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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."
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.
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.
Also note that if your nVidia has TV capture ability, it's not likely to have Video4Linux compatibility. ATI All-in-Wonder cards have historically had this ability, through the GATOS project.
As far as TV-Out goes, it really annoys me how ATI protects this for the express purpose of protecting the bits that control MacroVision. I mean, under Windows there are always hacks for MacroVision even when there is no documentation available, and if you are a linux head and want to do this, you can use the framebuffer and XFree FBDev and mplayer in console mode to acheive TV-out that sucks for normal usages (unaccelerated) but suffices for those who want to copy stuff to tape.
All that said, the TV-Capture capabilities combined with a really nice 3D-chipset and open drivers make me want a Radeon AIW 8500DV. I'll wait til GATOS has official support though.
The problem with binary drivers is that:
1) You are stuck with Linux on x86. No *BSD, no alpha/powerpc/etc.
2) You are stuck with what linux kernel that nVidia deems ok. This may be fine for now, but when nVidia releases new products, and cease support of older ones, when you upgrade your distro to something with, say kernel 3.0, your screwed because they only support the GeForce 4 and newer (hypothetical future)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yeah, but kernel structures and the module interface DO change from time to time, and in the past it HAS broken NVdriver. Waiting for someone to fix that crimps my style. :)
Glibc is also evolving, and changes there can make the nvidia drivers segfault. With open source drivers, you can just recompile the whole shootin' match. (i.e. libGL, libGLU, etc.)
Plus there's the whole _taint_ issue.
The Nvidia driver situation doesnt totally disqualify the card for me - but it is irksome.
With things as they are, I'd go for a Radeon 8500 or Matrox G550, or Kyro II *IF* the drivers were open source, AND of decent quality. At the moment, that isnt quite where we are.
I really hope PowerVR releases the Kyro drivers open source. Really.
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.
I have great respect for nvidia too, but I certainly don't want to talk the ball and go home: They need competition, and it is fantastic that ATI stepped up to plate where so many other companies faltered (S3, 3dfx, Matrox, Trident, Cirrus Logic). On top of that the local price for a Radeon 8550 64MB Retail is $390 CDN, compared to almost $600 for a GeForce 3 Ti500: I have to confess that the Radeon 8550 is on the top of my list right now (so long as they don't try "optimizing" Q3 again). The OEM down-clocked version of it is going for $300 CDN. Those prices are fantastic, and the reality is that the cutting edge in consumer grade graphics cards always was about the $300 mark until nvidia started losing competition, at which point it has ebbed upwards of $600 now (when every other computer component, from monitor to hard drive, has dropped for the latest and greatest).
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"?