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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."
I just wish one benchmarking site would release the raw data in some kind of ascii based table. I would love wasting coutless hours of gnuploting, generating variations on plots like those.
Does anybody have a pool of varied cpu & motherboard machines, new and old? There are a couple of statiscal tools I would like to throw at the benchmarking problem - if only I had the data.
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
As an amateur game programmer, I must say I prefer NVIDIA-based cards to ATI-based cards, simply because NVIDIA takes care of their customers.
I've used the latest flavours of the ATI Radeon series, and the drivers always seem to be a bit unstable. Downloading updated drivers doesn't always fix the problem, either; sometimes, it makes the problems worse. It's hard to tell whether they're even trying. It seems ATI, at this point, is just trying to keep up with NVIDIA in terms of speed, rather than in both speed, quality, and stability.
NVIDIA, on the other hand, fixes bugs properly *the first time*. They don't really produce many bugs, either, which means they can put forth more effort toward making everything more featureful.
There's no contest, in my opinion. NVIDIA wins, hands down. It will take quite a bit for ATI to change my mind, or the minds of my game programming colleagues, about this one.
I have a DV cam with RCA inputs, and firewire, so my video card doesn't need to be able to capture, just a nice S-Video out for watching downloaded southparks on my Wega in the living room.
What, me worry?
NVidia deserves a lot of credit -- especially from Linux folks -- for their top notch drivers. Installation is a snap (two tarballs, sudo make install), and once they're up and running, they're very stable and quick. And they're maintained. New versions are released fairly often, and the very latest cards are supported as well. I tried a radeon card once, but prompty returned it because there were no drivers, and only after a while did they finally appear.
I've sent NVidia some mail stating that because of their support for my OS, I plan to continue buying their products. It's good to give them that kind of feedback, I think.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
NVidia's developer site is why they will win the GPU war. Only because they help developers by prodiving an extensive forum in which they can educate themselves about their technologies. I recently started researching vertex programming, I went to NVidia's site and they had a entire SDK dedicated just to it. I haven't see anything like that on ATI's site. Keeping the people that develop for your hardware informed is the only way to win support, ATI hasn't realized that yet.
True... but the ATI cards do run in linux, and ATI does provide a link to the drivers. And ATI provides the specs to do open-source drivers. For me, it isn't that much of a concern that the geforce drivers are proprietary... but it is a concern. And for purists, it's a major concern.
It wasn't a concern at all, until I ran into a situation where I actually wanted to look at the source...
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
Probably not a bad idea to register your hardware (with those mail-in cards they include in the box (if nVidia doesn't, forgive me for my mistake. :)), making sure to select Linux as your OS. That way the real number counters get the message. :)
I have a geforce 3 ti200 and there are many games that will push this card well below 15fps.
Everquest
RealFlight
Wolfenstein (everything turned to max)
Microsoft Flight Simulator
James
You seem to be upset with the current technologies available to developers simply because they aren't photo-realistic. Or, in the case of bump mapping, it's a "cheap shortcut to REAL modeling." Well, yeah. That's exactly what it is. And, used correctly, it's extremely effective. (See Star Wars:Rogue Squardon 2 for an example)
But as for photo-realism, who cares? I, personally, think that the solutions people have come up with to maximize the hardware's potential are fascinating. And playing non-photo-realistic games has never been a problem for me, any more than watching a non-photo-realistic episode of the Simpsons.
Not that this has anything to do with nVidia vs. ATi. My $.02: Buy nVidia's high end cards if you're rich or like to waste money. Buy ATi's high end cards if you just want to play games and don't care about an extra 2% on your framerate.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
...refresh rates with framerates above the refresh rate of the monitor.
Strangely, most people don't seem to realize that this is a BAD THING, unless your app is running at an integer multiple of your monitor refresh rate.
To make it simple, imagine your monitor scans at 60 Hz. So every 60th of a second (16.67 msec) you get a whole new frame drawn on the screen. Assume, for sake of argument, that drawing the screen takes zero time. It's just instantaneous.
To achieve smooth motion, the same amount of time must pass between each frame. This is guaranteed if your application renders 60 frames per second. Unless you drop a frame somewhere, you'll see one rendered frame for every screen refresh, and you'll perceive smooth motion.
But what if you drive your screen at 60 Hz, but your application renders 95 frames per second. (Assume that it's exactly 95 fps all the time, rather than a variable frame rate, just to make the math work out for this example.)
When you run your game or whatever, the clock starts at zero. The first frame from the graphics pipeline is in the display buffer, so when the monitor gets ready to draw the screen, it draws frame zero.
10.53 msec later, the application has drawn the second frame, so it swaps buffers. The display buffer now has frame 1 in it. The application now starts drawing frame 2.
But the graphics card isn't ready to draw frame 1 on the monitor until a little over 6 msec later, at t = 16.67. At that time, though, the application hasn't finished drawing frame 2 yet, so frame 1 is still in the display buffer. The monitor draws frame 1. Game frame 1 comes after game frame 0, so we're still in sync.
During this time, the application has been working on frame 2. It finishes frame 2 at t = 21.05 msec and swaps buffers. Frame 2 is now in the display buffer, and the application starts drawing on frame 3.
The monitor is ready to draw frame 2 at t = 33.33 msec. So it reaches for the frame from the display buffer... but what's this? The frame in the display buffer isn't frame 2. It's frame 3! We dropped a frame somehow!
In the meantime, at t = 31.58 msec, the application had finished drawing frame 3. It swapped buffers again, before the graphics card got a chance to display frame 2. Frame 2 disappeared from the display buffer, never having been shown on the monitor. That's a dropped frame, and it's a bad thing.
Games aren't hard-real-time applications, of course. They run freely, sometimes drawing frames more quickly, and sometimes less quickly, depending on the load. This is okay. But don't just assume that because your game runs consistently at a rate higher than your monitor, you won't be dropping frames. In fact, you'll drop frames like crazy, at a rate determined by how far your game frame rate is from your monitor rate, in modulo arithmetic.
Ummm are you on crack, NVidia has closed development and docs for the cards. Binary only parts that work only on certain distributions. No *BSD development (closed = bad). No GL or DRI support unless you are running a distribution that they support. Top notch my ass.
Personally I've become very frustrated with nVidia's linux drivers. They cause my machine to crash randomly. This is not just me, either. All of my friends who have nvidia cards under linux seem to experience the exact same problem. All my friends using different video cards are stable as hell. Coincidence?
I'll give you that when the drivers work, they work quite well. They look good, and run fast. But part of the reason I started using linux in the first place was to avoid the constant rebooting that comes with the alternative. Being totally closed eliminates the possibility of someone else coming in and fixing the problem, so all I can do is wait and hope they fix it on their own....and so far, they haven't.
--
grep "xercist"
Secondly, their Linux drivers are quite good. I don't care too much if they are not open source, at least they work well.
Btw, the reason why nVidia drivers are not open source. nVidia wanted one driver for all cards under their Unified Driver Architecture model. The open source community (XFree I believe, but correct me if I'm wrong) wanted the specs to the actual hardware. nVidia was willing to give the community exactly what their Windows driver writing team has and the community did not agree.
Some agree with nVidia's point of view, others agree with the community. It doesn't really matter, the end result is closed source drivers.
PK
NVidia's linux drivers are available only as closed source binaries. That is 100% unacceptable and anyone with a brain will not use their hardware until they change their policies on giving us developers documentation. Of course ATI doesn't exactly have the best record for releasing timely or complete documentation either..
You know why 3D still generally sucks on the PC? Because the market has been ground to a halt by patents and restrictive licensing. Imagine if the Internet developed this way. Stupid greed.
NVidia's not going to stand still for the next 6 months.