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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."
YES! Now I can have an expensive video card that I can use for displaying xterms, emacs, and mozilla. Where do I sign?
I have an original radeon - I've always felt that ATI makes crap drivers... Their chipsets, if you ask me, are on par with NVIDIA's, it's just that their driver support is crap... If only they actually let 3rd parties develop like they said they would...
--NovaScorpio
Matt
Raise your hand if you remember a time when one company would make fun of the other for adding more and more memory because "You'll never need 32MB of video memory!"
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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.
Firingsquad just posted a report about the new GeForce TI 4200. They're coming out with two seperate versions, one with 64mb of faster memory, and one with 128mb of slower memory. The 64mb one was faster in the benchmarks that they ran, even though it was $20 cheaper than the other variant. Plus, it even beat their comparison TI 4400 in some of the benchmarks.
But it gets better. The TI 4200 can be overclocked to speeds comparable to the TI 4600, Nvidia's fastest card. Get the fastest performance available for half the cost!
Is anyone doing decent PCI cards these days? I realize I'm behind the times here, but my motherboard (Asus CUR-DLS) has no AGP slot, leaving me with a GeForce2. Still, my dual P3-1.26 ghz setup isn't far enough behind the game to warrant buying a whole new setup. I do have a couple 66mhz 64bit PCI slots going unused in the motherboard, any graphics cards go that route?
I don't see a reason for most people to upgrade to one of these things unless they are developing 3D technology.
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?
Instead of bruteforcing polygons the MAN'S way, ATI decided to be a bunch of sissies and implement HyperZ technology. 'Discard unseen pixels'? BAH! I'd much rather have these unseen pixels rendered than let them go to waste. Their proprietary TRUFORM technology is good, if you like seeing rounding errors (see Serious Sam SE's shotgun model). Moreover, their names are misleading. 'Pixel tapestry', 'Charisma Engine' - what do these names mean? How can a pixel have tapestry?
Meanwhile, NVIDIA continues its dedication to their customers by giving them 128MB of VRAM; conveniently providing the customer with 32 extra MB of VRAM to use as a RAMdrive. Instead of fudging around with names like ATI does, they've simply decided to follow 3DFX's naming scheme and simply name their cards GeForce(n + 1). I look forward to the day when the GeForce requires an input from the +5V power supply.
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.
When its all said and done, I have to place my vote for nVidia, hands down. There are many reasons for this... howerver this is the most compelling...
nVidia Drivers page link
ATI Drivers page link
At home I run about 7 computers, a mix of linux winXp 2k and 98. The fact that my geforceX cards can and will run great in all of the above os's using proper driver support is all I need to buy from nVidia. Good customer support, and good OS support. That will bring in my dollars...
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
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. . . .).
:)
Texture size is REALLY not a problem. Do you realize how fr*gin big textures can be byte wise before you get to being just plain old silly?
It is NOT the size of textures people, it is how COMPLICATED those textures can be.
Currently LOD is used in order to keep video cards from having to render full 256x256 textures when an object, say, only appears as 25 pixels in its entirety on the screen. You know, that sniper across the street with that gun? Yah that one, (duck).
This works quite well, until you get up close to the object. Shoddy unrealistic Bumpmapping (I highly disprove of bumpmapping, more on this later) can come into play at really close distances, and games like Serious Sam even make this look halfway decent, but it still is not real, or realistic.
The ONLY way to get good texturing done is to DISPENSE with the concept of textures all together. Polygons do not make this easy in themselves, and competing technologies can even make it worse. Some technologies like vertex coloring are a bit useful, but not much and they are just the texturing model relabled.
But once you DO dispense with textures, ooh yah.
Now for bumpmaps.
Bumpmaps are often times just a cheap shortcut to REAL modeling. Geometry deformation texturing is the next step, but until we get some video cards that can model each little crack and bump of an object we are not going to get anything near 100% photo-realism. Not to mention characters with actual nostrils. Yes there is a level of diminishing returns, but quite frankly, until I can model every last little crack bump and lump in a model and have it render real time on a home users computer, bumpmapping is what we are stuck with, and I don't like it.
But I repeat, I REPEAT, larger textures (and bumpmaps) are just a cheap low quality shortcut They DEFINITELY have a point of diminishing returns, and it is one that HAS ALREADY BEEN REACHED. Most new games do NOT do just plain old texturing any more, and a lot of what is happening now days in relationship to textures (Bilinear filtering and such) is just in fact ways to correct errors in the original texturing model of thinking. Or at least further refine the mathematical model used to show those textures.
But why do games look better you ask?
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. At the very least the texturing model of thinking has some. . . rather funky. . . math applied to it in an artistic manner with the results rendered to the screen.
Look at Nvidias werewolf model as an example.
The HAIRS on it look great.
The actual model though?
Hell looks like shit.
No it does.
Notice the face people. Horrid. The textures. It is not the modeler or textures fault, it is just a fact that, well hell, you CANNOT do realistic skin textures without using Pixar level technology.
Actualy, I recently read an article from awhile back that was an interview with someone at Pixar. They were describing the INSANE level of work that was necessary to even get something that SORT OF looked like a skin texture to render. The FF movie had kinda-sorta-maybe-ifyousquint real looking skin, it was nice, but it took a lot of work and it still was not perfect. Once again, diminishing returns.
While NVIDIA is doing good work in relation to getting various funky technologies out on the market that move around the texturing problem, as long as we rely on textures as our main source of coloring objects, we as a community of people who love to Blow Things Up are going to have problems.
Hell the very idea of textures themselves is exactly opposite to how existence works. Objects are not gray by default with colors added later. Objects are. . . . real. They exist. More or less. The color is an INTEGRAL PART of what an object is. You cannot separate the two.
In other words
I want molecular modeling please.
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about pc hardware, and after reading people's responses to this article it just enforces my belief that PC hardware is really bad because the standards are not strict enough. I've had problems with so maney systems and you never know where to begin debugging a computer that doesn't work correctly. Sometimes a problem that seems like it was a 'video card issue' turns out to be a problem with your main memory. Even when useing the 'high quality' components, one low quality component or slightly defective card can bring a whole system down.
Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't.
The point of this diatribe is that people seem very polarized on the subject of video cards, mostly due to the other guys card not working for them. When probably in many cases it wasn't the video card causing the problem at all, but rather an incompatibility in their system that was brought out by the video card.
Guess it's the price we pay for getting such cheap, bleeding edge systems.
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.
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. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I agree.
> 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.
> 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 !
> But why do games look better you ask?
> 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.
> 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
If you go to the retail section, there are is an OS menu with Windows, MacOS, Be OS (!), and Linux.
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
A modeler has to be a complete nitwit to fill up 128MB with verticies, heh. Or even 12MB with vertices. . . .
:) ) then 128MB of RAM that, err, uh, costs an arm and a leg and MAY provide some future performance, but by that time the texturing units on the video card will be old hat anyways and 'everybody' will have moved up to the next best thing.
:)
:(
It is not like verticies have to be loaded THAT often, and when they are they can often times be predicted, though how Messiah did things sucked (wow, look at that! SERIOUS texturing problems AND ass end load times AND the scripts get fucked up! Bah) but a GOOD loader can load a level dynamicaly and Not Suck.
I would MUCH rather 64*2 Megabytes of ram with a half clock seperation between them (In other words, fast ass access.
I myself will likely still be using my Matrox G400 MAX.
I cannot believe that some complete IDIOTS credit ATI with first having dual desktop displays. . . . grrr. Idiots.
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