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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...
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.
I have to say that I have had really good luck with the last 3 realeases of the nvidia drivers for Linux - X.
I would prefer they were open sourced. But, I am not going to slam drivers that have worked well for me just because they are not.
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
Umm, you are totally wrong under almost all assumptions.
The NVidia drivers have been totally unwavering stable for me, and I have been using them for over 8 months. This I CANNOT say for previous XFree drivers I have used.
THe NVidia drivers are totally fully featured, and support alot of things the raedons don't (Twinview, FullScreen Anti Aliasing to name a few).
Because of NVidias Unified Driver Model, the same code core is used in both the windows and Linux drivers (this is why new linux drivers come out at the same time as new detenators). This assures you of as good, or better preformance as what you would get on windows.
Next time, spread your FUD elsewhere.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
1> Easy install? Umm...hello. You can grab the rpm's for SuSe, RedHat, Mandrake. rpm -i is hard? For the rest of us, grab the tarballs. Extract and make install, a little pull from your spice weasel, and bam! Debian (woody, sid) even has the packages nvidia-glx-src and nvidia-kernel-src that will build debian packages from the downloaded tarballs)
2> In general, those who have compiled stuff themselves experience less problems than those using the biniary packages.
3> What features? read the docs. There's plenty of features there. FSAA, VSynctoBlank, Shadow Cursor, TV Out, TwinView, all there. What's missing? I should have modded you as flamebait instead of commenting, but oh well.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
OK Lets finish this crappy debate here & now. Seems everyone has different experiences - now theres a suprise. Seeing as my parent comment was buggy, I should really post a revised version.... Here goes:
UNBIASED COMPARISON:
Linux ATI Radeon Drivers:
Open Source, NOT fully featured (I just checked the docs), has caused some problems on some systems.
Linux NVIDIA GeForce Drivers:
Binary only, fully featured (well, very very nearly almost - just checked the docs), many people have reported problems.
No what have we learned? SOD ALL.
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/
You got it wrong. I've owned both. Truth:
Linux ATI Radeon Drivers:
Open Source, incomplete (no HW T&L), slower than Windows drivers, difficult to compile, unstable (prone to X hangs).
Linux NVIDIA GeForce Drivers:
Open-source kernel module, binary core identical to Windows drivers (Detonator UDM), complete hardware support (incl. HW T&L and FSAA), as fast as Windows drivers, available as RPM download, complete OpenGL support, and I have never once had an X hang.
I sold my Radeon because I just couldn't get it to work right with Linux even after months of trying. I bought a GeForce2 Pro card for cheap, downloaded the NVidia drivers, and have been sailing ever since without problems or crashes.
GPL fanatic FUDder, you are.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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"?