ATi vs Nvidia 2008

[SCHUMI_4EVER]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

You certainly have a point there, but the only reason why I quoted that review is to show how the ATi cards of those days, that at that time performed on par or inferior to their nVidia counterparts are now actually performing superior due to their architecture simply being much more suited to modern games. Someone who bought an X1950Pro for the same price as for what he could've bought a 7900GS or maybe even GT is now still enjoying a card playing new games, although at low settings, while the others won't even show playable FPS anymore.

Can't be illustrated with the entire high-end nVidia line up missing.

Apparently this has paid off, seeing how their X1k products have seen their performance keep their ground a bit better than the GF7 series. I hope you can see this as well when looking through the lines of this indeed faulty review where nVidia cards are missing?

So the 7600GT, 7900GS, 7800GTX and 7300GT now accuractely represent the GF7 series even when the omitted 7900GT, 7950GT, 7900GTX, 7950GX2 are all far more powerfull? I am afraid you can't show an accurate representation of the GF7 series if you leave out the 4 best cards in the series but don't give ATi the same handicap.

Change of topic btw, but there's quite some news about Havok GPU acceleration on OpenCL as well. This sounds like music in my ears: An open standard as opposed to PhysX

Has Havok been able to get past it's strange collision issues yet?
Been outa the loop for a while but I remember dozens of warnings on mods for TES4 Oblivion using Havok about them potentially screwing up the game world.

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Last edited by SCHUMI_4EVER; March 27th, 2009 at 15:26..

[Phil]

The 7950 GX2 had extremely shoddy driver support

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[fivefeet8]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

I hate the ethics of nVidia's approach of throwing horsepower at it and making deals with developers, as this is what halts the innovation and the fruits of it. (Assassin's Creed DX10.1 anyone?)

If AMDTi had the developer relations, they'd do the same thing. AMDTi cards not supporting SM3, HDR, and Dx10 for months after Nvidia supported them didn't help innovation much either.

Originally Posted by tuanming

Naw, i just feel sorry for who got tricked thinking that they have purchased something worthwhile or competitive against ATi offering. This goes to show how much those nvidiot loves you guys, the fan

Yeah, like all those people who got the R600. AMDTi loved them a lot.

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

Change of topic btw, but there's quite some news about Havok GPU acceleration on OpenCL as well. This sounds like music in my ears: An open standard as opposed to PhysX

It's no where near the same level of development progress as CUDA/PhysX. Hopefully within a year, we'll see something concrete. Nvidia actively also supports OpenCL development and it can also be used for PhysX. They're part of the Kronos group which defines the OpenCL api standard.

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Last edited by fivefeet8; March 28th, 2009 at 05:25.. Reason: Automerged Doublepost

[Cid Highwind]

Yet we did see SM3 games with SM2 paths, plenty of those actually, much more than now with DX10.1 support what's been here for a long, long time. DirectX 10 I consider a non-issue, given the extremely slow adoption of Vista anyway. The losses in speed on the 8800 series weren't worth it either in most cases, and switching to DX10 meant the change of an OS, not just the downloading of a new version.

Won't go into debate about the R600, that card sucked, period. The 3870 and 50 brought some nice changes with them offering great bang for buck, but still weren't up to par with nVidia's offering, unless you were limited on the budget.

And I agree with your points on CUDA and OpenCL, I can only see the recent developments in a positive light. With this hopefully we'll be having things a bit more transperent and supported by both teams so that us gamers can actually benefit from it, rather than being caught up in a war for standards like the Bluray vs HDDVD.

Schumi: I don't intend on debating forever, you have very strong points and I can't get around a lot of them. I suppose we'll have to let time do the telling and see which cards of this generation will be better in the long run. To be continued?

So the 7600GT, 7900GS, 7800GTX and 7300GT now accuractely represent the GF7 series even when the omitted 7900GT, 7950GT, 7900GTX, 7950GX2 are all far more powerfull? I am afraid you can't show an accurate representation of the GF7 series if you leave out the 4 best cards in the series but don't give ATi the same handicap.

And actually, they left out the X1900XTX, X1950XT and X1950XTX But yes, seeing how those were some more popular cards, including the 7900GTO even, it'd be more interesting with those too. Hopefully we can get back to this in the future, I'm rather interested how the challenge between the 260/280/285 and the 4870/90 will turn out.

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[SCHUMI_4EVER]

Yeah sure, we can postpone it for another time

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[skoreanime]

Well, it looks like Nvidia won't be releasing anything new this year. Like they've been doing for the past while, they'll just be tweaking their current line up to fight off ATis renewed threat. Their only plan for this year is apparently making their dual PCB GTX295 GPU into single PCB.

And it looks like ATi 4890 is going to do well. It's highly overclockable from what I've read. Won't beat GTX285 and 295 obviously, but the price/performance ratio is looking mighty fantastic...from the leaked benches.

More ATI 4890 benchmarks - The Inquirer

I don't know how many of you trust the Inquirer...but the leaked benches were pulled from other sites and they're the only ones I could find

[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by skoreanime

Well, it looks like Nvidia won't be releasing anything new this year. Like they've been doing for the past while, they'll just be tweaking their current line up to fight off ATis renewed threat. Their only plan for this year is apparently making their dual PCB GTX295 GPU into single PCB.

And it looks like ATi 4890 is going to do well. It's highly overclockable from what I've read. Won't beat GTX285 and 295 obviously, but the price/performance ratio is looking mighty fantastic...from the leaked benches.

More ATI 4890 benchmarks - The Inquirer

I don't know how many of you trust the Inquirer...but the leaked benches were pulled from other sites and they're the only ones I could find

It might be just me... but GTX 295 for $499 is still a juicier buy for that it really does make a run for the money spent. nVidia did quite an unbelievable price cut right there. I'm almost sold on that card...

ATi is still not cutting so much on the other hands. Now the GTX 280 is in between a HD4870 and a X2 whereas a GTX 260 with 216 SPs is way below that... almost touching a HD4850.

Newegg.com - MSI N260GTX-T2D896-OCv2 GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Desktop Graphics / Video Cards

^= And of course it was sold out. Hurting nVidia or not, the current card pricing is very tempting.

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[skoreanime]

True. But ATis pushing out more and more efficient GPUs and that usually equates to better pricing. For example.

ATi 4770 sounds pretty delicious for the HTPC too. Apparently it'll need no external power cord and can completely run off the PCI-E slot for power...

[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by skoreanime

True. But ATis pushing out more and more efficient GPUs and that usually equates to better pricing. For example.

ATi 4770 sounds pretty delicious for the HTPC too. Apparently it'll need no external power cord and can completely run off the PCI-E slot for power...

Yep, there's no deny the low to mid market is looking very good for ATi. I'm quite interested in HD47xx series, in fact.

Here's wondering what would happen if they were to push that technology onto laptops... No matter how you cut it, nVidia is still quite monstrous when it comes to power consumption. A pair of GTX 295's eat up roughly 1000W, cards alone. Even though they're faster than anything else God gives you to game on in this world...

That aside, I think 4890 should shine more in real benchmarks. 3DMarks tends to favor nVidia more.

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[skoreanime]

I agree. The thing about the 4890s is how much they can overclock. That's a big sell to a lot of people. It's already cheap for its performance. And being able to overclock another good chunk?... It sounds like a steal.

The only negative thing about it is of course the stock cooler. It does a fine job cooling, it never got past 60c I read on load. But its loud at 50% fan speed. Looks like they'll be massive order for aftermarket 4890 HSFs

[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by skoreanime

I agree. The thing about the 4890s is how much they can overclock. That's a big sell to a lot of people. It's already cheap for its performance. And being able to overclock another good chunk?... It sounds like a steal.

The only negative thing about it is of course the stock cooler. It does a fine job cooling, it never got past 60c I read on load. But its loud at 50% fan speed. Looks like they'll be massive order for aftermarket 4890 HSFs

Yea... but when you consider it, a stock GTX 280 or HD4890 and HSF... with overclocking risks...

The problem with ATi's architects is that the only magnificent thing they engineer is the chip. Then the rest of the components from hardware to software don't seem quite up to par. Heck... from Catalyst 8.4 to beta 8.12 was a long wait. 8 months, roughly.

It's weird, though. I mean... they could resolve the HSF issues with like... maybe $10 more per card? I wouldn't mind paying an extra $20 for that card if it means I don't have to dissect and reassemble it before use.

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[skoreanime]

Yeah, I suppose so. ATis never been good with the whole cooling issue.

And why they haven't gotten better people to code the software aspect part boggles me... Ever since they came to light, they've always been inferior to Nvidia in that aspect.

[Cid Highwind]

Originally Posted by skoreanime

And it looks like ATi 4890 is going to do well. It's highly overclockable from what I've read. Won't beat GTX285 and 295 obviously, but the price/performance ratio is looking mighty fantastic...from the leaked benches.

More ATI 4890 benchmarks - The Inquirer

I don't know how many of you trust the Inquirer...but the leaked benches were pulled from other sites and they're the only ones I could find

The Inq is terribly ATi biased, so everything it writes should be taken with scepticism.

Originally Posted by runawayprisoner

ATi is still not cutting so much on the other hands. Now the GTX 280 is in between a HD4870 and a X2 whereas a GTX 260 with 216 SPs is way below that... almost touching a HD4850.

Newegg.com - MSI N260GTX-T2D896-OCv2 GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Desktop Graphics / Video Cards

^= And of course it was sold out. Hurting nVidia or not, the current card pricing is very tempting.

ATi doesn't have to cut the prices, their cards sell like hotcakes and they're already putting the hurt on nVidia. You won't be converting die-hard nVidia fans that easily of course, unless you really go too low with your prices, which will hurt your profits as well.

Here the core 192 is about as expensive than the 512MB 4870. The 1GB version of the 4870 competes with the 216. So here ATi doesn't really have this price advantage from the consumer's POV, so yes, I see your point there. For the consumer it's a tough choice since price isn't much of an issue anymore.

It's weird, though. I mean... they could resolve the HSF issues with like... maybe $10 more per card? I wouldn't mind paying an extra $20 for that card if it means I don't have to dissect and reassemble it before use.

I don't know man, the stock cooler on the 4870 was the best stock cooler I've ever seen. Underclock the GDDR5 and it wasn't audible at all, and at stock settings it didn't become too noisy for a GPU either. Of course I could hear it move air at 40%, but never did I hear a whining noise. Otherwise you could always go for Sapphire's VaporX cards, or any other model with aftermarket cooling.

Originally Posted by PCgameshardware

Battleforge: Benchmark results
Due to D3D10.1 the Radeons that support it are doing really well, although the minimal framerate is always a little lower than the one of the Geforces. Nevertheless a HD 4870 is competing with a Geforce GTX 285 instead of the GTX 260-216 as it usually is the case - the difference between 512 and 1,024 MiByte VRAM are almost insignificant. If you don't activate 4x MSAA even a HD 3870 is fast enough to reach the performance of an 8800 GT. If you want to use even weaker cards, you can deactivate SSAO - that almost doubles the framerate.

Conclusion: Battleforge is - due to D3D10.1 - a playground for modern Radeon graphics cards.

Sounds promising to me, DX10.1 not needed? I consider it a nice bonus in this case

Battleforge: DX10.1 tested with 10 graphics cards - Benchmark, Radeon, AMD, DirectX 10.1, Battleforge - PC Games Hardware

Actually as soon as 4xAA is enabled at 1680*1050 the 1GB 4870 performs on par with the GTX285. I'm impressed and can't wait to see more websites coming to these conclusions to perhaps finally tip the odds in favour of the HD4k structure after all. What I'm wondering about is if nVidia won't be able to improve performance a lot through drivers. After all, they've been boasting they don't need DX10.1 compliance in order to still make use of the features it offers.

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Last edited by Cid Highwind; March 29th, 2009 at 23:16.. Reason: Automerged Doublepost

[skoreanime]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

The Inq is terribly ATi biased, so everything it writes should be taken with scepticism.

True. But like I said, those screenshots were hosted on several other sites before being pulled by ATi. The Inquirer may be adding some sugar to their article for ATi, but the numbers seem real enough.

[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

The Inq is terribly ATi biased, so everything it writes should be taken with scepticism.

Well, the screenshots were courtesy of team Overclockers, so there is a more credible source behind it all. But I still say it's not too credible because we only get to see 3DMarks benches.

Damn it... I am starting to want to see something beside 3DMarks... but then again, nVidia will most likely use their influence to make it so the new benchmarks go to their favor, anyway.

ATi doesn't have to cut the prices, their cards sell like hotcakes and they're already putting the hurt on nVidia. You won't be converting die-hard nVidia fans that easily of course, unless you really go too low with your prices, which will hurt your profits as well.

Yep, because nVidia thought everyone was willing to pay $200 for their mid-end card. Well, I say think again, nVidiot! But the fact that they can lower the prices of their GTX lineup to this extend means two things: either they were so bad at engineering that the cost of production for each card was immense, or the other: they were trying to rip off of their loyal customers.

I think the latter is more likely seeing as to how they price the GTX 295 right now, and the amount of price cut they can afford on the older card. But... then again, pure speculation.

Here the core 192 is about as expensive than the 512MB 4870. The 1GB version of the 4870 competes with the 216. So here ATi doesn't really have this price advantage from the consumer's POV, so yes, I see your point there. For the consumer it's a tough choice since price isn't much of an issue anymore.

Indeed. I think if you consider some other factors, such as a larger third-party application base (RivaTuner, nHancer, etc...) and patches for games compared to ATi, as well as superior drivers (I could swear that up to 8.12, OpenGL was still better on nVidia compared to ATi), and... I guess other factors such as higher load on processors with lower number of cores... and so on... then nVidia might have a slight edge here. But at least if the average consumer knows about it.

I don't know man, the stock cooler on the 4870 was the best stock cooler I've ever seen. Underclock the GDDR5 and it wasn't audible at all, and at stock settings it didn't become too noisy for a GPU either. Of course I could hear it move air at 40%, but never did I hear a whining noise. Otherwise you could always go for Sapphire's VaporX cards, or any other model with aftermarket cooling.

Well, I have one too, so I know. But really... HD4850 cooler was horrid. 100C under load was common. Or you had to deal with noise. It was one way or the other. nVidia, on the other hand, didn't let any of their cards get over 70C under load. And their fans were not too loud. Mildly overclockable, too. HD4800 is seriously overclockable, but to do more than 50MHz, you'll need more than the stock cooler, or you're likely to have to crank it up, or risk frying the card. I fried my HD4850 for trying to reach over 750MHz core clock stable.

Sounds promising to me, DX10.1 not needed? I consider it a nice bonus in this case

Actually as soon as 4xAA is enabled at 1680*1050 the 1GB 4870 performs on par with the GTX285. I'm impressed and can't wait to see more websites coming to these conclusions to perhaps finally tip the odds in favour of the HD4k structure after all. What I'm wondering about is if nVidia won't be able to improve performance a lot through drivers. After all, they've been boasting they don't need DX10.1 compliance in order to still make use of the features it offers.

Well, it could be an illusion. ATi cards perform nice with some games, while nVidia perform nicer with others. In my opinions, it's fair to say that we can only tell when we go to the end of their life cycle... which means when we start seeing HD 58xx and GTX 3xx cards to judge the performance of this generation. Or otherwise, I can only say that nVidia is slowly winning back with their pricing strategy...

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[Cid Highwind]

Originally Posted by runawayprisoner

Well, the screenshots were courtesy of team Overclockers, so there is a more credible source behind it all. But I still say it's not too credible because we only get to see 3DMarks benches.

Damn it... I am starting to want to see something beside 3DMarks... but then again, nVidia will most likely use their influence to make it so the new benchmarks go to their favor, anyway.

Couldn't agree more, I've never been a fan of artificial benchmakrs. Real games FTW.

Yep, because nVidia thought everyone was willing to pay $200 for their mid-end card. Well, I say think again, nVidiot! But the fact that they can lower the prices of their GTX lineup to this extend means two things: either they were so bad at engineering that the cost of production for each card was immense, or the other: they were trying to rip off of their loyal customers.

I think the latter is more likely seeing as to how they price the GTX 295 right now, and the amount of price cut they can afford on the older card. But... then again, pure speculation.

We have this saying here, "what the nutcase gives for it", and it's true, since a lot of people indeed were willing to pay it. I think it's both cases though, in the beginning I read reports about low yields. And of course having a huge chip won't help much when you're using round wafers, leading to have much more of it being thrown away. Of course as the manufacturing process matures, and also when you can go to a smaller die size, you'll automatically produce for lower costs since there's lest waste. But of course they'd have asked the original prices if it weren't for ATi, they've always done so cause they were able to.

The best thing about the situation now is that high performing cards have become available, and mainstream even. So we may finally see a nice jump in gaming quality again as well since we've been stuck at 8800GTX level for ages.

Indeed. I think if you consider some other factors, such as a larger third-party application base (RivaTuner, nHancer, etc...) and patches for games compared to ATi, as well as superior drivers (I could swear that up to 8.12, OpenGL was still better on nVidia compared to ATi), and... I guess other factors such as higher load on processors with lower number of cores... and so on... then nVidia might have a slight edge here. But at least if the average consumer knows about it.

Can't deny the fact you have better third party applications, although ATi Tray Tools is about all we need as well, combined with Radeon Bios Editor. As for OpenGL, I recently read a preview of an OpenGL game where the ATi lineup were outperforming nVidia by a large margin. Of course it's just a preview, but it sounds promising. Also they've been working on lowering the processor load, but I don't know how much it shows in PCSX2 again. In any case I think in PC gaming it's much less obvious, otherwise it'd reflect in benchmarks anyway.

Well, I have one too, so I know. But really... HD4850 cooler was horrid. 100C under load was common. Or you had to deal with noise. It was one way or the other. nVidia, on the other hand, didn't let any of their cards get over 70C under load. And their fans were not too loud. Mildly overclockable, too. HD4800 is seriously overclockable, but to do more than 50MHz, you'll need more than the stock cooler, or you're likely to have to crank it up, or risk frying the card. I fried my HD4850 for trying to reach over 750MHz core clock stable.

The 4850 was the cheaper version of course, and had a single slot cooler. It's the reason why I spent more to get a 4870, so that I didn't have to get an aftermarket one. And the HD4800 isn't that much overclockable, it's just that both the 50 and 70 use the same chips, so the 50 has a lot of potential since it's clocked lower, but the 70 is near its max anyway. I'm lucky if I can get 40MHz more on the core.

Thankfully, this is "fixed" in the 4890

Well, it could be an illusion. ATi cards perform nice with some games, while nVidia perform nicer with others. In my opinions, it's fair to say that we can only tell when we go to the end of their life cycle... which means when we start seeing HD 58xx and GTX 3xx cards to judge the performance of this generation. Or otherwise, I can only say that nVidia is slowly winning back with their pricing strategy...

Correct statement, can't wait for what nVidia will have to show for the new cards by the way, seeing how they have to stray away from g92.

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the g92's are long past overdue

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[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

Can't deny the fact you have better third party applications, although ATi Tray Tools is about all we need as well, combined with Radeon Bios Editor. As for OpenGL, I recently read a preview of an OpenGL game where the ATi lineup were outperforming nVidia by a large margin. Of course it's just a preview, but it sounds promising. Also they've been working on lowering the processor load, but I don't know how much it shows in PCSX2 again. In any case I think in PC gaming it's much less obvious, otherwise it'd reflect in benchmarks anyway.

Well, I know my HD4870 would do some insane numbers in some dedicated OpenGL benchmark, too. It's not exactly the performance that is the issue, but rather... the support of OpenGL extensions. Until I can run my favourite OpenGL demoscenes, ATi still has lots of work to do.

As for quad-core situations... I think it does show in some games. Say... I saw it in Mercenaries 2: WIF when I enabled the water effects. For some reason, it made my system crawl. As if everything was being handled in complete software calls rather than with hardware acceleration. Can't tell if it appears in any other game because most of the games I play usually max out the cores even with an nVidia card, anyway.

And imo, it might happen with nVidia card, too. Just that they "skilfully" camouflaged it so it's not so obvious. And then when you see the load, you'll think the game actually uses all 4 cores of the processor whereas it only needs like 2 cores to run. Hmm... developers should start disclosing whether their game engines run on 2 cores or 4 cores by default.

The 4850 was the cheaper version of course, and had a single slot cooler. It's the reason why I spent more to get a 4870, so that I didn't have to get an aftermarket one. And the HD4800 isn't that much overclockable, it's just that both the 50 and 70 use the same chips, so the 50 has a lot of potential since it's clocked lower, but the 70 is near its max anyway. I'm lucky if I can get 40MHz more on the core.

Thankfully, this is "fixed" in the 4890

I think more like "hopefully". And I think the 4870 has another factor to consider for its higher clock: more stable power regulators. That might also be why the max you can knock out of a 4850 would be around 800MHz core clock, whereas you can potentially hit close to or even past 900MHz on a 4870.

But I still think it's an unreasonable waste of horsepower for wanting that much... Up to 720p, it's still reasonably playable for most games. Games at 1080p, I think, need more than just pretty textures. It just feels like they're lacking something...

Correct statement, can't wait for what nVidia will have to show for the new cards by the way, seeing how they have to stray away from g92.

Although the G9x series were awesome, I say... it's time they strive for something even more. I'm waiting for a netbook with the Ion platform (Intel Atom and GeForce 9400GM) and it'd better be quick or I'll grab that Atom plus HD 3200 combo even if it supposedly sucks much more.

And I think they gotta do something like a GeForce 9600 of the GTX line-up... mid-end, reasonably priced, but packs a hell of a punch. Even now, it's still a great bang for your bucks.

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[fivefeet8]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

Yet we did see SM3 games with SM2 paths, plenty of those actually, much more than now with DX10.1 support what's been here for a long, long time. DirectX 10 I consider a non-issue, given the extremely slow adoption of Vista anyway. The losses in speed on the 8800 series weren't worth it either in most cases, and switching to DX10 meant the change of an OS, not just the downloading of a new version.

Fortunately for Nvidia, they had a much stronger devrel and this helps them far more than most realized. There were some SM3 games at the time I agree, but no where near the level of them when ATi finally had SM3 hardware as well. The only SM3/HDR capable game soon after the Nv4x was Far Cry and it only had those features tacked on. It also took ATi a whole generation until they supported FP filtering/blending HDR which saw little if any use during the Nv4x generation, but it's pretty much standard on most games today. Vista is still slow to adoption today and innovation is not only about increasing performance.

In SM4.1's case, the most talked about feature is multisampling depth buffer reading which increases FSAA performance and IQ, but as shown by Far Cry 2, it can also be done on Nvidia cards because they actually support the feature in hardware as well. There is a case to be made about how much Nvidia GPu's support Dx10.1 features beyond Dx10 unlike with ATi and SM3/FP HDR.

I agree that Nvidia is holding back innovation with still not fully supporting SM4.1, but Nvidia isn't alone in this regard. Both companies do it and have done it. It's never as black and white as most seem to think it is. Most of the time, it's differing shades of grey.

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Last edited by fivefeet8; March 30th, 2009 at 22:01..

[Phil]

Hmm the GTX275 has debuted for 259.99. it employs the full 240 Shaders. Seem like Nvidia is stepping up to the fight again.

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