Slashdot Mirror
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."
Definitely, I don't care if -any- ATI card has a 2%-5%-10% performance advantage, having absolutely great drivers from NVidia (for Linux & windows) far outweighs any small performance gains the ATI card might supposedly have.
:)
If the situation is like this (where the cards are pretty much neck & neck) the balance swings even farther towards buying NVidia. The only NVidia card I'd have never ever considered buying would have been the dustbuster...
Given that I'm running an (ancient) dual p3-450 bought 3 years ago, I guess this Fall it might be time to upgrade
-- the cake is a lie
ATI has never wanted to trouble themselves with Drivers. Historically they have abandoned hardware as quickly as they thought they could get away with. I got bit by this back with the introduction of the "new" windows driver model. A card less than two months old was "unsupported". I made the mistake of buying an ATI PCI TV Wonder while experimenting with HTPC setups. Fortunately that one is still quite useful in Linux. ATI dropped windows support for IT over a year ago. Shortly after I purchased one NEW. The ATI Windows apps still don't work right. Every time they invoke Windows scheduler to set up a scheduled show, they GPF.
I will never forget or forgive that blatant attempt to obsolete brand new hardware. The fact that they can't be bothered to stay current with Xfree doesn't help their case in my eyes.
The only windows box I have left is the one that I play most of my games on. Every machine I own runs only NVidia hardware. The fact that NVidia's drivers support every piece of hardware they've made back to the original GeForce (and I think the Riva) makes me much more comfortable in investing in hardware from them.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
The Unreal engine, and more generally the guys at Epic (Tim Sweeney) operate under a different philosophy than the guys at Id. The unreal engine is quite modular. In fact, it was originally written focusing on GLIDE as the preferred rendering method. Today, DX is the preferred method, even though the current engine (even with all of its changes, which has surely included complete rewrites of components over the years) can trace itself all the way back to that GLIDE-inspired code.
Id, on the other hand, likes to start "from scratch". Between Unreal I and UT2K3/Unreal 2/Splinter Cell/Raven Shield/all of the other Unreal-based games out today, Id's gone through Quake 2, Quake 3, and is gearing up for Doom 3. Each one of those engines was different, and pretty much rewritten from the ground up each time (I'm sure there are some core components that theCarmack reuses, but essentially it's all new code).
Which approach is better? Depends. Epic's approach to incremental engine design lets third parties license their engine and benefit from on-going development, as well as getting the newer technology out there quicker. Id's approach caters to theCarmack's godlike abilities, and gives us something to look forward to with bated breath. The strength of theCarmack's code proves itself when the aging Q3 engine can still hold its own against the newest of Unreal-based games (for example, the upcoming Jedi Knight Academy game). I say let's keep 'em both.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure Unreal's audio engine is modular as well, supporting the proprietary Miles system, DirectSound, and probably also OpenAL. Same with the input engine (DirectInput, SDL).
"Really, John Carmack singlehandedly keeps OpenGL alive;" Uh, anybody purchased a nice CAD program lately that uses DirectX? Or any EDA tool? Or any math tool?