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Radeon 8500/GeForce3 Ti500 comparison
RainDog writes: "The Tech Report has put together a pretty detailed comparison of ATI's Radeon 8500 and NVIDIA's GeForce3 Titanium 500 graphics parts. Despite being incredibly thorough, the review is also a pretty entertaining read. Definitely the best comparison of these cards I've seen to date."
For any Linux users looking at these cards, remember you can get 3D hardware acceleration on the Radeon with the Open Source drivers, you need to download the closed drivers for the NVidia card...
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Yes, I am utterly biased & asking for flamage:
Linux ATI Radeon Drivers:
Open Source, reliable, fully featured.
Linux NVIDIA GeForce Drivers:
Binary only, unreliable, cause frequent hangs on many systems, not fully featured.
'Nuff said.
When I decided to replace my Asus 7700 Deluxe with something a little newer, my budget seemed to limit me to a GeForce 3 Ti200. Further research showed me I could get a Radeon 8500 for just a little more. I ofcourse picked that up. It performs far better than a Ti200, nearly as good as a Ti500 (and better in many tests) for the price of a Ti200. Can't beat that eh?
tinfoilmedia
It looks like sol.exe is really gonna rock on these things.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Hopefully NVidia will wise up and drop the price on the GeForce 3 line...at a little over $200 (OEM), I can get two 8500's for the price of a single GeForce3 Ti500. And the difference is SO negligible. Since my idea of "practical uses for a video card" is not "watching 3DMark 2001 run all day", I think i can give up that unperceivable 10 FPS without any guilt.
The shipping drivers left out many pronised features. The first driver update supported them, but from what I read not very well. What is the current state of ATI drivers?
Why do I care? Well, my father (age 72) is looking for a new PC and has budgeted $2,000 for it. He uses it for editing (of Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing), web surfing, Quicken, and e-mail. He needs the best LCD monitor/card combo because his eyes are 72 years old, but any CPU that's on the market will do. Plus 256 Mb ram, any current hard drive capacity, and cd-rw.
Remember when you couldn't get much more than the basics for 2 grand? I like Moore's Law.
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Uh, because that's what they do? I don't go to sites like that (and they don't get linked) because the guy says "I tried them both and the Radeon just feels quicker". They get linked because while there's some subjective analysis, most of it is object analysis that they can get called on if they distort, hence it allows you to draw your own conclusions.
When it comes to MS Windows, I've never really believed that ATI fully supports their cards in terms of driver development. At least after having both an ATI Rage Fury and a Radeon 64MB DDR.
.... after this fiasco.
For those who don't know, ATI was basiclly hacking their drivers, so that when someone ran Quake3, it turned down the quality of the rendering, so that you could get better framerates. They did this becaus emany 3D sites use Quake as a benchmark. More details, and a better description of what they did, can be found here.
Now, I know, "well in Linux, this wouldn't be an issue since the drivers are open source". Well guess what, WHO CARES? If a company is going to be this underhanded with its users, I sure as hell am not going to support them.
I called ATI tech support about a week ago, because my All-In-Wonder 128 Pro wouldn't work properly with Windows 2000. Specifically, the DVD player doesn't work, and in order for Windows 2000 not to crash you need to reapply service pack 2, which in itself means that ATI's drivers are messing up fixes from service pack 2. The details aren't important, but I basically hashed the issue out with the tech for a long time and we both came to the conclusion that the driver that ATI offers for this product don't work properly on Windows 2000. When I asked when a fix will be available, he told me that I'll just have to wait and keep on checking the website for updates.
What kind of company sells you a non working product (driver) and tells you to wait and sit pretty while they fix it? In the meanwhile, I can't use the product for what it was advertised for.
It's the usual ATI thing. The first drivers suck, the second are OK, but the third are very good.
My that sounds familiar ;)
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About time they got volumetric texturing on a 3D card. When I nuke someone I want to see the smoking hole.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Heh that's what happened to me with Sony Vaio exactly...the thing came with the foil sticker on it that said "Designed for Windows 2000 Professional", so I was like great we'll take this laptop and stick 2K on it later.
No drivers available at this time...few months later, some drivers show up on sony's site. They don't work properly.
Anyways $200 or so and 9 months later the laptop is still on ME which sucks for business use compared to 2K. Hehe I was quite pissed on the phone a few times also.
Rrrrrrrrr....no more vaio's here to say the least!
Anyways off main topic I guess. But a black mark on Sony in this company!
Yup.
Are we good or are we good?
Face it... many games optimize special cases for specific cards, many cards optimize special cases for specific games. Mostly the cards optimize for the current generation of games (since they can't know about new games), the games optimize for the current generation of cards (since they cant' know about new cards). It common practice, and it improves performance quite significantly. nVidia's new drivers delivered a 30% boost in performance for a lot of apps... care to guess at what they did underneath?
:-). Read Carmack's comments on the issue before you burn them at the stake for giving you a significant performance boost. The one thing they did wrong was not provide the ability to turn optimization off for benchmarking.
Admittedly, ATI did this to a fairly upacceptable degree in this case (since there was significant image quality damage), but they probably didn't optimize Quake because it was a benchmark, they probably did so because it's a popular game full of framerate-freaks who do things like hack their drivers to turn off texturing anyway
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
And once you get under that crusty old ATI veneer of lousy drivers
The features and performance are up to the nvidea card. But do you know about the stabilty of the card (drivers). If people say: The card is good, but the driver needs some work, i'll trust it will get better, _I_ do not want to buy (or advise) it.
It is like the kyro2. It promises good thing, but if you look at the test some test are omitted because the program would not run with that card. What if you bought that game that did not work. (Or worse what if it does not run diabloII?8-)
The fact that it did run all the test in this review is good. However the one statement about lousy drivers makes me shiver.
my advise: don't buy a card that promises it will get good drivers, buy a card that already has good drivers.
i.e. In other test the 8500 did not perform Antialiasing under some resolutions.
and your point:
Did microsoft do it ok after 3 tries? (really)
I've been looking to buy a new system (for running
Linux and the BSDs), but the choice of video card
is a sticking point...
Nvidia cards are supported via binary drivers -
there is also an open-source 2D driver for XF86 4.1.0. The kernel driver is open source. My fear here is that I wont be able to follow development kernels closely, as the drivers will break. Ditto for changes to Glibc. OTOH, the
Nvidia drivers offer full support, including 3D w/ hardware T+L. The 2D hardware on Geforces have been lacking (i.e. blurry at higher resolutions).
As for Ati cards: XF86 4.1.0 supports up to Radeon 64 DDR/VIVO.
The CVS of XF86 supports that plus Radeon 7500 (2D+3D), and Radeon 8500 (2D only). None of the XF86 release or CVS supports hardware T+L, and probably never will (that support is complicated to write, and ATI isnt paying Precision Insight
anymore). Radeon 64DDR is a safe choice, but not the fastest. Very good 2D clarity at hi resolutions.
Matrox G400max/450 are supported pretty well - slower than Radeons, but they work. Excellent 2D quality. G550 is supported in CVS.
PowerVR Kyro 1+2 drivers are being worked on by the company - they say they'll be released in February. They havent decided wether they'll be open source or not.
OpenGL performance and features should improve when the Mesa 4.x sources are folded into the main XF86 tree.
Xig, the makers of the commercial Accelerated X, now have released Summit, with improved 3D support. The fastest card they support now is the Radeon 7500, with full T+L, full accleration, support for pretty much everything the card can do except for the TV/VIVO hardware. The only problem here is that they, bare minimum, cost $79, and the software key you buy is good for EXACTLY ONE driver, on EXACTLY ONE computer. I.e. if you change cards, or even your hardware appreciably, you're screwed.
Bottom line: if you want open source drivers: Radeon 7500 (risky, probably havent got all the bugs worked out yet, but fastest open source performance), Radeon 64 (stable), or Matrox G400/450/550 -- one of these together with the XFree86 CVS tree, compiling it yourself.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Last think about ATI cards in Carmack's .plan is about "Quake3 name checking in ATI's recent drivers".
I checked if JC has write somthing about the Radeon 8500, like the 6/1/00 update but there isn't nothing.
May be in the next update?
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
heh I told the guy we should return it, but he's a VP and liked the laptop and he's like well we'll just wait for the drivers...
...anyways next time he'll know better than to wait and we'll both know better than to get the Vaio.
there were a few glaring issues:
It was pointed out that synthetic/"looking to the future" benchmarks favored the Radeon, but "real world" seemed to lean toward the GF.
Hummm.
Also a concern (well, maybe just for me) is that the mac version seems non-existant. You can buy or flash the GF Mx line, and older Radeons...what about the current line?
What really tweaks my nipples is that Nvidia stated point blank that "adding bi-endian support was trivial"...sooo, why don't they make all their cards like that?
And put a little pressure on ATI (or v/v)?
Which begs the question, again, why is/was the mac version more expensive than the pc version when you could flash the darn thing?
I thought about submitting this link yesterday, but alas, I can no longer handle the "rejection".
And did anyone else notice that the 8500 is a perfect GF2 Ultra killer? Only problem is that pesky GF3 Titanium...
Now if only we could get Win95 and DOS drivers for these new cards.
Moose.
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The scarery thing is that this sort of thing is more common in the computer industry that you might realise. With OSs constantly evolving, in order to attract more sales, their APIs change once in a while, the third parties are left trying to support their hardware and updating their software to support the new OS and this is no easy task especially when the necessary documentation is not always ready. MacOS X and Win2K both suffer from this issue and there are still a good number of hardware devices that are left out in the cold, waiting for drivers for the new systems. Developing new drivers is certainly not cheap and most companies will concentrate on the products that are making them the most money.
At the same time, if Apple decided to go with NVidia it was because they felt that ATI wasn't making a good enough effort when it came to developing the drivers for the MacOS - sure there were other reasons, but this is the one that is best known.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
All sorts of high-end 3-d capability in these cards means that the very good 2-d capability (which used to only be in high-end cards) is much less expensive.
2 weeks ago I built a new server that wasn't going to run x-windows, much less any sort of games. I'd gone to 2 different Fry's, a Best Buy, and CompUSA to find a low end, PCI video card (the 2u case riser card didn't support AGP). The lowest end card I could find was a 3D TNT2 for $55.
Just a few years ago you could easily find a cheap ~4 meg card for around $10-20. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Of course, I probably coulda found one on-line but I like being able to actually walk into the store for a refund/exchange if something goes wrong.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
what the hell - nvidia did same shit with the first detonator xp, many hardware sites said so. but they didn't do it only for quake 3, they degraded the 3d quality all over for faster drivers cause they were scared of ati's hardware
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If ya read toms hardware.... you would know that they got rid of that little cheat...
Taking a look at MS today vs IBM 12 years ago there are some interesting parallels in the corporate hubris area.
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The 'designed for Windows XX' logo means, last time I checked, that it will boot to desktop.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
A friend of mine said a while back that he hoped ATI sold plenty of video cards so nVidia would have a reason to keep progressing forward. "Without competition," he said, "nVidia will just stagnate and 3d gaming will go nowhere."
Hogwash. nVidia has a great reason to keep progressing: profit. My mother (family EQ addict) runs a TNT2-based card and pretty soon I'll be upgrading her to a GeForce 3. I run a GeForce 2 Ultra, but I imagine I'll be upgrading to something else come spring time. If nVidia didn't keep moving 3d gaming forward, there would be no need to replace your 3d card with a new one...ergo, limited amounts of repeat customers. As it is, nVidia releases a new, more powerful 3d card every six months in both high-priced and value varieties. Game developers often adopt the latest and greatest as the standard by which they'll be producing a game, so gamers always have a reason to go out and get the latest smokin' piece o' silicon.
But I am still glad to see that there is competition out there, which probably contributes to nVidia pushing the envelope harder and faster than if there were no competitors.
My sigs always suck.
As long as I can aim well in Quake ]I[ without jerkiness I'm happy too ;-)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Hmm... My All In Wonder 128 Pro works fine in Win2K, in fact I don't even own another DVD player for my house. I watch all DVD's on my big screen from the AIW 128 Pro card. I guess I must have done something "special" to make this work, like install things properly. Try using a different DVD software, maybe it isn't your ATI card. Just because you called some "database searcher" at ATI doesn't mean you got a competent answer. That guy probably knew about as much as you. Just my .02
It actually means lots of stuff - basically that the hardware meets MS's guidelines and the OEM is in line. It also means that there's certified drivers available. Sounds like Sony fucked up and put the wrong sticker on the machine.
Look at the post #s clearly not redundant
Ask Slashdot - google for stupid people.
Appears to be /.ed.
Personally, I've had much respect for NVidia's quality. I've hated ATI since their All-In-Wonder-128 years (bleaak!).
Besides, this is temporary until the new GeForce4(?) comes out and the GF3 Ti drop in price comparable to the Radeon 8500.
And for those of you who complain that ATI is like Microsoft (ie: trying to make a buck first), may I remind you that NVidia purposely forced mobo manufactures to keep down the price of new mobos with their top-end n420 chipset *under* $180, when the manufacturers said "Hey, you could charge over $200 retail for this thing!"
Just my $.02
-CraigJames "All I need is a little TLC: Thorazine, Lithium, & Compazine"
matrox cards usually are nowhere near the fastest in terms of 3d performance, but their 2d performance is top notch. The image quality and text clarity on a matrox card is soooo much better than anything nVidia or ATI offers it's just not even funny. Plus, matrox cards have good LCD/DVI support. (Neither of these two features is suprising given that they aim for the professional/graphics design market.) Although, for $2000, you're options re: lcd moniters will be extremely limited if not nonexistant. Truthfully, I'd say go for a Trinitron tube or the like and run it at 80+Hz ( you won't see any distortion or flicker) becuase a 21" Trinitron is probably less than a 15-17" LCD (more screen space will be nice for page layout). Oh, and caution Gramps against moving said 21" Trinitron moniter, he'd probably herniate if he tried. (Hell, I almost would and I'm 30% of his age...) ;-)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I bet debian 3.1 will include the drivers and will also include new and onnovate thigns like the 2.4 kernel and kde 2.x! YIPEEEE!!
http://saveie6.com/
This was NOT an 'optimization', it was plainly CHEATING on ATI's part to get better benchmark scores.
If I select in q3 that I want a certain level of detail, the card better give it to me, otherwise what's the point!
It's as if whenever you ran q3 the card defaulted to non textured polygons in 320x200 'because in this way you get 600fps', come on, please be objective, ATI blew it big time.
I am not saying that NVidia are saints, but AFAIK people haven't found this kind of cheating in their drivers yet...
(I actually don't own either of those brands, I own a Matrox G400Max so I consider myself fairly unbiased).
-- the cake is a lie
For those of you who havn't been paying attention ATI got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, literally. They blantly attempted to cheat on benchmarks, lowering the quality of quake3 to improve performance in it since quake3 is used as a benchmark by many sites. Rename quake3 to quak3 and you get back the lost image quality and see the real (and slower) framerates.
Added to that HORRENDOUS driver support and driver issues across all their platforms. I don't know what these "ATI open source drivers are soo good" folks are smoking, but the nvidia drivers are CONSISTENTLY more stable (which is what I really care about) and often faster on linux.
I realize some users have weeks to spend futzing with their drivers, bios etc and for them the historical low quality of ATI drivers will not be a problem. But if you expect even a decent set of features to work right out of the box without waiting for six new releases, consider nvidia.
They also have good justification for failing to open source on linux, since they have a common core and have implemented an entire ICD I beleive in their opengl variants. There is a real competitive advantage to doiing things right in that space, and keeping it closed allows them to bring those changes to the linux platform as well.
Not to mention, the hype machine at ATI won't quit, their paper specs always show them BLOWING the socks of nvidia but wheneveranyone gets down to benchmarking things (especially with legit drivers) they never seem to measure up.
This leaves me running one head when I boot Linux on either of my 3-headed systems. nvidia seems to have approximately zero interest in fixing this problem, as users with multiple geforce cards and multiple digital displays running Linux are a pretty small minority.
Is ATI any nicer about this? Do the ATI drivers support multiple digital heads, or are the relevant bits of the source open?
BTW.. the word is imperceivable.
WTF are they saying in there??? It's not intelligible!
What kind of company sells you a non working product (driver) and tells you to wait and sit pretty while they fix it?
:)
Umm...Microsoft?
Complain to Microsoft. They take their hardware compatibility seriously.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Then why not get the Ti200? They're less than $200 (retail, IIRC).
Pax, Ardax
Just like AMD & Intel have never introduced )nearly) useless features designed to influence benchmarks? Face it, the people you're ticked at are _not_ ATi - it's ATi's _marketing_ division, & NVidia's & AMD's & Intel's & Apple's & ....
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
Who cares, they never should have done it in the first place. They've already lost all credibility, it's too late now.
This is NOT a feature. Have you even _read_ the articles in question? What they did was up the threshhold to do mip-mapping so that it basiclly encopassed th entire playing area, only if you were running "Quake.exe". THis has the effect of giving you MUCh poorer quality than if you rename the xecutable to "Quack.exE" and run it again. So this is not an "optimization", it is a deliberate attempt to get higher framerates through lower quality.
because the 8500 is a better value, quite simply. The drivers are still immature, which leaves the possibility of really great improvements in the near future. I would rather pay the extra 20 or 30 bucks for the Radeon, rather than buy an underclocked GeForce 3 that is nearing the end of its development.
If you're using the hydravision software.
I bought my RADEON 2 months ago and the CD that came with it had an old version of hydravision that doesn't support WinXP (I know, probably not a problem for most people here...). I CAN get the new version for "free", all I have to do is either pay $10 or $20 dollars for them to ship me a new CD. No kidding. They won't offer it as a download!
I'm looking for my receipt as I'm going to return the card. This is bullshit. Oh, and don't expect their tech support to ever deal with any of your problems via email. All I got for a response (if at all) was "we're looking into it". You're going to have to call their pay number and sit on hold for a while to talk to some underpaid "tech" who really doesn't want to be there. Or know anything other than the stardard line: "we're sorry you feel that way". Well I'm sorry that ATI doesn't give 2 shits about their customers, because I'm revoking my status as one.
I vote with my dollars and I encourage other to do the same. Make a difference in this bliss we call capitalism. Matrox burned me with the G200, waiting for 2 years for a stable OpenGL driver that was "just around the corner". I will NEVER buy their products again, I don't care how much they've cleaned up their act. ATI just made the shitlist too. Sorry guys, you just made my next purchase a whole lot easier. I've owned 2 Asus Geforce cards, and been happy with both. I should never have wandered.
'nuff said.
You're being inconsistent. First you say you don't care about an extra 10 fps in 3DMark2k1 (though it's actually the 8500 that gets the higher 2k1 score), and you like the cheaper price of the 8500. Then you say you'd rather spend the extra money on an 8500 instead of a Ti200 because of a possible future 10 fps...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
As soon as the Christmas gifts are paid off from the credit cards, I'm going to upgrade to a Tyan dual Athlon board. I'll give you good odds that my system hangs will disappear when I do that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Personally I thought the more interesting article was the one linked on the side:
d ex .x?pg=1
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q4/os/in
A comparison of WinXP, Win2k and WinMe performance. Basically it showed WinXP was faster by far when it came to a variety of content creation, probably due to faster harddrive access.
When it came to memory, CPU and video benchmarks, Win2k and WinXP were comparable.
Overall though, WinMe was 25-40% slower than both 2k and XP in nearly every test.
Conclusion: If You have Win2k, you might want to upgrade.
If you have WinMe, you definately want to upgrade.
I will say this, the new GUI does make use of faster graphics hardware, and I recommend buying a Radeon 8500 at the same time you upgrade to XP.
(There, now the post is on-topic)
The article had some great coloured-mipmap shots of the two cards. The GeForce shots showed lovely trilinear filtering of the mipmaps, true per-pixel range-based transitions with nice soft blending. The older Radeon drivers did pseudo-approximate-range-based transitions with soft (but not as nice) blending between the mipmap levels.
But the new Radeon drivers don't bother with soft trilinear blending at all. There is only one 50% blend level between mipmap levels, when trilinear is turned on. That's not trilinear - that's a "dual-bilinear" hack of some kind. And it's still not properly range-based.
Worse, when anisotropic filtering is enabled, you don't get trilinear at all. The mipmap level transitions are bilinear, hard edged. Looks awful. And they're still not properly range-based. THIS is the reason anisotropic filtering doesn't cause the same performance hit on an 8500.
I don't understand why people keep insisting that ATI cards have superior quality images. Certainly not in 3D - they're taking all kinds of quality-reduction shortcuts to try & boost their benchmarks. Fine so long as it's optional, but as before, it isn't.
Their 2D output is fine, better than some brands of nVidia chip-based cards, but you can certainly find other GeForce-based brands which look great in 2D. My reference QuadroDCC looks superb, better than my Matrox G400.
I really wish ATI would stop forcing these compromises on us just to squeeze a few more fps from Q3A. If I want faster performance on a game, I'll lower the resolution, or turn down the texture size or something - in the game, or the driver. If I ask the card for max quality, trilinear & all the nice stuff, I want to get max quality, not some half-assed performance hack.
That said, I'm keen to see what Smoothvision looks like these days. Sounds nice :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Both of these cards will obviously do well, but what Im wondering is which one will work best with linux. I am using SMP with dual Athlons, so it is an awkward situation. Any thoughts?
Everybody makes mistakes... just because they did a little slip in their programming means we should hold it against them for ever? They came out with drivers... much better drivers, and there is still room for improvement. So what happens if it turns out to be the best card ever? Should we just forget about them because they had that little slip-up??? Why don't you bitch about Nvidia and not making open source drivers for linux if you're gonna be such an ass...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but judging from my experience owning Radeon DDR, it will be a long long time before there're decent 8500 (linux) drivers.
I like how they only compared them on a IBM, why not on a g4? consistant hardware and no fideling with direct mumble.
http://www.evil3d.net check it out
The anti-open-source trolls are out in full force today.
Will see you in metamod.