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GF FX 5900 Ultra vs. ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
Mack writes "OCAddiction.com has their GF FX 5900 Ultra vs. ATi Radeon 9800 Pro article online detailing which card is more powerful. Running a plethora of benchmarks we were anxious to see which card outperformed the other. Quite simple really. We take nVidia's top offering and pair it up against the current top offering from ATi and let them duke it out till the bitter end. Who will come out on top? Let's take a look."
If you haven't heard about the controversy with MadOnion/Futuremark/3dmark2003, check out This article. Kyle @ HardOCP suggests that if you give Futuremark more $$$, they will 'optimize' their benchmark to help out your video card's score.
Now, in this review, we see that GeForceFX 5900 clearly dominates the hardware side of things: .13 vs .15 micron process, 450/850 vs. 380/340 (GPU/Core), 27.2 GB/sec vs. 21.8 GB/sec memory bandwidth, etc. Yet when we start looking at real-world scores, the 9800 keeps up pretty well & even beats the faster GeForceFX 5900 in most tests.
The big exception is the 3DMark2003 score - the GeForceFX 5900 wins 3477 to 2837!!! (!!!).
This can be attributed to one of three things;
1.Speed isn't everything (e.g., AMD vs. Intel CPU's). But of course, the slower Radeon 9800 *is* faster even though it's slower in all the real-world tests.
2.The GeForceFX used WHQL drivers... But despite these 'superior' drivers, the Radeon 9800 still reigned in all the real world tests!
3.3DMark2003 added unfair optimizations to their program to make the nvidia card seem better than ATi's
With the benchmark-favoring drivers fiasco, just how much can we be expected to trust a review which relies so heavily on this testing method?
Why didn't the poster tell who won? Now I have to actually read the article.
who finds these types of articles really, really, really boring?
.03% increase in one card over the other is just tearingly boring to me. I often find myself skipping right through to the end just to see the final "verdict"
Staring at graphs indicating a
Why, oh why, can't we get some interesting writing in the field of online hardware reviews?
I mean, damn! Four more FPS! For only $499 (plus tax ans S&H)! Where's my credit card...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Is this a matter of faster cards, or a matter of best optimized software'
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
haven't benchmarks comparing the 2 been out for quite a while now? Just checked, hardocp.com had one comparing the 5900 ultra, and the 9800pro 256mb up on may 11. Good job slashdot! You're only 1.5 months behind the times.
And the winner is.........The FIC ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. We compared these cards in every category we could think of and in the end, we saw better performance overall from the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Did the FX 5900 fail to impress us? No, not at all. We believe both cards are worthy of any good system but we do have to tip our hats to the excellent performance that the Radeon 9800 Pro has showed us here today.
But it looked pretty damn close in most of the benchmarks. Interesting that in 3DMARK, the FX 5900 ran away with it. Hmmmm.. Oh well, I doubt 5% of the people who post comments on this are going to buy one soon anyway. I know i'm not in the market.
Which one has non-NDA documentation or Open Source drivers available for it? I know it won't be the nVidia, but have ATI released anything yet?
Thats what I figured.
It's cheaper, it apparently runs faster, and I also hear that it doesn't need TWO SLOTS like the FX 5900.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The 9800 Pro wins in all but 2 benchmarks. I think every tech site on the web was shown the ATI to be superior to the Nvidia. (This is not a troll, I don't play 3d games or even own a card from ATI or Nvidia. I only casually follow 3d graphics cards, but obviously the /. editors don't at all.)
Yes, it's an evil satanic conspiracy.
Did you know that "Mature Furk" is an anagram for "Futuremark"? Google for it, and be enlightened.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
I'll do what I always do. Wait for my current card not to be able to keep up at the optimal resolution for my screens with the games I like, then pick a £100 card that does.
*pats his shiney new GF4 Ti 4200*
Sure, I have to upgrade more often, but it seems to be a lot less painful for me than for early adopters - and there are plenty of homes for older cards in my secondary and tertiary boxes, and then a final home put out to pasture in the render farm.
Beep beep.
They compared the 128mb radeon vs. the 256mb geforce, I think having twice the ram gives the geforce a slight advantage, they could have at least used the 256mb radeon and made the comparison fair.
NVIDIA cards because ATI's Linux drivers are not very good compared to NVIDIA's. I won't be buying an ATI card until ATI supports Linux fully like NVIDIA. I do play Linux native-port games in Linux.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Duke Nukem Forever was released?? Woo-hoo!!
Let's see here, they compare two cards that shouldn't compare in real life.
The GeForce card has:
* Twice as much memory (256 MB vs. 128MB)
* More memory bandwidth (27 GB/s vs. 21 GB/s)
* Faster memory (3 ns vs. 3.8 ns chips)
And the GeForce still got it's ass handed to it by the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, which, by the way, doesn't even need a leaf-blower attachment just to keep it from overheating!
Is anyone still buying Nvidia cards any more these days (other than the blindly trusting fanboys, that is)?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Slashdot has long been anti-nVidia and pro ATI. Simply because nVidia supports Linux much better. Slashdot has become a clear mole in the Linux community - speaking from both sides of their fat body. And NVidia is of course a better card. As for the benchmarks we all know that it depends entirely on who runs them.
OMG,
about the 3DMark2003 you are so wrong unfortunately.
1.Speed isn?t everything (e.g., AMD vs. Intel CPU?s). But of course, the slower Radeon 9800 *is* faster even though it?s slower in all the real-world tests.
Its less about the speed of the GPU nowadays, its more about more successful methods of saving memory bandwidth. But basically you're right here.
2.The GeForceFX used WHQL drivers? But despite these ?superior? drivers, the Radeon 9800 still reigned in all the real world tests!
The difference between the WHQL drivers and the beta drivers are, that the WHQL ones use a different method für uninstalling and that they require a reboot when applying the coolbits hack to pverclock the VGA card. With the beta drivers the coolbits are quite often already enabled.
3.3DMark2003 added unfair optimizations to their program to make the nvidia card seem better than ATi?s
Nope.
The other way round. Guess what teh Patch 330 did with the 3DMark2003? It lowered the score of the ATI card by 3 (!) percent. The nvidia card got slower by... more than 30 (!) percent. Yikes.
But your PCI graphics card is inferior to my integrated graphics controller, which are inherently faster. Unlike AGP and PCI cards, integrated graphics chips, such as those made by Intel, do not have to travel through the PCI bus like AGP and PCI slots do.
Let's see now.
:)
1/ Both cards can display current games at 2 quajillion fps, the winner beating the loser by 3fps
2/ The economy of well, the world, is in the dumps
3/ Quite a few cool and very demanding games (Doom3, Halflife) will come out Soon(tm) but Definately Not Yet(tm). (Personally I wouldnt be surprised if it would be @ christmas time
4/ At X-mas time (or whenever these demanding games start to come out) newer, faster cards will be out, and/or these cards will be cheaper.
5/ At X-mas time people will actually have some money set aside to buy rad new videocards for.. eh.. their girlfriends.
So who would buy this?
(No, I haven't actually -read- the article
just goes to show the crappiness of synthetic benchmarks: before, when nVidia was losing in 3dmark, they complained about how it wasn't a good benchmark. now, nvidia wins, I'll be they won't complain, but their card is still slower.
Except for one thing... I just happen to have gone to the ATI web site for some Linux drivers, and they appear to be gone now. Clicked on drivers from the main page -> Graphic drivers -> Linux and "Unsupported" came up in the window...
3dmark2003
GF FX: 999999
Ati Raedon: 40394
Weird outcome! It was strange though, because during the gf fx test, it just flashed and gave me my score! Awesome speed!
Keep up the good work, NVIDIA!
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
The 9800 is still the better purchase, the 5900 has little to no overclocking room and needs a massive heatsink to remain "cool". The manufacture process for the 9800 is more mature on the other hand, and it usually clocks about 60Mhz beyond stock for the GPU and about 20Mhz for the RAM giving 440/370, which makes it comfortably faster than the 5900.
Anyways, I would withhold judgement until driver optimizations come out for this card. Remember, ATI's Radeon 8500 had extremely poor drivers at first, but since CATALYST, the 8500 showed tremendous performance gains. This is true of all new graphics cards.
As for people buying NVIDIA cards, sure, plenty of people are buying them. NVIDIA's TNT2 is a popular low-cost 3D accelerator card that OEMS like Dell and emachines like to market.
By the way, NVIDIA phased out the 'leaf blower' attachment. They learned from their mistakes.
Right-oh.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
HardOCP is a bad source for the "3dmark2003" controversy, simply because the guy was a huge Nvidia and 3DMark pimp until this came out. So half the shit he's spewing is just to cover his own "hardware expert" ass.
>3. 3DMark2003 added unfair optimizations to their program to make the nvidia card seem better than ATi's
Huh? Most sane people think:
4. Nvidia cheated like crazy on 3DMark in their drivers.
Go check FutureMark's site.
HardOCP's coverage of all this is disgraceful. When Extremetech originally broke the story, HardOCP practically accused them of making it up, and said they had "motives of their own" for writing the article outlining the problem. Instead of investigating on their own, apparently the procedure at HardOCP is to question the findings of the other, more competent, tech sites.
... As if _they_ broke the story. As if _they_ are responsible for causing a patch to be posted. No apology to Extremetech, either (in fact, no mention of them at all)
Then, when the fix is posted, they write "This is in response to the news item we posted last week."
And now, they're making unfounded accusations that 3DMark is taking bribes to skew the benchmark results? WTF? Why doesn't HardOCP just hire Jayson Blair to write their "articles"? At least then, they'd have less spelling errors.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Ok, so what we have here is a branding battle between two companies that want to make sure that when you think "I need a fast video card" you think of one of their products.
Ok fine, but why is it stuff that matters? Tell me about recent advances in fabrication, or bandwidth to RAM or bus latching and I'll be thrilled. Show me someone's benchmark of the XYZ Foobar vs the ABC Barfoo one more time, and I'm going to start moderating up the goat-posts just to have something more informative to read!
Call it a troll if you want, i just trust benchmarks as much as i trust political surveys. IOW both of those are only tools for the people who publish them, not for the people who are actually reading them ( Sadly, there was time when that wasn't so true... not anymore. )
Anyways, i wouldn't buy an FX ultra, because of the 2 slots you have to give it. Yeah that's kinda BS and also is a good sign of design flaw. Aside for that minor detail, i would, like always, trust the products from Nvidia. I've never had any problems with those, they always gave me very good performances and are painless to install. I can't say the same thing for ATI products. I have a big list of frustating memories from ATI and their open source drivers aren't good enough to clear that list. In fact these drivers are a fsckin PITA and i still can't make them work with the DRI under gentoo.
Guess what? The nvidia drivers do not require the DRI. Woot! Guess what? The nvidia drivers only take 5 secs to install and work. Guess what? The drivers are closed source and i don't give a #$!%#@. ( yeah that kind of thinking usually ends up costing me 100$ more... oh well can't have everything.. )
It seems that when the the video cards fps exceed the your monitors refresh rate that the extra frames are sometimes wasted. If the card puts out twice as many frames/sec as the monitor can refresh then on average half of the frames are skipped by the monitor.
After buying a 7500 and tinkering with it for a few days, I decided that I didn't want to try anymore, and then traded it for a GeForce 4. It worked perfectly on the first try. I'm not a huge fan of either company, but yes, I still like to buy Nvidia cards.
To quote the article:
For some reason I thought of "Iron Chef" when I read this.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
..does it run linux ?.. ..or maybe yes..
I don't think so!
finaly hwo cares!
Sometimes compaines don't realize how importnant customer service really is. In this case, I became a life-long ATI fan after it appeared that someone cared for their product.
"This food is problematic."
I guess I wouldn't be as pissed if it was a genuinely interesting article, rather than a collection of specs and benchmarks.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
9800 has a faster transform engine, is slightly ahead at lower resolutions.
5900 has a higher fill rate, is slightly ahead at high resolutions.
Otherwise there are no real differences between the benchmarks and it all comes down to differences any layperson could understand:
The 5900 takes up 2 slots (WTF?) and the 9800 is $100 cheaper (although $399 for a graphics card is still nuts if you ask me).
BTW, the ATI 9800 won the "shootout".
WBGG
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
Sorry ATI, but I use Linux... If ATI supported Linux as much as nvidia does mayby I'd buy one. But till then I'll stick to nvidia, no matter if it's slower then ATI's card.
NVIDIA cards because ATI's Linux drivers are not very good compared to NVIDIA's. I won't be buying an ATI card until ATI supports Linux fully like NVIDIA. I do play Linux native-port games in Linux.
This hasn't been true for quite some time.
I have owned numerous high end nvidia and radeon cards, and have never had anything resembling stability from the nvidia cards using the nvidia binary driver (and yes, I've tried all of the tweaks and suggestions Nvidia and others suggest vis-a-vis AGP settings, etc.). This has been true on numerous machines, both single and dual Intel P3 and Athlon XP/MP boxes, with a variety of motherboards, memory configurations, and Linux kernels.
ATI radeon cards on the other hand have been pretty solid, with excellent support via the xfree DRI drivers for most cards, and adequate, reasonably stable support from ATI via their firegl binary-only drivers for those not yet supported.
NVidia has not been king of the Linux hill for quite sometime, and while I have had my gripes with ATI as well, the notorious instability of the Nvidia binary drivers and lackluster support via the xfree DRI drivers has placed me (and my employer) firmly in the ATI camp.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Thats right! Thats why the radeon looses any benchmark on my computer!
radeon 9600pro or fx5600? both around $150, both have good performance, but which is the better card? im not spending more than $170 on a new card, what should i get?
I want 2D games back.
What really sucks when playing games is a huge drop in your frame rate. You want the card that has the best minimum frames per second (with the best image quality).
Also, who cares about these synthetic benchmarks. Gamers should only care about performance in games that are actually out there - cover all the major 3D engines.
Maybe nVidia should stick with their own tech; seeing as the GfFX was a continuation of 3dFx's latest project before they died. Hopefully in the future, nVidia won't rely on other companies tech to create their own, and the next generation video cards will perform a lot better with the specs that they have than what the GfFX is doing right now.
Hmm! It has been improved lately. I might be wanting an ATI card then. After reading http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=69322&threshol d=0&commentsort=3&tid=137&tid=152&tid=185&mode=thr ead&cid=6326912 ... it said that the drivers are hard to install. Is this true?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Just wanted to point out that Linux (XFree86 4.3.0) supports the Radon 7500 Mobility quite nicely on my Dell Inspiron 4150 that is quietly running the xsrceensaver in RH9 while I type away at my desktop (uses the ATI driver (loads the Radon (generic) driver))
Am I the only one who automatically ignores any benchmark whose result isn't in FPS? I learned a long ago, from PC Mags 3d benchmarks, that synthetic benchmarks are absolutely useless!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The DRI project's (Tungsten Graphics maintaners) ATI drivers are cross-platform. You can get ATI Radeon running with near full-feature hardware-accelerated openGL on an Alpha computer, whilst a GeForce FX gets you nowhere on an Alpha. Also of note, HP's Alpha computers are shipping with Radeon. I just bought a Radeon 9000 for my Alpha 'Ruffian' 164UX and am using DirectFB's SVGA framebuffer with the openGL (DRI) in a window! Fast openGL in a Framebuffer on an 633MHz ev56 Alpha! Radeon is also the only recent graphics accelerator that will POST (boot-up) on an older Alpha because Alpha's BIOS' VGA support is stunted to only support adaptors with 16bit VGA BIOS. Radeon 9000 works though! And with the recent mergedfb() support; a second monitor can be connected, extending the DirectFB desktop, with accelerated openGL on both monitors. You can't do that with nVidia for now, mainly because there is no driver. This is opensource at its greatest. Until now, Matrox G200MMS was a best bet with Alpha, and I hear someone is working on some software so you can have one graphics adaptor 'tunnel' graphics from another; this way, for example, a Matrox G200 MMS (Quad graphics adapter) can have a Radeon (ie or nVidia GeForceFX) installed next to it and the 3D graphics acceleration is performed on the advanced graphics accelerator and the images are piped over to one of the four framebuffer/CRT of the Matrox G200 MMS.
Also of note, you can't have graphics clustering on non-X86 computers with nVidia hardware. ATI's Radeon, once again, is king of the graphics clustering world. Chromium project works well on Radeon.
So, I've been pretty happy with the Radeon 7000 that came with my PowerMac. It played most of the games I like well, but then UT2k3 came out last week and changed everything.
Now I'm looking to upgrade, with UT2k3 in mind. Apple offers a Ti Geforce for $400 -- out of my budget right now. However, I can get an ATI Radeon 9000 for $169. Buying a PC version of a card and flashing it isn't really an option, since I need an ADC port.
Right now I'm thinking a Ti Geforce might be overkill, since my CPU is only 800mhz. Yet, within the next year when upgrade prices drop I may move it to 1.4ghz. On the other hand, the only games that would need better than the Radeon 9000 would be Doom 3 and the likes, which probably will need better than a 1.4ghz CPU anyway.
So what would you do? I'm looking to spend under $200.
Note to meta-mods: This is a direct reply to a parent post, and can therefore not be offtopic. If you are meta-moderating a moderation of offtopic on this post, please mark it as unfair.
Note to mods: This is what the 'overrated' option is for.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
With such amazing performance from both cards the ultimate benchmark has to be the picture quality - which OCAddition gave to ATI Hands Down.
Given that both these cards are going to be able to give a decent frame rate with whatever program is thrown at them i would be looking at the picture quality - which after all is what we have to look at.
Which card has the better fan? I can only find stuff that says the NVidia fan is loud. Unfortunately, I need to know this stuff cause I'm a little disaster prone, and both these cards sound like they can get fairly hot.
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
s/plethora/variety/g;
I have been pwned because my
Who cares about synthetic benchmarks. If it's like compare penis sizes at LAN parties great. But, when you're smoking people because you have a better real world graphics card who will care if you have a little dick?
WHQL doesn't mean they're better drives, it just means that they passed some MSFT testing bits. If anything, non-WHQL drivers have potential to have higher performance (think a car engine that doesn't have to worry about passing emissions), since they don't have to worry so much about playing nice with -all- available hardware.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I am partially colorblind and have a hard time telling which bar corresponds to which card. Using colors that are so close to one another is bad they should use strait red green blue and black maybe. Anyone else having a hard time with the color graphs? I am going to let the author know of this problem.
I NEED to know which one is cooler than the other. I can't be going to school tomorrow and know I have the wrong video card in my computer. If the other kids find out, I will be the laughing stock of the A/V club!
I had a sucky sig.
Hmm! It has been improved lately. I might be wanting an ATI card then. After reading ... it said that the drivers are hard to install. Is this true?
... (at the risk of sounding like a Gentoo zealot it is quite easy on that platform: simply 'emerge xfree-drm' will compile and install DRI, linked against your current xfree and kernel installation). For higher end cards like the 9800 you will need the binary drivers, however.
It probably depends on your distro, although in general I found them to be relatively easy to install. Whether using Red Hat's RPM, uncompressing and installing from a tarball, or using Gentoo's portage (the easiest approach I suspect, and the only one I've used personally: simply 'emerge ati-drivers'), once the software is installed configuration is easy. Just follow the ATI README, run the configuration utility (it will identify the card, ask you some questions as to whether or not you want to run dual headed, optimize your 3d opengl for Maya, CAD work, or whatever, and will generate an XF86Config-4 file automatically), and restart X. At that point you should be off and running.
Note that for Radeon 9100, 8500, 7500, etc. you can use the xfree DRI 'radeon' drivers, which (being source based) are more straightforward, provided you're used to configuring your XF86Config file. Installing DRI can be a bit painful on many distros
Good luck!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Seriously. And those with excess cash. I was involved in a Tribes 2 clan for quite a while and it would really impress me (some of the systems people put together for the competative edge). Players that don't lag frag. Just thought I'd throw that one out there too.
Quack, quack.
They may be useless to you, since you're a gamer and you just want to know how fast your games will run, but when I need a card to run 3dmark as fast as possible, I know which test I'm looking for.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
FreeUser: Thank you for the informative posts.
:)
Maybe I will get an ATI card for my next card (GF4 Ti4200 is not that outdated yet).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't see why this particular set of benchmarks is special enough to deserve attention on Slashdot. Okay, so they run through a nice variety of benchmarks and they're a fairly credible source. But it has nothing to do with Linux, nothing to do with Apple, and not much to do with OpenGL. The benchmarks are all done in Windows XP with DirectX 9. Even the UT2003 benchmarks were done in DX9.
About the only thing I can tell about this set of benchmarks is that OpenGL and Linux are ignored completely. At least most other reviewers benchmark Quake 3, Serious Sam 2, or some synthetic OpenGL benchmark.
3DMark2003 added unfair optimizations to their program to make the nvidia card seem better than ATi's
3DMark2003 (or rather Futuremark, since I doubt the program is advanced enough to program itself) did no such thing. nVidia did it all by themselves, and Futuremark conducted an investigation confirming the "optimizations" (cheats i.e. static clip planes inserted by nVidia) and denouncing them. Google for more.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
a) A Pentium-4 >=2500mhz
:)
b) An nVidia FX 5900 gpu
c) 19 inch monitor
If you set it to turn on in the morning time, the FX 5900 also doubles as an alarm clock/wake-up service.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Let's see some decent Linux drivers from ATi and a benchmark showdown at Linuxhardware.org. Till then, it might be wise not to make such sweeping remarks to the Slashdot crowd.
Of all the tests, only two were games. Yippee.
"Guys! Guys! Come look how well my card renders these scenes!"
"Neat! Can we play next?"
"Play?"
These aren't the same bozos who "benchmarked" the Apple G5, are they?
If you actually like THG, you might want to take a look at this article over at AmdMB. I never particularly liked THG, and this just solidifies it.
The new Radeon Catalyst drivers (2.5) have this very interesting note in the change log: "The 3DMark2003 shader optimizations found in previous CATALYST(TM) releases have been removed" Yet Nvidia gets to keep THEIR optimizations... hrm.
Here's a good article at Tom's Hardware on the sorry state of 3D benchmarking. http://www.tomshardware.com/column/20030624/index. html
I learned a long ago, from PC Mags 3d benchmarks, that synthetic benchmarks are absolutely useless!
And what exactly differentiates a real benchmark from a synthetic benchmark? While Futuremark does report the fill rate (both single-texturing and multi-texturing), it is simply extraneous information, which is in no way used to determine the resulting 3DMark score; the score is determined by running four game demos, which use engines akin to those used in "real games." The individual game results are reported by 3DMark, multiplied by certain coefficients, and then added together, rendering the result (3DMarks).
The reason 3DMark03 is invalid is not because it is a "synthetic" benchmark, but because nVidia mucked it up with their shenanigans. The frightful truth of the matter is, however, that the same illegitimate "optimizations" (i.e. static clip planes) that were used by nVidia in 3DMark can just as easily be used in any and all timedemo. Hence, your precious "real" benchmarks are just as susceptible, and may be just as compromised and invalid as 3DMark03. To make matters worse, unlike 3DMark03, which offers advanced diagnostic tools that allowed nVidia's dubious actions to be exposed, "real" benchmarks have no such tools. Therefore, exposing cheating in "real" benchmarks is much more difficult; however, just because something cannot be proven does not make it false.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
ASDF
Bollocks to framerates & application-by-application performance comparisons. We're getting to the point where the differences aren't boulder-sized but skipping stones, and soon sites will squabble over grains of sand. Specs are just numbers on paper. How do the cards LOOK? Which has truer colors, contrast, antialiasing, anisotropic filtering?
I'm not just picking on you, my buddy was going on and on about the dual Xenon he was building for his brother and law and it drives me nuts. Unless he's going to shine his dual xenon lamps on the 5900, he's got a dual xeon box. And searching Google for dual xenon has the first 9 results referring to dual processors instead of the gas or its applications in lamps or elsewhere.
OK, sorry, you can go back to comparing mindless differences between cards that we'll be replacing a year from now.
Bleh!
Simply because we seem to alternate between classic UT and Counterstrike at LAN parties, with a bit of Starcraft thrown in now and again. There's simply no reason to buy a card when you're running games half a decade old.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
If they would do once in a while a "price per feature and quality". The main thing is the most bang for the bucks. Why hit a fly with a cannon when a rolled up paper will do!
Oh well!
For those Windows / dual boot users looking a little on the lower end of the performance and price curve, I just found this hacked driver page and this thread that basically turns certain Radeon 9500 cards (~$135) into 9700s (~$200) by unlocking 4 pixel pipelines on the chip. It doesn't work on all cards, producing visual artifacts on some (some workarounds exist for some users) but given the right hardware, you might pull a good deal of performance out of a mid-priced piece of hardware.
Bleh!
For only an extra $200 or so dollars over a GeForce 4, you can crank out 10% more FPS. Wow! Real good value.
Sometimes I wonder at the nerve of these companies to charge so much extra, for products that are only marginally better than that which they just released 6 months ago.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Who really cares? I'm not about to drop $500 on a video card, nor are most people on slashdot. Honestly, the video card market is totally uninteresting these days. There aren't many games available right now that take advantage of the features of these cards. And when games really start appearing, the cards will be available for much less. NVidia vs. ATI, I mean seriously, who cares? Both companies are full of lying sleazeballs, both companies offer similar products at similar prices, and both companies pay off "hardware review" sites to give their products favorable reviews.
"Brand loyalty" in video cards is a joke. It's like having brand loyalty on paper clips. This holy war between NVidia and ATI fans is retarded, it's like people are TRYING to find something to argue over. Neither company offers a product that really distinguishes itself from the other, so it's all a wash anyway. Can we please stop posting these "reviews," as they're all obviously biased in one way or another (based upon the "reviewer's" chosen side in the holy war.) It's just a goddamn video card, not the cure for cancer.
i wonder what it would take to knock off the rest
yea i'm a chauvanist (sp?) but i couldn't resist
i started to read it and then i realized i dont' care
tom pabst rocks your socks in a box with a fox
i've bought lots of hardware solely on his word and i've yet to be disappointed
you post a lot, hell that makes 3 ofy our posts i've read just for this one article
and two of those are karma whores, well played ones, albeit
i think he means you should only use benchmarks that can be found in the wild...
Well since I don't need the power of my new video card to run benchmarks or UT2003 (that game blows anyway), here's benchmarks that are actually worth reading!
e fo rce_fx_5900-11.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030512/g
Like I really care about 500FPS in UT2003 or comanche, my GF3 runs them fine. So when I buy the newest card, I should be thinking about the games I'm buying it for!
I've been really tempted to upgrade to a Radeon 9600, 9700, or balls-out 9800 card from my GeForce 3. But the only thing holding me back from making the move to ATI are there drivers as they have always left a bad taste in my mouth in the past. Now I know the new ATI drivers are unified like nVidias. But I'm just not convenced they are still mature enough. Anyone else care to share some personal insight on ATI driver stability and the like?
Life is not for the lazy.
Sign here.
The unofficial
Great theory, except for the fact that nVidia dropped out of 3DMark's developer program last fall. I doubt they're ponying up anything.
I think it's also been firmly established as well that nVidia BS'd its way through build 330 by way of straight-up cheating, not by paying any one off.
And your numbers are generally irrelevant. Smaller core means cheaper, means lower temperature, but by does not really translate to *faster*. Neither do the frequencies. 850MHz is the *DDR* speed, so the first comparison is actually 450/425, so we can toss that one out. Second one is equally useless because nVidia core vs. ATI core is apples to oranges. Two very different ways of getting to the same point, so you can't use MHz as a rule of thumb. Those bandwidth limits are also purely theoretical and both companies use slightly different math to get there.
Lastly, how are UT2k3, Quake 3, et al considired "real-world" benchmarks, while 3DMark flythroughs are not? Is someone under the impression that the benchmark is basically going through some kind of special video clip? No. Every one of 3DMark's flythroughs is operating in a complete, three-dimensional environment. Those with the developer version of 3DMark can attest to this, as they are free to move the camera around the environment as they please.
The flythroughs are not "synthetic." The multitexturing tests, the image quality test, the CPU tests--yes, all synthetic. But those don't factor into the damn score anyway. Timedemos are effectively identical--and just as prone to fiddling. Get informed, people. There's nothing sacred about any of your benchmarks.
Anyone else see a trend here? I have an ATI card, blah blah blah its so much better. I have a NVIDIA card, blah blah blah its so much better. Can't they just agree both are pretty much the same and both are good products? That the benchmarks are so close that it really doesn't matter whos on top? Just find what card is cheaper and buy it. And for the record, BOTH cheated on benchmarks. So unfairly saying one is better "cuz the other cheats in benchmarks" is retarded logic.
Why on Earth would you say "e.g. AMD vs. Intel CPU's"? Speed is everything. IPC is worthless, the only thing that matters is speed.
Now, you could argue that MHz isn't everything, of course.
I love how they use benchmarks that mean nothing to show that one card is better than another. I mean you can only like 60 frames per second, the monitor can only display about 75 or so frames per second, do I really care if the card can do 100-something fps? It's just a graphics card pissing contest. The 1600x1200 tests I can understand, but the rest... pointless.
Can please somebody point me out the difference between the "no AA" and "full blown" AA screenshot ? They all seem to be the same picture quality. Worse, this is a static image, the difference (which i am still searching) would be probably less visible in a full blown action... Is really AA worth it or is it an overhyped feature ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
sorry folks i prefer to use my own judgement.I rarely trust a faceless article to make my hardware decisions
but wouldn't that be fewer spelling errors? If you're going to go after someone else's mastery of the language, display a little more yourself. Granted, good grammar/diction is a higher skill than decent spell-checking, but, hey...
OTOH, your analysis of the situation is much more accurate.
we should thank their moronic asses. It's a zero sum game. The only reason we can make off so well, getting such an exceptional price/performance ratio, is because they are so fucking dumb that they are willing to blow 3k of salary (which could, btw, be contributed to a RothIRA, and 20 years later buy them 10 or so of the best computers at that time).
I am thankful that there are morons out there willing to pay twice the price for 5-10% of extra performance. Thank god for such stupidity.
I could only hope for more retards like them, obviously trying to make up for their small dicks, so that the latest greatest systems of just 3 months ago, instead of 6, will now be deemed nearly worthless.
Thank god for such stupidity.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Well, your experiences differ from most. At my college I knew a bunch of people with both NVidia cards and ATI cards. The NVidia cards have all worked flawlessly in Linux, with one exception - don't turn on NVidia framebuffer support in the kernel if you will be using NVidia's X drivers. That's a bad combo that leads to system lockups when switching between virtual consoles.
NVidia's Linux drivers are actually better than the Windows ones. I've done a decent amount of OpenGL coding, using GLUT for the UI. 100% identical code will usually get about a 10% performance increase being run in Linux instead of Windows.
As to ATI, you're only going to get the basic features of the card working. TV support (both in and out) doesn't work on either the 7500 or the 9500. Probably not on other cards either, but I know those two for a fact. Also, in Linux you'll get a significantly lower framerate than in Windows.
I dunno: FPS benchmarks aren't all that helpful either, because they are inevitably averages of demo performance. What I want to know is the lowest FPS score: how bad it gets during the most intense action in a game. It's not the constant framerate throughout the game that I worry about, since I know pretty well that a given card can manage a given game at a certain level. It's the "hitches" that I worry about, and want to know if they are eliminated by the card.
As the original poster, let me conclude that ATI has the overall superiority with its technology; whereas ATI tends to release "revised" versions of its hardware with a more perfected purpose. For example, the Radeon 8500 was discontinued for a performance-wise slightly inferior Radeon 9000. However, power-consumption-wise and manufacture-wise, the Radeon 9000 provides equal value and it is much smaller footprint all-the-while performing equal to a GeForce FX 5200.
Look at this picture of a PowerColor Radeon 9000 PCI. Perfect choice for a computer platform lacking AGP in many circumstances, such as Alpha or Sparc.
With all that testing, did anybody consider compatibility? I run Red Hat and Windows on the same boot system so I need compatible hardware that will run in both environments and the Radeon 8500 does just that.
A few nanoseconds in a game is well and good but if you plan on running two or more operating systems on a single machine you might check into that aspect of your video card.
Just a thought.
I love it when stupid people jump to stupid conclusions.
http://mirror.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html
Please check your facts before you make such claims. I own a Radeon 7500 and I assure you the TV output works just fine in Redhat 9.
The biggest catch is that you have to boot up the computer with the TV plugged in. The second biggest catch is that XFree86 on the TV output only works with the VESA driver, not with the radeon driver. Thus neither 2d nor 3d acceleration is available with the TV output.
However, video playback acceleration is available on the TV output: for video playback on a TV, use mplayer on the XFree86 VESA server together with the xvidix video output plugin to get hardware accelerated scaling and colorspace conversion.
I am not sure what the situation is with the all-in-wonder line of cards, but with the non-AIW versions the TV output does work with the caveats above.
I've got a box at work with a TNT2 Ultra and she's beeeeeerrry quiet (fan disabled). I still own at Q3a during lunch.
^_^
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Of course, every card has on-board software that actually draws the stuff (pardon my techno-jargon), perhaps ATi is just writing a better on-board 3D engine.
:)
When the Gamecube was being developed, Nintendo went with Art-X (a small graphics firm that split from SGI) to design their graphics processor. During the devlopment cycle, ATi bought Art-X, hence every Gamecube having a little ATi sticker in the bottom right corner. My supposition (which is probably false) is that ATi got some new blood, including the Art-X people, who re-wrote their base-level graphics routines and helped them design better silicon specifically to run those routines.
I just hope that Nintendo sticks with them for the Gamecube's successor. Imagine what a Radeon 9800 could do if every developer who worked on it used it's proprietary features.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
Both FPSs (UT2k3, Splinter Cell) use the Unreal engine. Comanche uses it's own engine, but it's not a real GPU hog (the physics sim is the limiting constraint on FPS).
So you've got Unreal numbers, and a meaningless test the author even suggested he will drop in the future.
As a rule, these "roundups" should contain timedemo-style benchmarks from games using at least 3 different engines. Otherwise you're just rating the engine. By trying the 3 more popular engine, you can guage the performance of a wide swath of games.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It seems to be readily apparent in the Radeon screenshot (at least the full quality AA screenshot). I use it all the time, it makes 640x480 gaming look a heck of a lot better (which is good for games that are old and don't support higher resolutions). Ultimately, though, it's just one more feature for the list on the side of the box.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
The traditional rule holds that "fewer" should be used for things that can be counted (fewer than four players), while less should be used with mass terms for things of measurable extent (less paper; less than a gallon of paint). However, less is used in some constructions where fewer would occur if the traditional rule were being followed. Less than can be used before a plural noun that denotes a measure of time, amount, or distance: less than three weeks; less than $400; less than 50 miles. Less is sometimes used with plural nouns in the expressions no less than (as in No less than 30 of his colleagues signed the letter) and or less (as in Give your reasons in 25 words or less).
In the given example, "less" is the proper usage, not "fewer."
Yeah, I've made a lot of posts today on this article because I've been spending the last two weeks researching my a$$ off at THG and other places as I get ready to build a new gaming machine on a tight budget. I have this huge web page in front of me full of all the useful links to reviews and comparisons and benchmarks and product info that I've been compiling. So pardon me if I was trying to point folks in the direction of some of the interesting information from my research that I wanted to share with the /. community, when I came across an article on the topic of graphics cards for gaming machines!
Sheesh! Its been awhile since I've had time to /., I'd forgotten what a tough crowd it is.
If you've ever seen me post before, I'd be really really surprised, cause usually I haven't had much to say that adds value to the discussion. In this case, I was just trying to be nice. I enjoy the interesting information other people post, and it was nice to be able to contribute some back, hopefully. Being called a whore isn't nice. :( Not everyone on /. wants to be a Karma Deity ya know? Though now I kinda wish I could mod, cause I almost feel like your comment is flamebait meant to piss me off. Well, it worked.
WBGG
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
Do you mean risotto?
well, i'm still happy with this 9700 i've got....
does well with a good AGP4x and Athlon 2400
behind it. I think nVidia have lost the plot
like 3dfx did.
as for Linux support. come on you guys, dont show your total ignorance, ATI is well supported under Linux now
Think i'll even put a 9700 into my AmigaONE
Are we on the same page? I have been using my ATI Radeon 9000 in Linux with the proprietary ATI Radeon drivers. Full 3D acceleration. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory plays just as good on my Linux partition as it does on my Windows partition. Just because the Radeon drivers say they are for Radeon 8500 (or whatever) doesn't mean they don't work on the newer Radeon's in the 9xxx series.
HardOCP has a history of this behaviour. The only reason they would even think of accusing FutureMark of shady dealings is because that is how they themselves do business. Apparently, Kyle Bennett believes everyone else is as much of a lying scumbag as he is.
For those of you who don't care to read the link, here's a synopsis:
*HardOCP posts bogus inflated numbers in one of their reviews (with advertising on the same page. BIG coincidence)
*HardOCP readers take notice, and comment in the HardOCP forums.
*Said users are banned for questioning his almighty lordship, Kyle Bennett. Mr. Bennett accuses said users of photoshopping their screenshots of his review; Steve Lynch chimes in with similar accusations. "That picture is fake", he says.
*More mass bannings of long time posters at the [H] forums ensue, as people ask questions about the issue.
*A few days later, Kyle issues this statement:
"After researching this fully for two days, I have been able to pull together 100% factual evidence that a single set of benchmarks in the 3GHz article were changed after publication of the article. The 3DMark benchmark was changed from "17829" to "17329". The fact of the matter is that we did not note this change. It is standard operating procedure that anytime a portion of an article is changed, outside spelling and grammar, it is noted and explained as to why the change was made. This was not done."
*The aforementioned banned users are not reinstated; no mention is made of the mass bannings, and no apology is given.
OK, there is support for Xf 4.2.0, but they haven't released anything serious for 4.3.0 yet. I can use my firegl with 4.3.0, but only basic stuff.
:-(
No opengl and most annoyingly, no XVideo
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
The fiasco killed any respect I had for those tests. As a gamer, I only look for scores with games and apps themselves that I actually use and play, I will never, ever, trust some 3rd party blanket test that has been completely tarnished. Yes, people can cheat the FPS scores in games too, but if reviewers randomly test around 6-8 games, we'll end up with some really believable scores.
3) There are always those people who are actually in the process of shopping for a new rig. If you are going to outfit your new computer with new gear then why not take the moment to figure out which card/hd/cpu/etc is best and buy it then.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
If it's like compare penis sizes at LAN parties great.
Hmm, you must go to different LAN parties than I do...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
IIRC, many demos these days *do* report lowest FPS score. I think the UT benchmark does, and many sites have started reporting it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The difference between a synthetic benchmark and a real game is that the real game has all sorts of other things going on. It has to handle user input, much more extensive collision physics, etc. It's much harder to cheat at real benchmarks because they're not static. Most (good) review sites can and do come up with their own demo scripts for popular games. As a result, cheating is harder because there is much less that the manufacturer can assume about what will be running. And you don't need advanced diagnostic tools to see if a manufacturer is cheating. Just watch the demo, take screenshots, and see if you notice anything odd. If you don't notice anything odd, then even if the manufacturer did do something, its an optimization rather than a cheat. Remember, a large part of graphics programming involves taking quality shortcuts in ways that (you hope) the viewer doesn't notice.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I dont know about you guys but I want my Voodoo back. I have to say that Nvidia has not carried Voodoo's legacy very well.
ATI might be the winner for a Wintel-game-machine. If you do professional 3D graphics (possibly on a U*IX system), you need
- fast and big memory
- even faster AA to make your customers cry tears of joy
- AA, no gaussian blur *g*
- support for complex vertex shaders
- many texture layers to make things look goood
So my guess is they're more aiming at the professinals, a market which hopefully will soon be growing again.
The difference between a synthetic benchmark and a real game is that the real game has all sorts of other things going on. It has to handle user input, much more extensive collision physics, etc.
Yes, that is the difference between a synthetic benchmark and a real game; I never stated otherwise. The problem is, since real games are taking in user input, the variables of the test are constantly being changed and there is no way to duplicate the results a second time on another graphics card. As for "extensive collision physics", that observation invalid since there is no reason a "synthetic benchmark" cannot have much more "extreme collision physics" than a real game, and in fact many do; in addition, "extreme collision physics" doesn't affect the graphics card in the least since physics calculations are done on the CPU and not the VPU/GPU.
Almost all reviewers run timedemos that are almost always created by the game manufacturer, are constantly being used, and have been available for a long time; they then proceed to tout these as "real benchmarks" all the while discrediting 3DMark03 because they are too moronic to understand that in reality there is no difference between the two.
It's much harder to cheat at real benchmarks because they're not static.
If it is not static, then how can the results be duplicated? If one were to do as you propose, which I might add almost no one does, there would be no way of obtaining constant results, let alone verifying the validity of those results. No one uses dynamic benchmarks; they all use prerecorded timedemos.
Most (good) review sites can and do come up with their own demo scripts for popular games.
First, if they come up with a script, then they are not playing a real game, with constant user input, as you stipulated in the previous part of your post. Second, aside from Firingsquad.com, no other review site has recorded their own timedemos, to the best of my knowledge. I might add that Firingsquad has only done so once, and that was in their recent review; unfortunately, no site has yet to implement the procedures I described in one of my previous posts, which would appear to be the most logical course of action.
Just watch the demo, take screenshots, and see if you notice anything odd.
Really? Again, this works if the demo was to be recorded just before the review and it was never publicly available beforehand. As most reviewers use prerecorded timedemos which came with the games themselves, this belief does nothing but add a false sense of security. As I've stated many times in the past, and will continue to state till it is drilled into people's heads, there is no difference between prerecorded timedemo that has been available to the graphics chip manufacturers, and 3DMark03. Since both are static, things such as static clip planes can be inserted by say nVidia without anyone noticing, as there is no way of spotting a static clip plane in a benchmark that is on rails; the only reason nVidia's "tinkering" was exposed in 3DMark03 was because there are versions of 3DMark03 available to certain parties which allow one to move the camera while the demo is running. This, of course, was unbeknownst to nVidia; fortunately for them, no such tools are available in "real benchmarks," so they are free to insert static clip planes with impunity, as "watch[ing] the demo, [and] take[ing] screenshots" cannot be used to expose well-implemented cheats in prerecorded demos, just as they could not be used in 3DMark03.
If you don't notice anything odd, then even if the manufacturer did do something, its an optimization rather than a cheat.
Really? So static clip planes inserted, by say nVidia, at arbitrary points in the benchmark just so that their bloody video card has to do less rendering, are optimizations, and not a cheat? And keep in mind that static clip planes are not exclus
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
WHQL doesn't mean they're better drives, it just means that they passed some MSFT testing bits. If anything, non-WHQL drivers have potential to have higher performance (think a car engine that doesn't have to worry about passing emissions), since they don't have to worry so much about playing nice with -all- available hardware.
I don't know, but you seem to make the point of 'WHQL doesn't mean they're better, because all WHQL means is that they won't fuck up your system.'
To me, that's kind of important. I would rather have better drivers and slower performance than an extra 100 FPS but break my sound card's S/PDIF port when a Gl rendering is finished.
--Dan
Well said. About time somebody set the fools straight.
Couldn't the CGA output to a TV?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, FutureMark didn't skew their benchmarks to make nVidia cards look better; rather, nVidia tweaked their drivers to "cheat" in certain tests on 3DMark 2003. This is why FutureMark released a patch to bring 3DMark 2003 to version 330 -- the patch disables the video driver cheats that nVidia put in.
There are many nVidia expatriates who have expressed disgust over nVidia's corporate policies, and what management tells the rank-and-file driver programmers to concentrate their efforts on.
Assuming you believe "passed stability tests at MS" is at all meaningful.
It's called being patient. ATI have already said that they are going to release 4.3 drivers. What does X4.2 in games that 4.3 cannot? I mean in tangible gaming performance? I can see little difference between ATI Radeon playing Wolf ET with Linux (XF4.2) and MS Windows.
Send all your complaints to: http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ if you think their drivers suck or they are too slow in releasing them.
I'd rather they released good quality drivers, rather than release buggy drivers like some other company.
You could always revert to XF4.2. It is a simple matter with most dists. That way you get OpenGL, etc.
Remember that many companies do not release Linux drivers at all. The community often has to reverse engineer these. People who use ATI and NVidia are the lucky ones. I pity those who purchase expensive cards by other brands who have to use generic XF drivers for their card in Linux.
I was a regular [H] reader until today. This is ridiculous. Check out what's on the front page.
More bullshit drama and conspiracy theories. This time it's about some supposed media blackout, and accusations that THG might be suing some other website. (a completely baseless accusation)
At what point did Hard|OCP stop being a hardware site, and start being a fucking soap opera? I've seen twelve year old girls that are less into gossip and rumors than this.