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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...
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.
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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
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.
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