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.
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yehuda - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Thanks Anand and Gary for all your work on this article. Do you know if the Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H board is coming out with the others?kevinkreiser - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Where's the discussion about hybrid-sli drivers/benchmarks? A follow-up article with the tests still in progress?This german review has hybrid-sli benchmarks but they omit a discussion about drivers or even how you set it up, they just show numbers.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/mainbo...">http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hard...schnitt_...
kevinkreiser - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Wait my mistake, actually the german article mentions in the conclusion that they experienced bugginess with the hybrid-sli driver and sometimes games don't start or run really slow. Any comments from you guys at anandtech?Visual - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Does nVidia intend to have this GPU on an AMD chipset at all, or have they given up competing there?Can we expect this chipset to be used in Intel laptops (other than Apple), and will they still get the Centrino brand? If Intel insists on requiring their own chipsets for that brand, I'm afraid laptop manufacturers will not use it despite its obvious advantages.
Does something like hybrid-SLI work on this chipset, to get better performance from a 9400/9500/9600GT card?
From the Apple adverts it seems dynamic switching between the IGP and stand-alone GPU will be a reality in its laptops... is that the case also with the desktop version that you test today? I guess you'd have mentioned it if it were... Is it at least planned with future drivers or something?
R3MF - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Good point about the Centrino brand, that may well make laptop manufacturers wary of this chipset, just because of the power of the Centrino brand.On the other hand, this may be a very good reason for nVidia to push the Via Nano netbook platform via big companies like HP which have a strong brand quality of their own.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
The Hybrid Power tech (switching between IGP and discrete GPU) should be available in this chipset; support for the feature still remains with the motherboard/notebook vendors, however. I'm still waiting for my first Windows notebook to feature hybrid power (which is also available with G45 chipsets... though why you'd want G45 over GF9300 is a tough question to answer; oh, right: Centrino 2!) You're right: Centrino as a brand is so powerful that NVIDIA can have the best solution in every way and still not see much uptake. We'll have to see how it goes....danielgr - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
It's funny... it seems that it's always the same, and Apple has to introduce something for people to get to know it...Sony has been selling "hybrid-power" laptops for about 2 years now... (here is an old laptop running Intel's 965GM chipset with NVIDIA 8400M graphics and "the magic switch"), together with LED displays, SSD drives...
Their current offer gets you Centrino2+DDR3, BD, Raid-SSD, HybridStuff with Nvidia 9300M GS on Intel's GM45, Wide Gammut LED display, and still weights around 1.5Kg with 7.5-11h of autonomy...
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.html">http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.html
danielgr - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
Forgot the link to the "old_laptop":http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/SZ6/feat2.html">http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/SZ6/feat2.html
Gary Key - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
We will be updating the article shortly. It has been an all night meeting marathon with the motherboard suppliers and NVIDIA trying to get answers on the AHCI problems, memory performance, and other minor items we discovered. ASUS sent us a new BIOS that we will test in a couple of hours, the AHCI problems have diminished greatly after yet another clean install of Vista SP1 (still have some minor pauses during heavy drive load), and we feel safe enough in taking a detailed look at the motherboards in a couple of days.That said, NVIDIA surprised us with this chipset, probably the best one (all around) on the market for HTPC setups and casual gaming performance now. That is not to take anything away from the AMD platforms, personally I am running a 8750 and GF8200 hooked up to a new 52" LCD, if the price was right, the 9350e is a really sweet processor that will greatly lower power requirements on the AMD side, as we will see next week. Hopefully, AMD will respond with multi-channel LPCM output in their IG chipset. If that is not important, the 780g/790GX is great. ;)
Zstream - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
30% cpu utilization for a HTPC is good? Umm, I guess I come from a different perspective then.Quite a few HTPC's are for streaming, so with this chipset it is almost impossible to stream data while watching what you are streaming.
Did I misunderstand something here or what?