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ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
ATi is bringing out their new card, the Radeon 9800 Pro, and all of the hardware review sites which depend on ATi's generosity for pre-release hardware have released their necessarily favorable reviews. Here's a few: Hothardware.com, Hexus.net, HardOCP.com, Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, Extremetech, PCWorld.
Enquiring minds want to know (before they blow ${WEEKS_WAGES} on new toys...)
Jon.
...and all of the hardware review sites which depend on ATi's generosity for pre-release hardware have released their necessarily favorable reviews.
Err, what were you expecting? If you give a kid a new toy that's faster, shinier and has more bells and whistles than his old one then he's going to be impressed and say that it's faster, shinier and has more bells and whistles than the old one.
I have no doubt that if nVidia, ATi, Matrox or whoever released a card that stank the place right up then these guys would write about it - what do you think they'd do, michael, fake benchmark results?
Do these cards represent good value for money? No, not unless you have money to burn. Are they interesting to gamers? Yes, because what's in a $600 graphics card today is what'll be in a $200 one in a few months time.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm an NVidia fan, too. However, we can do without your digs to the reviewers. So much for unbiased journalism.
I'm glad to see Ati released another video card. the more ati competes the less likly NVidia will become a company likly Microsoft.
Tho I won't have the top of the line =(
It beats having the bottom of the line =)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It is nice of you to call ATI generous. It is not nice to assume that those who are capable of running fair and large amounts of benchmarks and therefore are a welcome advertiser for good manufactures who on their side give them early access to their hardware even if they sometimes have more bugs than the final product. Don't judge over others. Judge what they are doing.
All of these sites do decent work, I read them daily, and they all PILE ON when something is released that is a POS. Whatever axe you have to grind, keep it to yourself or back it up please.
I have BOTH bleeding edge cards right now, and unfortunately for NVDA, it's just plain "true" that the Radeon's are top dog at the moment. If you don't believe them, run your own benchmarks.
Slashdot calls itself "News" that simple blip alone is enough to require the editors to keep their opinions constrained somewhat. Sure it is okay to have a slant when calling yourself news, but some editors here, Michael especially, place very strong opinions in almost every link they post. This isn't news, this is treating the site as a personal log.
Thats all well and good if you aren't a paid employee with customers, but this site stopped being that years ago. Unfortunately, we, the slashdot readers let them get away with it time and time again while paying their salaries by adding content and viewing the ads.
--- I do not moderate.
Well, nVidia fans (like myself too) may be severely disappointed that the GeForce FX turned out to be an almost total turkey because of noise, power consumption, and barely adequate basic performance, but it's actually pretty healthy that ATI is now back in the lead.
Hopefully nVidia will recognize that it made a dreadful mistake way back at design and specification time on the FX, and learn from it. If it doesn't then it's commercially dead, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Within the company, this probably requires booting out some managers and pressing some engineers' noses onto red-hot heatsinks.
I agree, there's no need to bash the reviewers. Everyone knows that they try to butter up the hardware suppliers, but they still deliver fairly objective reviews, so there's no real problem.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If you go out and buy their cheap cards twice as often as you'd upgrade to their top of the line cards, you'll spend half as much money and always have a latest generation card capable of playing all the latest games with all the greatest detail levels with a framerate fast enough that you won't know the difference.
Except that's just not true.
Take UT2k3 as an example. Turn up everything on high, set your anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering to max, and go play online... your frame rate is going to suck so badly it doesn't matter how good you are.
And if you're hoping the card will perform better when Doom3 is released, well...
That said, you can back things off very slightly - particularly on the AA and AF fronts - and things will be just fine with a $150 video card. And you can do what you suggest. Which, frankly, is probably fine for most people.
And while by and large I don't stare at the eye candy when playing UT2k3 online, there was a massive improvement in going from a GF2 to a GF4 Ti4200 - upping the visual quality very much improved the experience (and the frame rate boost didn't hurt my play either).
And, yes, you really do want your framerate above 60 fps at all times. Below that you will start seeing stuttering -- video cards don't display motion blur like film or video do, so 24 or 30 fps is not good enough.
1. So can one truly notice the difference between say 45fps and 100fps? Come on, you can't be serious. We go through this every single time a graphics article is posted. IT'S REDUNDANT!!! Not interesting or insightful.
The monkey is harder to render :-)
I think the issue is the claims nVidia's PR made about the card, such as 48 gigs/sec memory bandwidth, 8 pixel pipelines, etc, none of which actually exist.
These are purely physical specifications, and PR can't simply change the specifications for marketing purposes. Its almost identical to the RIAA saying we confescated 400 burners when it was actually it was only 50 fast ones (can't remember the exact numbers)
We're talking about graphics cards that cost as much as entire systems... and not fancy workstation cards, cards designed for games!
We're talking about graphics cards that have more transistors and processing power than most CPUs. Have you looked at the R300 or NV30 GPUs? The shaders are fully programmable... just like CPUs are. Except they're a whole lot faster for the operations they're designed for.
You're also talking about video cards with 128 MB of memory that's 2-3x the speed of the stuff you put on your motherboard. Of course, a few years ago, 128 MB was more than you'd put in anything short of a workstation.
In otherwords, that $150 video card has more horsepower than the an entire workstation did just a few years prior. Oh, and the workstation cards are based off the same chips but only cost about 4x as much now - which is a considerable improvement over how it used to be.
Hell, I still remember seeing one of the first VR systems in the early 90s from GVU at Georgia Tech. It was designed to help reduce acrophobia and consisted of a SGI Onyx with a RealityEngine2. It could usually do 30 fps at 640x480 in 8 bit color with non-textured simple solids. Put more than a dozen or so objects in the FOV though and you started stuttering badly. The system cost roughly $600,000 - without the VR goggles.
About a year or so later you could go out to CompUSA and buy a 3DFx Voodoo card for $200 that could handle 100x the polygons, with texturing, at the same resolution with a higher frame rate.
Heck, companies are now looking at the GeForce FX and ATI Radeon 9700 cards and considering doing movie-quality rendering on them. Because they're getting that good. And you can do it in a tenth the time it would take otherwise. Trading a $10,000 workstation for a $400 video card sounds like one helluva deal to me.
Let's chain down the game developers and make them use $40 SiS305 cards, or better yet, $20 second-hand Matrox G400s and Voodoo3s
Why? Those cards are all cheap for a reason - they're crap. They don't support any of the graphics capabilities desired nowadays (the G400 and SiS305 don't even support the graphics capabilities of their time). You may get UT2k3 running on a G400 or V3, but not at a reasonable frame rate, and in order to get that reasonable frame rate you have to ditch visual quality features. There's simply no way around it.
Doom3 on such a card? Yah, right.
If you're happy with graphics from 5 years ago, then keep playing those games. But whining about cost and "it's not a workstation" just shows how amazingly ignorant you are.