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ATI Radeon 9800 Pro vs. NVidia GeForce 5900
HardcoreGamer writes "Today ATI shipped its Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB DDR-2 card in time for E3 and nVidia announced the NV35-based GeForce 5900 which will be available in June. Early tests seem to say that while nVidia edges ahead of ATI in specific areas, overall ATI still has the better card. The caveat is that the next generation of DirectX 9-based games (like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, demonstrated with ATI at E3) will truly determine which is the better card. Lots of coverage at PC Magazine, PC World, The Register (ATI) (nVidia), ExtremeTech, InternetNews, and Forbes/Reuters. Either way, at $450-$500, serious gamers are about to get another serious dent in their wallets."
Anandtech and Tom's Hardware are more reputable sites than the story poster mentioned. They also perform more comprehensive benchmarks, including Doom 3 and Unreal 2, at multiple resolutions, with and without anisotropic filtering. The other reviews just seem shallow by comparison.
This is using unoptimized nvidia drivers on a pre-release card. I saw benchmarks that were pulled due to NDA that showed that with the Detonator 50.xx, the NV35 chip performs SO much better than with the current drivers. I say wait, before judging the performance of NV35.
It's really rather quite simple. A small subset of 3D games are OpenGL games. These hardware accelerators are incidentally designed to adhere to standards defined by DirectX. They simply expose this functionality as part of their OpenGL implementation, either as vendor-specific extensions or otherwise. Doom 3 will make use of features standardized between DirectX 8 to DirectX 9 3D hardware. No one is going to enumerate every possible OpenGL extension the engine can be run with, as there're numerous render paths. They're not incorrect for using DirectX as a benchmark for functionality the engine will make use of, even if it doesn't use the API. Most 3D engines, though, actually do use DirectX. Source and Unreal both do, for instance.
ATI's drivers were given to the X crew, they didn't commit them. Check out their archives for more info.
Every graphics engine since Quake 1, that John Carmack has made, has used OpenGL. In his latest .plan update he makes many comments about using OpenGL, though the most obvious is this: "Trying to keep boneheaded-ideas-that-will-haunt-us-for-years
out of Direct-X is the primary reason I have been attending the Windows
Graphics Summit for the past three years, even though I still code for OpenGL." Anyway, if an interesting read is his .plan update when he was first experimenting with OpenGL in quake. Basically, there are not as many problems with DirectX anymore, but he still uses OpenGL. Personally I like OpenGL better because of its design philosophy and because it's cross platform. Anyway, some links are below for those interested.
. html
http://www.bluesnews.com/plans/1/
http://www.exaflop.org/docs/d3dogl/d3dogl_jc_plan
People call games "DX9 games" because the various DirectX revisions give a rough dilineation of the different generations of graphics hardware. Roughly, they are:
DirectX 6: Software Transform and lighting. Most games from this category use lightmaps for lighting, rather than goraud(per vertex) shading.
DirectX 7: Hardware T&L. All those new T&L enabled games you heard about belong here. The opengl equivalent is calling glTranslate, glRotate, etc do to transformations, and using glLight to do lighting
DirectX 8: Vertex and Pixel Shaders. Let's you program the vertex transform and lighting part, and to a lesser extent, the pixel processing part, of the graphics pipeline. Corresponds to the OpenGL extensions NV_VERTEX_PROGRAM, NV_TEXTURE_SHADER, and NV_REGISTER_COMBINERS(for nvidia, similar extensions for ATI)
DirectX 9: Highly programmable Vertex and Pixel Shaders. The old pixel shader model let you do something like 8 operations max, while the new model greatly extends this number. OpenGL extensions are ARB_VERTEX_PROGRAM and ARB_FRAGMENT_PROGRAM.
This is really only a brief overview, there are many, many more OpenGL extensions(which you can see here, some of which have no DirectX counterparts. It's easier to tell non-graphics programmers "It's a DX9 game" than "Oh, it uses OpenGL 1.4, ARB_VERTEX_PROGRAM, ARB_TEXTURE_PROGRAM, etc", especially since DirectX is a well-known name. People generally aren't as aware of the various revisions of OpenGL(which are mainly exposed through extensions).
Doom 3 uses OpenGL for its graphics. In fact, the basic tech required is really DirectX 8 level(bump mapping and stencil buffer), but it looks better on DirectX 9 hardware(due to the higher programmability). It likely uses other Direct X APIs for sound, networking, etc on Windows.
I guess my above post may not have exactly answered your question. DirectX is a suit of media components including network, sound, input, graphics. Most developers use it for sound and input. In fact, many libraries, like SDL, simply are a layer between DirectX on windows. I don't know of anyone who uses the network component (direct play), but many people do choose to use Direct3d (the graphics component). Quake 2 and 3 used DirectX for input and sound, if I remember correctly, and used OpenGL for graphics. Because of the .plan file, Doom3 will be OpenGL based, and, because of history and industry trends, we can assume it will use DirectX 8 or 9 for sound and input.
Anandtech and Tom's Hardware have much better hardware reviews than that ZD reviews specified. They also have Doom 3 bench marks, which put the new NVidia card significantly ahead of the ATI counterpart.
Every consumer graphics card for several generations has had a unified memory arch. Everything from the z-buffer to shadder programs gets thrown in the same heap until all the onboard memory is ocupied and things start being swaped to main system memory (a situation to be avoided). And the z-buffer doesn't double memory ussage, it uses the same amount as the primary framebuffer (well, not necessarily but now-a-days it's usualy the case).
I have had a handful of video cards since my original trident 8900. Pretty much every time I plug the card in, boot to VGA resolution, install the drivers, and reboot. Everything is done.
I just got an ATI 9500 pro--my first ATI card. The driver installation was a five hour nightmare of crashing Windows, exception errors, hangs, and black screens. When I was done, I couldn't set the refresh rate. Nothing I did (including installing the latest drivers, and trying to use the 'secret' max. refresh setting in the ATI display controls--it wasn't there at all) could get me off of 60Hz.
Games crashed. Windows hung. Horridness. I talked to the manufacturer, and they said it was a bad card--get an RMA, and ship it back. This I can believe.
The problem is, I can no longer set the refresh rate on my OLD video card anymore! These damned drivers screwed up my system substantially! Removing them didn't help at all. I'm going to have to dig into the registry most likely.
If the replacement ATI card doesn't work any better (hardware AND software), then I'll be going back to nVidia permanently, or at least for another two generations. At least their stuff works.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You know, some of us *DO* use OpenGL for things other than games. (Hint: It was oringally designed by SGI for use in engineering apps)
TODO: Something witty here...
As it stands, the current Quake 3 engine and the upcoming Doom 3 engine are the only major OpenGL-based engines I can think of. And they were both done by theCarmack and crew.
While UT2003 uses DirectX by default on Windows platforms, it does have an OpenGL renderer also. You can switch it to use OpenGL instead, and the Linux version (of course) uses OpenGL by default.
I think it also uses OpenAL...
Yes, I have observed this with my 9700 AIW. Check Rage3D and search through their forums. I didn't have any problems with mine until I got a new hard drive, reinstalled XP and decided to use Service Pack 1. All the common problems, waves, some games crashing, TV stuttering...
A small proggie from Rage3D fixed some problems but I think I am going to have to reinstall.
Card works fine in Redhat 9 btw, and is otherwise stable.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Yeah, but does either of them have 3 Gbit DDR SDRAM for 360 degree autostereoscopic 3D viewing? I think not...
I quote the Resolution / Color / Performance / Memory specifications of the Perspecta 3D, which is available from Actuality Systems.
- Volume comprised of 198 2-D slices (1.1 slices / degree)
- Approximately 768 x 768 pixel slice resolution
- 24 Hz volume refresh
- Full color (21-bit hardware-based stippling)
- 8 colors at highest resolution
- Polygons / sec.: To be announced
- Dual volume buffers
- TI(TM) 1600 MIPS DSP high-performance embedded processor
- 3 Gbit DDR SDRAM (100 Mvoxels x 3 colors x 2 buffers)
Granted, there are only 8 colors available at high resolution, but it points out the fact that 3D graphics cards and monitors have a long way to go yet. I don't mean to be a troll, but I get rather pissed-off when these video card manufacturers, with their planned-obselesence, talk about their latest-and-greatest "3D" video cards. Please; these are pseudo-3D video cards; and if you've worked with a stereoscopic video system (virtual reality system) or an autostereoscopic video system (3D television system), you'll know what I mean...
(Granted, I only got to work with this kind of technology for a couple of months in college, so I'm not an expert on this stuff... still, I know stereo3D from pseudo3D when I see it...)
In the extremetech review, the version of the drivers used were not specified. /. posts? ;-)
What kind of review is that?
ohh, wait, is this some of those comercial
ahh, now I understand why anandtech.com or tomshardware.com links were not in the original post.
Click and learn:
Tomshardware review
Anandtech Review
Nvnews review/news
Review links
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And you know this because you bring him coffee every morning? Bother to download the original source releases of Quake and Quake 2 and you'll notice that this "coded from scratch every single time" is a myth. You'll see a lot of similarity in the renderers. Q2 is much cleaner, right, but it's not radically new.
Try this link -- they have later drivers, and they work quite well for me (though nVidia's offerings still are a lot more stable).
/* Steinar */
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