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ATi FireGL X1 Vs. NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000
SpinnerBait writes "The professional graphics card arena has been heating up as of late, with new
products from ATi and NVIDIA hitting the streets on the heels of SIGGRAPH
unveilings. In a first of two article series,
HotHardware has a showcase with benchmarks on the ATi FireGL X1 and NVIDIA
Quadro FX 2000. It seems as though NVIDIA still has a stronghold in
this market, as their card seems to dominate many of the benchmark runs shown
here."
> It seems as though NVIDIA still has a stronghold in this market, as their card seems to dominate many of the benchmark runs shown here."
...The FireGL looks like a much better value.
Not really. The benchmarks were very close in most of the tests and if you consider what the end of the article says:
At this point in time, various price search engines have the ATi FireGL X1 listed at or around $530. Conversely, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 is listed at no less that $1250 and that's in the 128MB variant, not the 256MB model we tested. So with this in mind, the FireGL X1 price/performance ratio is rather compelling, at less than half the cost of the competing NVIDIA product.
The unofficial
Well I have used a Geforce MX 200, Geforce 3, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9500 non-pro, and just bought a Radeon 9800 non-pro (will be flashing with pro BIOS).
The Geforce 3 was a good card, but its the only one that has died on me.
No problems with any of the Radeons, and they sure are fast!
IMO, Nvidia's only good desktop offering right now is the FX 5600 Ultra, which has a value comparable to ATI.
The 5900 has a few more frames than the 9800 in UT2K3, but its image quality with is noticeably inferior to the Radeon.
The unofficial
Didn't have to.
Do I trust benchmarks? No.
Will I ever trust benchmarks? No.
Are benchmarks meaningful in any way? No.
Do benchmarks have any credibility whatsoever? No.
'nuff said
Apart from the fact nvidia got their asses kicked in most benchmarks it does indeed rock, yes. Especially the bit which claims the price for the damned thing is over 1200 USD a piece. Ah well, next time it will be an Ati I guess, considering they both fecking cheat with benchmarks these days I might as well go for the cheapest cheater.
Hate me!
I don't blame him. It's all opinion. I've been completely turned away from entire brands before because of a couple of consecutive problems (rather major ones).
Case-in-point, I will NEVER by Dell again because my last two purchases were utter garbage. Does this mean that Dell sux? No, they're probably one of the better PC manufacturers out there. I'm sure my experiences were in the small minority. But that doesn't change the fact that they've lost me as a customer forever.
It doesn't take much for a company to permanently leave a bad impression on one's mind. And a person shouldn't be blamed for haiting a company that's given them a bad experience, more than one.
I've always gone for featureset when looking at graphics cards. Speed is a secondary and usually fairly costly function.
If I need the speed, I turn off AA and lower the resolution and game detail settings. But if it's fast enough for me as is and looks like it'll suffice for a couple of years, I don't care about the benchmarks.
even if the ati card WAS faster, hell will freeze over before i ever buy another card from them!
they have crappy support, crappy hardware (as in reliability) and crappy drivers. i've had so many ATI cards die on me it's not even funny.
on the other hand i've had only one nvidia card die, due to rough handling and no fan (it came loose somehow and i didn't notice it, probably in transport)
Man, I've handled well over 100 different models from at least a dozen manufacturers over at least as many years and I've never had a card die on me. If all these cards are dying on you then there's got to be a reason - just what the hell are you using them for and in what environment? Unless you're a big time overclocker,video cards are pretty damn sturdy and the odds are that a card will outlast your use for it, so perhaps you need to re-examine just how you handle your cards and how much abuse that they're taking?
Having one card fail on you is unfortunate. Two, three or more smacks of carelessness.
(I'm not looking to troll here. I'm just comparing my extensive experience with yours.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Why do they bother with these "standardized" benchmarks. We already know that the manuf. tend to gear their products towards scoring well on these things. That and from a content pov, anybody with the requisite hardware could do what they did. Whatever happened to the days when a group with solid domain knowledge would take some products and run it through their "own" benchmarking? Instead of using some canned 3DStudio simulation benchmark, find a bunch of models you've created and test them out. Run the cards through tests that YOU (not YOU the reader, YOU the ficticious reviewer) know are important. In this way people get a MUCH more realistic feel for what type of performance they can expect and the reviewer actually has some value added to doing the review in the first place (not just running the same thing that the eight "other" benchmarking sites do).
Where exactly are they getting "new" from. The FireGL X1 card may as well have cobwebs on it. The current workstation cards being pushed by ATI are the FireGL X2 and FireGL T2 (X2 being highend as the X1 was, T2 being targeted at the budget market). Claiming "NVIDIA still has a stronghold in this market" is deceptive at the very least. Would you find a CPU benchmark accurate if they compared an Athlon XP 3200+ with a Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz and concluded that AMD was leading the market?
They should have also benchmarked the latest 3Dlabs cards in order to give us a proper frame of reference. For all we know, both these cards could be providing inferior performance compared to the latest Wildcat; good gaming performance doesn't necessarily translate into a good professional video card.
The Wildcats are also cheaper: $899 for the 512 MB VP990 Pro and $499 for the 256 MB VP880 Pro or the 128 MB VP970 (from the 3Dlabs eStore) compared to $530 for the cheapest 128 MB ATi FireGL X1 and $1250 for the cheapest 128 MB nVidia Quadro FX 2000 (the 256 MB variant was used for benchmarking).
Anyways, these aren't even ATi's and nVidia's top of the line cards; ATi's is the FireGL X2-256 and nVidia's is the Quadro FX 3000.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
HotHardware
Um, pardon me, but...who?
Call me when you've got benchmarks from a real magazine(say a CAD/CAM, 3D graphics and/or animation, etc related magazine), and not two-guys-in-a-dorm-room-who-write-reviews-for-kick backs websites who run Unreal Tournament to benchmark professional graphics cards.
Case and point is their 'testbed' system: they used a "DFI LAN Party 875Pro" motherboard. They used Pentium 4's instead of workstation-class Xeon processors. IDE drives instead of SCSI. Folks, that's NOT a "workstation". A dual Xeon cHomPaq is a workstation.
Oh, and the benchmarks? One no-name benchmark, and 3D Studio Max. Oh, and Unreal Tournament. No fill rates, no polygon counts, no NOTHIN. No mention of Linux, which is tearing into the market like crazy among top computer animation houses.
This is pathetic- they're just a bunch of guys who compile daily linkages to other cheeseball review sites. They have no industry background, no experience, no nothing...just a P4 3GHz and a (probably pirated) copy of 3D Studio Max.
Please help metamoderate.
do we really need these video card peny wars on Slashdot, is this "stuff that matters" by any accounts?
Not so...
nVidia's recent Linux driver sets have been utter trash this year. Why don't you explain the "best in the business" stuff to those that have had continuous system lock-ups on Gnome 2 desktops because nVidia treats its "Linux customers" like test subjects for its Windows driver base.
You may not realize it, but ATi's drivers are more stable than nVidia's on Linux. Shoot, even the lowly PowerVR is writing Linux drivers that are far more reliable than nVidia's. The fact that nVidia updates their drivers frequently is nice, but they can't seem to refrain from breaking something new each and every time that they do it. Don't believe me? Check out all of the Gnome 2 message boards out there.
The fact is, you're going to pay for it in some form of stability problem when you start running wonky drivers with non-standard features and rendering code. The nVidia drivers don't draw off of the DRI mechanism either, which is unfortunate. Their proprietary rendering mechanism is likely the cause of many of the strange instability problems. We see this problem every day, on a support forum, in which some user claims that they are having problems with desktop hangs and rendering anomalies. Nine times out of ten, it's a problem with the closed-source nVidia binaries. Asking someone to test the "NV" driver instead of the "NVIDIA" driver almost always corrects the problem.
I'm not trying to flame nVidia. I like their products... But until they straighten out their driver problems on Linux (their Windows drivers are quite good), I'm not buying one of their cards.
ATi isn't much better, however. Their commerical drivers haven't been updated since November, though the FireGL and Gatos drivers are good, alternate choices in many cases, though they sometimes lack features. ATi, however, has often been pretty generous with providing documentation about some of its products for some features of the chipsets. And, though ATi's commercial driver options have been limited of late, what they do have is typically quite solid on Linux. I'm holding out for a unified driver update for XF86 4.3 though, before I even consider one of their cards.
It was epoxy, I could not believe my hands. Anyway, read my other reply to another guy's similar comments regarding board making.
I agree with you on the other points, remember Day of the Tentacle? Indiana Jones? Monkey Island? Wing Commander? Ah, those were the days... When a Diamond Stealth with a mere 1 MB of video memory did the job and did it well.
What interests me is if we keep getting better and better cards like this, will we one day get games which look so good so as to be indistinguishable from reality (albeit still on a screen). I certainly hope so because when/if this happens, games companies will have nowhere to go with graphics and will actually have to give more focus to making games more enjoyable. Fun to play instead of just flash, whereas the onus these days tends to be on graphics that take advantage of graphics card feature x.
Our SolidWorks station that I use on a daily basis has an ATI FireGL X1 in it and I can say that this card can perform.
Our assemblies can get pretty big component wise and the FireGL keeps chugging along.
In the end, the buying decision between ATI and NVIDIA workstation vcards came down to price. After shelling out the huge amount or money for SW (I'm in a small company), justifying the purchase of a $1300 card was near impossible. Now, paying $400 for the FireGL, with great performance, made my managers smile (for a microsecond, at least)...
blueorder