ATI vs. NVIDIA: The Next Generation

doppler writes: "There's a killer graphics card round-up at TR today that compares the new GeForce4 and Radeon 8500 128MB cards against each other in extensive testing. Very good stuff. Most interesting: a visual representation of a texture upload problem in OpenGL on the Radeon 8500 chip."

Comments

Voodoo 4/5 might do for you

[bbk]

Try and find a Voodoo 4 or 5. They've got decent (Geforce 2ish) 3d capabilities, will work at 66Mhz in a PCI slot that supports it, and have quite decent linux drivers.

They're also dirt cheap on ebay, as WinXP and MacOSX don't support Voodoo cards, and people are selling them off for better cards.

You may also look for Mac cards - for the longest time, there was no AGP slot on the Mac, and I think you can get a Radeon PCI with mac roms. Flash it to be x86 compatible, and there you.

BBK

Re:Voodoo 4/5 might do for you

[MisterBlister]

Keep in mind that there's no decent official driver support for Voodoo cards now that 3dfx is gone. There's already some games that are DirectX 8.1 only and the list keeps growing. Many of these games wont run properly on Voodoo cards because there are no updated drivers.

They do have PCI GeForce 2 boards though for obvious reasons they suffer a performance hit when compared to the AGP versions... That's your best bet until you upgrade your mobo.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[felipeal]

So maybe they are just missing a link to:

http://www.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html

I have 2 computers at home, one with a nVidia TNT2 card and the other with an ATI Rage Pro 128, and I can tell you, I'm much happier with the ATI one (the nVidia one sometimes freezes the whole system, for instance).

The overall situation (If I'm not wrong) is that even though nVidia provides the drivers (and even the source), they don't disclose technical information about the cards, while ATI does the opposite.

Nvidia Chipsets vs Nvidia TV out

[BrookHarty]

I personally use the Nvidia chipset. If I want to use video in, I use a mpeg2 capture card that does a better resolution and doesnt skip frames. For output, I do get nvidia cards (Asus) with video out, but I perfer ATIs video out. ATI displays a better picture on tv out, I can display 1024x768 (about 500 lines on svhs out) and its clear. Its visible that ATI has better compression and output to TV/SVHS. ATI also polish's their driver tools, they look better and have more functions. Nvidia is lean and mean with their tools.

I picked up a PNY GF4 4600 128 Megs, VIVO, (video in/video out). Not impressed with it over a GF3 Ti500. Check the benchmarks out and see what I mean. I cant tell the difference between 80 and 90FPS. The big part of GF4 was it running at 1600x1200 in 4x AA which the GF3 cant. 2X looks good enough for now.

If anyone cares about some Benchmarks on GF and CPUs. I tested 3 video cards and 2 cpus. GF2MX, GF3Ti500,GF4 4600 (128 meg), P3-800 and a AMD 1800. I could swear I had GF3 benchmarks on the P800, Guess Ill need to do that when I get home. I wanted to show how a slower CPU can play newer games with just an updated GPU.

AMD 1800 + GF4 4600 - 9697 3D marks - http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3157957
AMD 1800 + GF3 Ti500 - 8204 3D marks - http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=2777031
P3 800 + GF4 4600 - 6170 3D marks http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3167224
P3-800 + GF2 MX - 2368 3D marks http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=2929648

There is no overclocking done on these tests, but I did hit over 12000 3Dmark with minor overclocking.

Re:Even more OT

[ncc74656]

I've yet to find an AMD motherboard with onboard SCSI (granted, I have only looked in a few places but.. you'd think they'd be common from ASUS).

The Tyan Thunder K7 includes dual-channel Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI, dual 3Com Fast Ethernet NICs, an AGP Pro 50 slot, 64-bit PCI, and a bunch of other stuff. It's also a dual-processor board, so you get twice the Athlon goodness. :-)

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[HeUnique]

Oh really? is ATI that great...

Then you wouldn't mind showing me the specs where I can switch on/off the Macrovision part, would you?

Oh, how about giving me very fast 3D drivers? oh, that will be only available in June..

What about The Rage 128Maxx 2 processor use in Linux? no support..

Maybe can I get a full support for both TV out and VGA without Xinerama (a-la Nvidia's Twinview)? nop, not supported...

Yes, nVidia doesn't give the source or specs, but I can use ALL the features of my Geforce card - top to bottom, while with ATI Radeon I can't (currently), not mentioning Matrox G450/G550..

I don't give a damn about the source - I give a damn about full feature driver (which got some nice extras - true dual head without need of Xinerama, shadow mouse, 2 versions of AGP for compatibility, and tons of other feature) which I don't get with others...

Sad, but true..

Re:128! Wowzers

[UnknownSoldier]

&gt This is noting that having over 32MB of memory has proven to be of NO benefit in benchmarks outside of the occasional 1 or 2 FPS difference (and when you are getting over 100FPS any ways. . . .).

I agree.

&gt Texture size is REALLY not a problem.

It IS when your PC game is being ported to consoles and you ONLY have ~ 2.5 Megs of VRAM say like on a PS2 ! (Yes the PS2 has 4 Megs of VRAM, but you need space for the framebuffer and zbuffer.)

Now consoles make up for the lack of video memory by having a high bandwidth (i.e. PS2 can DMA ~20 Megs of Textures per frame) but I'd rather upload my textures ONCE, not every bloody frame. Yes, you be more efficient at texture uploads (draw the last model from the last frame, first this new frame, etc) but you're still tying up the BUS.

&gt The ONLY way to get good texturing done is to DISPENSE with the concept of textures all together.

I don't compeletely agree, but you raise an interesting point, because of the fact that textures are a form of (color) compression. If we take this to its logical conclusion we should be able to have a triangle PER pixel, and that would negate the need for textures. Unfortunately that has its own problems -- there's no way we can send a million vertices across because we'd saturate the bus! Doh! (Give a reward to the person in the back who said, well let's move to paramateric surfaces then!)

In the "Real World" (TM) we have a *unique* texture per pixel (ala ray tracing) however we don't have the memory to store that, unless we calculate them parametricaly. Sure we can get nice "marble" ala Perlin Noise, but it's going to be a while before we can mathmatically generate EVERY texture !

&gt But why do games look better you ask?

&gt Mostly because video cards have any number of fancy TnL units that can independently create some rather nifty effects while working AROUND or OUTSIDE of the plain old texturing model.

You'd be amazed at what multitexturing and multipass render does. Even a simple repeatable base texture with a "random" noise texture overlaid with a bump-map, looks OK.

&gt The color is an INTEGRAL PART of what an object is. You cannot separate the two.

You *can* get away with this, but you have to be aware of the tradeoffs. One common "solution" is to crank up the bit-depth.

i.e. If you use 16-bit color channels ala 64 bits per pixel, then you don't have to throw out your whole rendering functionality -- you just extend it. Not a perfect solution by any means, but "its good enough."

Take a look at "Titanic" The ship was rendered via tradional textures, and it looks pretty good. The hard part is getting that quality in real-time with so little memory ;-)

Cheers

--

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson

Where the Linux drivers link is

[Gogo Dodo]

You went to the OEM driver section (Powered by ATI), not the Retail driver section (Built by ATI).

If you go to the retail section, there are is an OS menu with Windows, MacOS, Be OS (!), and Linux.

Re:Why ATI are a bunch of sissies

[k_187]

The GF4MX is more like another clock speed jump of the GF2s. It doesn't have the programable pixel and texture shaders that the GF3 and 4 have.