The IGP Chronicles Part 3: NVIDIA's GeForce 9300
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on October 15, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
Everyone likes a clean victory; while NVIDIA has the opportunity to obtain just that with the GeForce 9300, there are a handful of lingering issues that cause them to hit just wide of the bullseye. It's a tough conclusion to make; while my HTPC experiences with the GeForce 9300 were fairly flawless, Gary had several issues, and both of us experienced poor memory performance with the platform. Being an early adopter in any case usually means dealing with the lion's share of problems, but with a product that's ready we don't normally have a long list of issues at launch; they generally crop up over time. We knew about the G45 issues and many of them are still unaddressed.
At least the GeForce 9300 issues don't fundamentally cause the platform not to work in a home theater setup, but they are bothersome nonetheless. Given the maturity of the GeForce 8200 as a platform on the AMD side we hoped for more from NVIDIA here, but at least it gives us a glimmer of hope that what we're talking about today will soon fade and we'll be left with an easily recommendable HTPC platform. Because honestly, if these problems are quickly addressed, the GeForce 9300 is as close to perfect as you're going to get for now.
Gaming performance is good enough to compete with what's out there today. The GeForce 9300 is leaps and bounds ahead of Intel's G45, but that's not really a tremendous accomplishment. What NVIDIA has done however is effectively bring 780G-class performance to the Intel platform, which is better than nothing. It's still short of what we want in terms of integrated graphics performance but it's a big step in the right direction.
The HTPC feature set is nearly complete; the only thing we're lacking is the ability to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA (both of which no chipset currently supports). Flawless HDMI/HDCP repeater compatibility? Check. Fully functional hardware acceleration? Yep. 8-channel LPCM? Of course. Stutter-free 24p playback? It seems so.
It would be nice to see some more effort put in on the software side, as I mentioned before, to enable configuration of your HTPC without needing a regular computer monitor. I've also been dying to see AMD, Intel or NVIDIA incorporate a real color management system in their drivers to easily enable HTPCs to function as true video processors and not just expensive Blu-ray players.
As far as chipsets with integrated graphics go, NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 won our hearts, I would just hold off on that first date until the kinks get worked out.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
XavierJohn - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
I switched from a Pioneer Elite to Integra DHC-9.9 and to me it seems like the Pioneer sounds better. Pioneer during its speaker setup also setup EQ to compensate for room modes. I did not see Integra do that.XavierJohn - Friday, October 17, 2008 - link
I wish you said atleast one sentence on why you would go from Pioneer to DTC 9.8.Better sound?
BikeDude - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
I have never fully understood "PureVideo". It is my understanding that this is only supported by a handful few players, like the awfully buggy PowerDVD that simply won't run on my system (PowerDVD no longer support SCSI DVD-ROM).Atechie - Friday, October 17, 2008 - link
Funny, Windows Media Player and PureVideo works fine for me?iwodo - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
The performance for Ethernet CPU usage seems rather poor. In fact all of them are bad, as Intel should be in the region of single digit percentage shown in other website.One interesting point i realize while reading, i hope to share with their reader.
Is that measuring the few percentage difference with low CPU resoource usage playing H.264 Full HD isn't very important at all... Why?
Because the difference between 15 - 25% , while 10% looks like a lot, the most important factor is POWER CONSUMPTION. While most people would think lower CPU usage and therefore lower power usage. In this article it turns out while Geforce has the lowest power consumption while using most CPU resources.
And how many people use their CPU for other heavy task while watching Full HD Movie?
I cant wait to see these being refreshed next summer, with 40nm, more die space because memory and most northbridge move to CPU, we should be able to put more then double the shader inside?
crabnebula - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
I know the focus is on Blu-ray and progressive source material, but most people stil have SD DVDs and 1080i TV broadcasts that they want to play back on their HTPC.Adequate deinterlacing, detail enhancement and noise reduction have been the missing pieces of the puzzle for all other IGPs except the 780G + Phenom combination, but that has other issues.
What about the 9300/9400? Does the increased GPU power allow for better processing?
If it doesn't, there is one other check missing on your list, in my opinion.
Natfly - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
So is this the article that was supposed to come out analyzing the 780G, 8200, and G45? You know, months.... and months.... and months ago? I'm glad you guys waited until nVidia released a competative product before releasing this article. Otherwise I would have bought a 780G motherboard months ago.AmdInside - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
I wish you guys wouldn't use the Sony BDU-X10S in your testing. I've owned this drive and it just sucks. Had problems on both Intel and NVIDIA chipsets.As for the data transferring problem, I had the same problem recently on my Badaxe2 motherboard. I was moving my hard drive from my Geforce 8200 system to Intel G45 system but first needed to copy recordings to another hard drive so that I could format the hard drive. My desktop has a Badaxe2 is running Vista x64 and I too randomly experienced pauses when copying 500GB of data. Not sure if it is related but it might just be a Vista thing.
Badkarma - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Hi Anand/Gary,In your next installment, can you please find the slowest usable CPU that plays Bluray smoothly and also test Speedstep with it? Using a quadcore is really overkill and kind of defeats the purpose of GPU DXVA. The 8200 w/ a 4850e cannot utilize CnQ to playback BR. I'd like to see whether a 9300 w/ E5200 or E7200 and Speedstep enabled can play BR smoothly.
Thanks.
sonicology - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Nice LL Cool J reference in the article description!