Slashdot Mirror
ATI vs. NVIDIA: ATI Steals the Show
(54)T-Dub writes "Apparently a group of MIT engineers made an OpenGL wrapper for the NVidia Demo of 'Dawn.' (a fairy with high sex appeal) Even though the wrapper adds more overhead the demo still runs faster on the 9800pro and creates higher quality images." Yet another reason it's good to have engineering students on your side.
That's gotta hurt... I feel sorry for nVidia... it does look like they're going the way of 3dfx... Maybe I should buy an ATI card next. nVidia do have good linux driver support, though - does ATI have that too?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I mean if you're going to have medieval fantasy characters in your demos, might as well go the whole way and have a proper Princess.
So I take it you won't be buying the newer ATi cards either, since their latest cards are only properly supported by binary-only drivers.
I guess I too follow these stories closely, as I'm a fairly avid gamer. However, all this tugging between which graphics chipset company is better is likely to go on for some time. People say that NVidia is now the clear cut loser. Well, I wouldn't be so fast to judge that. I believe that like many other industries, there are two or more powerful companies that have good years and bad years when compaired against their competitor.
It seems that NVidia is having a bad year or two right now. But they're a big and resoucre rich company, hopefully know what they are doing, and were just caught off guard by ATi pushing the technology in the 9700 of last year to market so soon. I think they are operating in a "catch up" mode, desperately trying to caputre back the coveted crown of the graphics wars. And it is that preoccupation that is deriding them from true technolgical innovation.
Once NVidia resumes its roll as a technology innovator, much like ATi is now, the race once again will be on for the true champion of the graphics wars.
And when that happens, I think that is a definate signal that graphics will again become sort of the arms race of the cold war, each side battling to be "best". But better, because when you have two free market companies battling it out, it usually comes down to as much blistering performance avalible for the dollar.
And that is excellent for all gamers, and the general computing public at large.
But maybe that's mumbo jumbo, it sounds good 5 hours past my bedtime. nighty night.
ATI vs. NVIDIA: ATI Steals the Show
I dunno if you guys heard about this one but nVIDIA actually had a e3 party then went pretty wild(some topless pics). Not only did they have Smashmouth perform at their E3 party but they also had some porn star make an appearance to(she was eventually kicked out for dancing topless on a table). Check google its all fact
Sounds more like they aren't 'supporting' you. Fortunately for all the NVidia/Linux users, your opinion doesn't really matter here.
Oh sure, you and others with similar beliefs about the situation should make them known. And if that includes not using someone's product because you don't like the way they do business
I wonder when a graphics card company will have the GUTS to release a demo that can run on ALL hardware and not just their own. Of course the company in question would need to have hardware greatly advanced from whatever else was available. Perhaps ATI could have done this when the R9700 was launched???
Cheers,
_GP_
I recently spent a lot of money on a 9700 Pro, which is currently sitting atop my machine, useless. The reason? ATI won't release a driver that works with xfree 4.3.0, and after several mails told me to just keep an eye on their site for updates. I know there are open source drivers (2d only) for the card, but those gave me really nasty rasterline flashes whenever the card did anything - so were next to useless.
Anyone else stuck in the same situation? If you look up drivers for the firegl cards on their site , you find a newer version of the drivers (same as the 9700 - why aren't they listed on the 9700 page??), but again it's compiled only for 4.1.0 and 4.2.0, and will refuse to work with 4.3.0.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Again, this proves the superiority of Direct3D over OpenGL and the 'schism' between ATI and NVIDIA. Programming for OpenGL is not compatible, unless you handle all render path for all targets (take time). Such things wouldn't happens if the Dawn demo was Direct3D.This also proves that ATI could write drivers which can handle all the Nvidia OpenGL proprietary extensions (not what they doing actually). They are supporting a couple of extensions , but for example GL_NV_occlusion_query for example, is supported on my Radeon 8500. But I like to see GL_NV_point_sprites for examples (actually you can't do point sprites on ATI (ie particles) under OpenGL, except in Direct3D).Theses students should contact ATI and give the source code of their modifications for the next ATI driver.That, would be really nice and legal. These extensions are approved by OSI anyway. Sadely, for 'policy' reasons, it won't be accepted by ATI (I've already tried that in fact).
----------------
I need a Sino-Logic 16. Sogo-7 data-gloves, a GPL stealth module...
The John had a .plan update before which pointed out that NVidia's card is actually cranking out more precision by default compared to ATI. That could explain why ATI runs faster by default. When he used an NVidia-specific rendering path (where the precision is more or less the same as ATI's), the NVidia card actually ran faster.
Is this somehow related to the discrepancies in this fairy demo?
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
On some other forum (here) they talk about renaming some file to get rid of her erm.. cloths/leaves.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
A huge pile of cash is only indicative of the past - during the heyday of the internet bubble there were dozens of companies with huge piles of cash - a year ago United Airlines had billions of dollars in the bank too - they've barely managed to emerge from bankruptcy, and there's still much work ahead.
What matters is that a company knows what to do with the assets they have. It's awfully easy for a company to get lazy and make money in spite of themselves when everyone else is doing so too - the question is can they continue to do so when times are tough.
ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.
From what I understand, the FX5800 is a crap card. A review at tom's hardware, however, shows the FX5900 pretty much beats the crap out of anything ATI has right now. I'm sure this will change with the next iteration of hardware, but hey - it always does.
;-)
Either way, we should stop talking smack about nVidia when the best card on the market pretty much depends on when you're looking for it
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Right... but the HTML that points to said banner is loaded from the slashdotted server. So there is some selectivity on what the server will send...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I do not think the NV40 will be out any time soon as they are marketting the NV35 as the card built for Doom III.
ATI on the other hand has the R400 coming down the this holiday season. I've been wowed by the R300/350 based cores and can't wait until laptops start getting Mobility 9600's. ATI could drop the ball of course, just like Nvidia did with the NV30, that would be an interesting race at that point. ATI would have to hope their R450 could beat out the unreleased NV40.
Either way, we can only benefit.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Check out the hair on this NVIDIA shot
and compare with the hair in this shot off the ATI.
The zoom on the NV example isn't quite as close-up, but you can still see how the hair feathers away at the tips, while the hair on the ATI is all jaggy and uniform thickness right out to the tips. Like some kind of Raggedy Anne yarn hair.
So does the ATI not support alpha-to-coverage? Or did these guys making the wrapper just not translate it properly? The hair looks pretty bad without it.
I seem to remember when I saw the NV guys give the demo that they made a point of how expensive the hair was to render. Each hair is a separate GL_LINE_STRIP, there are thousands of them, and if you turn off the complicated blending and smoothing on each one of those little hairs, that could maybe add up to a large savings. I don't know, but I wonder if that would account for most of the speed-up they see running it on ATI.
Still a neat hack. It would really rock to have complete NV<->ATI compatibility dlls that would work for all apps and not just this demo.
While they may have made some slight improvement to one aspect of image quality by improving normalization, which I guess makes the lighting a little more accurate, I really doubt the improvement is all that noticeable. Maybe I could tell given a side-by-side comparison, but I doubt I would notice if only shown a version normalized one way or the other. On the other hand, that ugly hair is pretty obvious. To me that makes the NVIDIA sreen shots look better.
For nVidia, its pile of cash is definitely only indicative of the past. However, in the internet bubble-days, a lot of companies had cash not because of earnings, but because of overhyped equity. Most of us know how to quickly spend a lot of money, nVidia has proven, in a most competitor-bloodspilling manner, that it can make it.
In addition, take a look at all those engineers from Silicon Graphics - when Silicon Graphics made its ill move towards "normal" servers and away from its graphics niche, all those engineers abandoned ship and signed up with nVidia.
Compare that with 3DFX, shortly before they went bankrupt they had purchased the tiny GigaPixel firm for (iirc) 1Billion USD in hopes of grabbing the Microsoft XBox contract which was at that time assigned to Gigapixel, before then, they wasted money on buying STB (don't even remember for how much there).
I cannot comment too much on Airlines since I don't track them too much (fully commoditized, too heavily regulated, no serious money to be had in any of its niche markets).
A friend of mine showed me a "handy-cam demo" of Half-Life 2, and its engine. In that demo we see the most sophisticated shaders (refraction, translucency, reflection) around, physics engine, you name it -- aside from wondering about how that much content (a _lot_ of detail in that game) could still be profitable for a gameshop, the other conclusion was that I'll probably be needing a new graphics card soon to get a decent frame rate. That kind of engine puts a heavy demand on both GPU (shaders, graphics) and CPU (physics), and I personally strongly believe that this type of engine will drive future demand for graphics cards.
Imho, The future for graphics is only in its infancy; after the z-buffer paradigm, we still have raytracing to explore. The possibilities are truly endless.
I was excited to try this out last night, and it runs beautifully, but after readon the comment about the hair (how its not shaded to kind of fade out), i also noticed that Sawn has no eyelashes, and aparently does on the nvidia cards. Having seen the demo on boh cards, i cant say technically why the ati does in fact seem to have a nicer overall image (is it the gamma, is it actually what rage 3d mentions?), but nonetheless, this is still a really, really cool hack. Now if we get the hairs back, can have an even match up~
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs