Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Stealth on July 30, 2004, 01:19:19 am
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graphics card upgrade coming real soon. what are you guys thoughts on their cards? Try to keep it upper level, like, Radeon's x800 and nVidia's 6800. also discuss the various models, such as the 6800 ultra, the x800 pro, etc.
i'm interested to see what you think.
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I spy a flamewar.
At the moment ATI, in the future,nVidia, beyond that **** knows. Who cares, just get the card the gives the best performance for the best price.
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I got both ATI readeon 9800 and Nvdia asus 5700 FX.
Nvidia accutally run really smooth, I would go with nvidia, and save a hundred or two, read the review on magazines, they help alot.
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How future proof do you want to be?
I was reading an article in PC Zone (heh) this morning, looking at Epics new Unreal Engine 3.0 - of course that looks spectacular and should be the way of things to come (although it has an ETA of about 2006). My point is that in the preview they said that the only hardware that could fully utilise the engine right now is the nVidia 6800.
No doubt hardware from both companies will be able to use the engine to its best potential by 2006 - but you're looking to upgrade now.
If you're not to worried about 2006 - and just want the best card at the moment - I'm fairly sure you could get great use out of either nVidias or ATIs top cards. Lets face it... these days the high end stuff is rarely ever a stinker - and it doesnt seem either offering from ATI or nVidia is right now. Me, I'd pick an ATI card - purely because I've had better experiences with ATI than I have with nVidia. But that's personal preference and not based on anything concrete.
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The Newest cards out for Nvidia and ATI are both great. None is better then the other, except the Nvidia uses Pixel Shader Technology 3, and ATI does not. What does this mean? Nothing right now. no games are planning on using this feature as it is deemed unnecessary unless they are trying to impress people then they may include it.
Compatibility is fine for both and both carry the newest technologies frequently used in high end games such as Far Cry. Basically you cant go wrong either way.
Personally i prefer ATI products as their drivers are always more stable. Recently ATI has slacked in that department, but possibly due to the X800 release. I run a newer Radeon (9700XT) and i never seen nicer looking graphics on a computer for any game in my life, i can only imagine the X800. I will buy the Radeon myself because they are tried and true for me. Nvidia cards i had just never worked as intended and since my switch to ATi ive never been happier.
As for unreal working better on Nvidia, i dont doubt this. It is due to Pixel Shader 3.0, and the fact some game companies lean towards certain card companies. Although impressive most articles ive read have said the industry plans on staying away from PS 3.0 due to the many more million instructions needed to program in.
I could be wrong, consumers could be wowed by PS 3.0 which would force companies to include it on all cards, depends on how the masses react i suppose.
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nVidia is less about speed and more about features - It seems to have worked well for them as demonstrated by Doom 3, where the NV's have blown ATI's cards away.
I prefer nVidia mosre 'tho because their drivers (Win and Lin) have always been better quality (IMHO).
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I beg to differ, ATI has a history of hosing one app or another with driver updates, whereas Nvidia doesn't. Sure, on occasion it happens, but it's not consistent. The last time I remember a new Nvidia driver being worse than the one before it was way back when they "upgraded" to 45.xx from 44.03. There was a severe reduction in performance even on my low end MX420, so much so that I rolled back till Forceware was up and running.
If you want the top of the line of the current generation get a FX 5950 which has better performance than the previous title holder, the radeon 9800.
If you want top of the line next generation, get which ever one is the cheapest as they all blow current mainstream cards away.
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9800XT whoops the **** out of any FX card ... its the nonpros that suck
i personally would go for a Ati because these utilise AA and AF far better than any FX generation vid cards so if you want great quality and a few fps less go for current ATI's if you want 2 more FPS and crappy ass quality go for a FX.
i myself am getting a Radeon 9600XT tomorrow.
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Originally posted by Ashrak
i personally would go for a Ati because these utilise AA and AF far better than any FX generation vid cards so if you want great quality and a few fps less go for current ATI's if you want 2 more FPS and crappy ass quality go for a FX.
Yes YES! I agree fully with this. I was a dedicated Nvidia user till my friends showed me what the 9800 Pro could do, and I bought one myself about a month ago. ATI's cards run games at FAR more acceptable framerates when you crank up the Anti-Ailasing and Anisotropic Filtering. If you have an Nvidia card, you *might* be able to perform as well as an ATI, but you'll see slowdowns in the AA and AF departments on an nvidia.
Basically, the Nvidia card will run GREAT if you dont want to worry about AA or AF. But if you want nice visual quality with decent framerates, ATI should be the way to go. Also, with some tests I have seen with the Pixel Shaders and FarCry, there was some wierd bug that prevented foilage to be rendered properly at a distance. This was on a 5950, whereas the 9800 could render foilage properly. The close-up pixel shader image quality is also sharper and clearer on an ATI card compared to an Nvidia card. (9800 XT compared to 5950 Ultra)
Here's something I read in Maximum PC as well, when they compared the 6800 to the X800. The 6800 requires a RIDICULOUS amount of power! The X800's can run comfortably on 350 Watt power supplies, whereas I've heard that the 6800's might need a 450W or higher watt power supplies just to ensure system stability.
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Well I say Ati because I have ati card (radeon 9800xt)
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Despite having a GF5200 in my Pc, all I've read says that ATI has held, and continues to hold, the advantage over nVidia ever since the GF5000s came out.
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I use a GeForce FX5600, it does the job :) I might need to upgrade in the future, but, to be honest, that's a given regardless of what card you buy ;)
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They'll both be out of date in a few months. ;)
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i know one of nvidias newest set requires 2 power taps from you power supply and they recommend a 400+ watt supply for stability and if ATI is doing that as well. does that mean video cards of the future are gonna cause city wide black outs. that would really suck
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No it means we need higher voltages for the card interfaces. e.g. PCI-Express.
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Which, by the way, rocks. I just got my new system up, complete with an X800 XT in a PCI-Express interface. I've yet to see any slow down on anything. Period.
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If you are going for the current gen cards, It's more or less even, some think that the current gen NV cards may end up outperforming the ATI cards. I'd think it's a safe bet to go with the best price/performance, which, IMHO would currently be the 6800GT or X800 pro (Or, now is the time to really buy an 9800pro 256MB, as you can get it for ~386CAD).
Cheers!
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Originally posted by silverwolf
i know one of nvidias newest set requires 2 power taps from you power supply and they recommend a 400+ watt supply for stability and if ATI is doing that as well. does that mean video cards of the future are gonna cause city wide black outs. that would really suck
yeah that's the Ultra. it comes with two molex splitters, and requires you tap the power from a lead not going to the processor, or something like that :p that's the one that takes up two slots on your computer ;)
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For some reason ATI brought me more stability then the nVidia cards did...
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Why not just go with the dual PCI-Express? That should rock. :D
Oh and you are going to need some sort of 512 meg card to run doom3 at the best specs...
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ATI hands down - the have superior fabrication techniques, graphics processor design, less heat issues (infact almost _no_ heat issues, they barely have to use active cooling even on their highest end, as opposed to nVidia's needing vacume cleaners),
Pixel Shader 3.0 is nothing but Pixel Shader 2.0 with a larger instruction buffer -- that is the _only_ difference, and no games in the foreseeable future will need PX3 over PX2 -- if you have that long of a shader program then it's not going to run in realtime, period.
nVidia has a long history of making boards that toast themselves, making their drivers overclock their boards, and general asshatery.
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Originally posted by StratComm
Which, by the way, rocks. I just got my new system up, complete with an X800 XT in a PCI-Express interface. I've yet to see any slow down on anything. Period.
don't be surprised if your computer disapears ;)
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Yes, and suppose we only want a video card and not muck with finding a new motherboard with the PCI-E interfaces?
Personally, I can't give much advice. My newest-gen card is a Geforce4 Ti4400, so I'm not too knowledgable on how the newest of the new perform. I've heard much good about the current crop of Radeons, and some not-entirely-unearned ribbing of the FX series. If you ask me, the 9600XT might be the best choice if you want a balance of power and price.
Now, going on a minor tangent from this, I've done a bit of reading on the All-in-wonder Radeons, and from what I gather they're effectively a slightly refined 9x00 with an integrated TV/FM tuner and appropriate signal processors. Granted, they only run 128mb of memory, but that's plenty enough for the crop of software I'm using. And since I'm also needing a TV tuner in my system (as the dorms back at uni are notoroiously lacking in both space and power taps) I figure this would serve well as a replacement for my aging Geforce4. But, naturally, I've heard rumors that the AIWs are generally a bad thing when it comes to TV viewing (a contradiction from what Anandtech's review of the AIW 9600 Pro says).
Opinions?
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It probably all depends on what you have them hooked up to. You're limited by the size of your monitor, of course, and by the type of TV you're trying to get. If it's broadcast, you'd need the same huge antennas as any other TV to get the same reception.
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Well, the reason I ask of the AIWs is because the TV Wonder VE I currently have, to be perfectly blunt, is ****e. Compared to a normal TV, the image is grainy/staticy, and the sound is oftentimes too soft to pick up without maximizing every volume slider in software and my speaker set.
Input's no problem, as it'll be a cable connection (essentially a small step down from sattelite), and the monitor's been a faithful one to me.
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At moment, of the new generation cards, the 6800GT has the best value for the buck since it costs about the same as the x800Pro, has similar performance (read, sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse) in DirectX games and better performance in OGL games (read, beats the x800XT-PE in the D3, an OGL game).
Of the high-end, the x800XT-PE is better than the 6800Ultra for a myriads of reasons.
Of the previous generation, the ATi cards win hands-down.
nVidia's dual moniter abilities are better than ATi's as well and nVidia's drivers are better than ATi's across the board (from win32 to linux).
ATi still has better image quality (much less pronounced now between the x800 and 6800 but still there). The new cards also have temporal AA which is pretty neat.
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Actually, the reason the X800XT beat the 6800 Ultra was due to a bit of a cheap trick by ATI. If you read the early reviews, you notice they all mention disabling the "brilinear" optimizations on the nVidia cards, as suggested by ATI, who claimed it would make the field equal. However, what they didn't mention is that ATI also used brilinear optimizations, which were left enabled because no one knew about them.
Realistically, at the moment, here is my recommendation for each price range:
0-100: Buy a better card
100-175: 9600 XT
175-250: 9800 Pro
250-350: 6800
350-450: 6800 GT
450+: Whatever you feel like wasting your money on
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Except for the fact that ATi's optimizations are almost impossible to see except under very specific situations and with a trained eye.
I'm miffed that you can't turn it off, but nobody actually knew about it or even saw the difference until someone noticed that the ATi x800 was going faster than it theoretically could in certain cases. This is unlike the "brilinear" optimizations that nVidia had (which can now be turned off in the contro panel) where the image degradation is blatantly obvious.
As for you suggestion list, I'd actually suggest getting a 9800SE 256bit memory interface rather than the 9600XT. Most 9800SE's underperform the 9600XT, but the 9800SE 256bit doesn't, moreover there's about a 50% chance of modding it to an 9800Pro if you get the correct one.
So for about the same price you get a similar performing card that has a chance at being soft-modded (meanign install a different driver) into a 9800Pro. Not a bad deal if you ask me.
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True about the 9800SE. I had forgotten about that card. And you can turn off the X800 optimizations. Registry editing.