NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go vs. ATI's M28: The Mobile GPU Wars Begin
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 8, 2004 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
First and foremost, kudos to NVIDIA for launching a mobile GPU and be able to promise availability of notebooks based on the GPU on the same day. This year we have seen far too many GPU launches on the desktop side met with absolutely zero availability, and to have a launch with availability on the same day is a nice change of pace. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a new era for NVIDIA, we'll just have to wait and see. With ATI's M28 launch just two weeks away, we can only hope that ATI will follow suit in having launch and availability paired with one another in the same manner as NVIDIA. With the GeForce 6800 Go, NVIDIA has effectively set the launch schedule standard that ATI must at least follow in order to avoid the scorn of AnandTech and end-users alike.
Performance-wise, the latest mobile GPUs from both ATI and NVIDIA are quite strong. Offering desktop-class performance (because they are basically desktop GPUs with some neat power management features), ATI's M28 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go make perfect LAN-party notebooks as well as excellent desktop replacement notebooks for users who happen to be gamers. The performance of both solutions was pretty impressive, with 1280 x 1024 being an extremely playable resolution on either notebook. The performance advantage does to go ATI however, the M28 performed very well across the board, only losing to NVIDIA in Doom 3 performance but offering much higher performance in most other benchmarks.
Things could get very interesting with NVIDIA's higher performance configuration of the GeForce 6800 Go running at 450/600, instead of the 300/300 configuration we tested here today. At 450/600, the performance advantage could definitely shift to NVIDIA in the areas where things are already close and ATI's performance gap could also be eaten into. ATI may have an answer to NVIDIA's higher clocked configuration of the GeForce 6800 Go; while ATI only rates the M28 at 400/400, some manufacturers are apparently running it at higher speeds, we will have to wait and see what is launched by the end of this month, but the performance verdict is far from final. All we know today is that M28 is faster than NVIDIA's baseline GeForce 6800 Go configuration, and we'll have to wait until the end of this month for a truly final verdict on the king of the DTR mobile GPU market.
What's even more exciting however is the possibility of both ATI and NVIDIA's mid-range GPUs coming down to more manageable-sized notebooks in the near future. While we just had the 6600 vs X700 battle on the desktop, don't be too surprised if we see a very similar comparison on the mobile side next year.
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onix - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
"I'm very disapointed with this article for a few reasons:1) There is no point of reference. Where are the benchmarks for a radeon 9700 Mobility or Radeon 9800 Mobility? We have no idea how much faster these things are than existing mobility parts "
Agreed. I am about to buy a ThinkPad T42p with a 128MB ATI Mobility FireFL T2, and don't know what I'll be passing up.
Neekotin - Friday, November 12, 2004 - link
who plays in a laptop anyway?Shadowmage - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
The Mobility X600 uses 1W idle and 9-10W on max power. I would like to know how the Mobility M28 and nVidia 6800 go compare in wattage and heat. Remember that the X800 whoops the 6800 in both heat and power.stephenbrooks - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
Nice review, though it would have been nice to see the difference in power consumption (and hence battery life) of the desktop vs. notebook GPUs in the previous and current generations, so we could see how much good the 'clock gating' that was nicely explained at the beginning of the article does. Probably a hard thing to do with limited time though.Terr1 - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
Hey im in the proccess of buying a new laptop, which im using with my studies and of cause gaming (since its going to be faster than my stationary computer. I dont want a normal Pentium 4 M, because of the low battery usage. My choice is 100% on centrino (dothan CPU), so my question is, do you think this come to the centrino chipsets as well? Since it prob. require a new chipset that suppports PCI-Express, as far as I know the next chipset will first come in about 3-6 months. I need mine around january, and pref. faster.. So is it stupid to buy ATI 9700PRO 128mb card now?Woodchuck2000 - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
It's hardly surprising that the 6800 loses in the majority of benches given that it's clocked 100/100 lower than the M28 and both are 12 pipe parts.... It would be interesting to compare the solutions at equal clock speeds.Is 400/400 the likely shipping speed of the M28 and if so why is ATi's DDR3 clocked 200MHz slower than nVidia's high end solution?
Live - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
You really should include the minimum FPS recorded in your benchmarks. Average FPS doesn't say it all. Other then that it was a good first look at these new GPUs.Camylarde - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
# 16 thats nod needed. WIll lack comparison to desktop GPU'sThanks Anand for your review, yet, I agree with all those negative comments about quality of the review. I am considering you as one of the best reviewers on the net and your articles never disappointed me. This one is far from being best and as you wrote, you know that. Rather wait one more day for a full work than "launch not available product".
Cheers, Petr
klah - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
" I'm hoping to have a shipping version of M28 by the end of this month for more thorough tests."How about some benches using the native resolutions of the displays(1690x1050).
skunkbuster - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
i think they named it that way to reflect that the mobility 9800 performed on par to a regular desktop radeon 9800.i think that if it performed closer to an x800, then maybe they would have called it that instead...