it took awhile.