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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."
Neither runs faster than the Orchid Farenheit 180.
I used Lotus 123 and WordPerfect 5.1 as the test applications.
> 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!
It doesn't bother me that much who has the fastest card. All I know is that this sort of competition is great in the Linux arena. With the recent trends in 3d animation studios transition to Linux, they can't ignore the need for high quality drivers.
Nvidia has really polished up their Linux drivers recently, and in response ATI has done the same.
This means Linux is one step closer to gaining a foothold on the desktop. Hopefully this will will spur interest 3D gaming on the linux platform.
One can dream of the day of playing Battlefield 1942 on Linux. I'm using the Liux FireGL drivers on my Radeon 9700 Pro, and so far, they work great for playing RTCW ET.
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).
"Why is it that both products we'll be looking at today, the [$725--128MB]ATi FireGL X1 and [$1500--256MB]NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000, share nearly identical hardware with their consumer counterparts, yet cost 3 to 5 times as much? The answer goes back to those highly specialized applications again, and optimizing the hardware and drivers to accelerate performance to the best of the core Graphics Processor's ability"
---
It would have been nice if they also benchmarked a $400 GeForceFX5900-256MB and a $425 Radeon 9800Pro-256MB then. (current prices from pricewatch)
Anyone have a link to another review that includes these?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Have we, the public, not learnt yet that ATI and Nvidia have "optimized" their drivers for whatever benchmark.
Unless reviewers compare same motherboard, same amount of ram, same processor, same bios version, same version of the motherboard, as what their audience has then the numbers are MEANINGLESS.
I thought FireGL was from Diamond, not ATI. :p
In fact, I'm holding a FireGL right now... I'll sell it for $200! Less than what ATI charges.
god I wish peole would think before naming things sometimes.... USB2.0 vs USB2.0 "Hi-Speed"....
I Love it when a Writer decides to capitalize Random Words when writing an Article.
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.
Since I'm seeing a lot of this, a note to the uninformed/misinformed who didn't RTFA or even much of the blurb:
These are NOT cards for gaming, they are for professional graphics work. Very different market, so please refrain from telling us how you don't need a high end video card or don't play video games. It's of no consequence.
-palp
My impression from the Anandtech review is that the visual quality of the FX 5900 vs. ATI's 9800 were quite comparable, and at times, indistinguishable.
*shrug*
ATI is going to have a hard time in the developer market ---
"According to Carmack, nVidia is among the best in the business at writing drivers. He went on to explain that whenever he runs into a driver-related bug with nVidia, he assumes the problem is with his own code. With ATI or other card manufacturers, he assumes the problem is with the driver. Extremely high praise for the driver engineers at nVidia."
[cited from http://www.dallasnews.com/, a review of QuakeCon 2002]
The only reason I'm still buying nVidia is because it's setup under linux is very well documented, whereas I've had a bugger of a time getting a Radeon 9000 Pro to run accelerated on linux. And I've not found anything terribly useful when asking google.
Inconceivable!
I respect John Carmack, but I am not a picky developer like him. ATIs drivers seem fine to me and the cards perform great.. and thats all the criteria I have.
My experience with ATI and Linux is limited to Gentoo:
emerge ati-drivers
Works like a charm...
The unofficial
I don't see dual monitor setups mentioned in the article. Does ATI's output quality stand up to NVidia's?
I have a Radeon 8500, and I can tell you that ATI has some serious issues with output signal quality. On my main crt monitor, I can still see occasional sheering and small display glitches. The 2nd monitor quality was even worse. I am using a pci TNT card to get 2nd monitor suupport.
Judging by the picture of the ATI card, the second DVI connection may have problems. It is an extra board so there is not a continuous trace which can introduce all sorts of problems (like contact resistance, oxidation, etc.) Yes, it is a digital signal, but it's like putting an ide ribbon cable with really short wires. You are going to get all sorts of problems...
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?
While this may be brushing 'redundant/offtopic', I have to say that getting one of those may cost you a bit more, but it's much nicer than a consumer graphics card.
/. article on it), while the latter have been traditionally good with it.
What the author fails to mention is that there's better R&D (build quality?) put in there. Not just application-specific optimisations. If they *had* tested the consumer equivalents, they'd see them outperformed, methinks. That's my experience, anyway.
Back in '98 I had a Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro (yes, the FireGL series was owned by Diamond then), which was matching/outperforming many 'new' gaming cards my mates were buying (it was a fairly old model at the time, IIRC). Thing is, I hadn't paid a fortune for it, as you might think. It was a bit expensive, but not *that* different from what my mates were paying.
Now I have a FireGL 8800 and again the performance is there. Gaming-wise, I can play GTA3 and CMR3 at resolutions previously undreamt of with the 9500 (1600x1200).
Having said that, it's a pain to get (linux) support by ATI. Ever tried emailing them? Up 'till March (IIRC) things were OK and they even had good drivers. But now it's all shaky and iffy, as we all know.
Now I'm looking for a 3DLabs/NVidia. The former are increasing their linux support (I even recall a
It would have been very interesting if they'd included the VP990 Pro or the VP970 in the comparison...
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
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.
Other benchmarks include a leaf blower and a flaming jar of gasoline. The leaf blower actually did quite well in the noise tests against the Nvidia card but lost out due to the fact that it consumes less power than the video card. Ati unfortunately did not fare as well, and lagged behind with the noise factor. An ATI spokesman recommended that the card be coupled with a "cheap ass Athlon CPU fan" which would develop a good rattle to help the card become more obnoxious.
The jar of flaming gasoline also did pretty good in the heat department against both cards, but unfortunately had to be refilled which was considered a drawback. Aside from that the life like animation the fire produced only ran at one frame rate, but was always consistent. Unfortunately the jar of gas lost out big time in the cost arena, but it seems that can be compensated for by tossing $1 bills into the flames at various intervals to get the costs up higher.
Some wondered why we didn't benchmark a toaster as well, or instead of a jar of gasoline - but as we pointed out before, a toaster is far to practical to compare in a contest of flushing money down the toilet.
How often does it fsck up a render? With consumer cards, who cares if you mess up a render, because it may just be a temporary jaggy, they just want to be all out speed-demons. But, with these corporate cards, a messed up render could be a misplaced weld, or something along those lines.
I hate sigs.
With Quadro4 it actually became a different chip so you can't turn the workstation specific parts of the chip on with softquadro any more.
I'm a systems person at a university department.. over the last 2 years, with all the various machines at work and "friends", I've probably been in contact with about 600 -700 machines.
Of these, I've had to replace 3 video cards. One early AGP Matrox, an AGP TNT 2 M64, and a PCI S3 VirgeDX. All of them more than 3 years old. And the TNT2 was a maybe, but after fitzing with Windows for 2 hours, and plonking in another TNT2 and having it work perfectly, replacing it was an easier option all round.
OT, but if you want to know what dies a lot, it's hard drives, mice, monitors and power supplies... about 30 mice per year and about 15 each of hard drives, monitors and PSUs.
That board (and epoxy/heatsink) was NOT made and assembled by NVIDIA. NVIDIA does not produce their consumer boards. All the boards are produced by other vendors such as PNY, Asus, MSI, Chaintech, Leadtek, Gainward, etc. using chips they buy from NVIDIA. NVIDIA does produce and tightly control the manufactur%3of their Quadro cards.
I am a CAD administrator, and use several different CAD packages. The problem I have with most graphic card now isn't performance - it's accuracy. When you zoom up on an intersection and the lines "move" at different zoom levels, it becomes impossible to know which surface is which.
I have had this problem with Quadro cards. I have not had a chance to try ATI cards. I have had the best results with older 3D labs card (gx1 pro and gmx 2000.) Those cards did not offer the fasts performance, but were better for surfacing.
Where performance matters is when I'm working on large assemblies. Some of the repaint/redraw times can be as high as 15 minutes (1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Quadro 550, Pro/Engineer, Windows NT)
I would love to give Pro/Engineer a try on Linux (It's available - web site is ww.ptc.com) But, our PDM package (Pro/Intralink) is not. Does anyone know how the performance compares to Windows?
maybe ATI's drivers ARE better on linux. I don't know - I haven't gotten them working yet. Not a criticism of the drivers, just that there's an extreme shortage of documentation on the internet about how to install them. Of course, there are a number of options, Gatos, ATI, the DRI driver that ships with the kernel. I've only tried ATI's and the kernel DRI driver and not had much success.
Inconceivable!
There's no need to actually buy a FireGl X1 as you can easily soft mod a Radeon 9700 Pro into one. instructions can be found here.
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.
HotHardware, where they test pro graphics card with games... cool...
:
Now, for the ones who want a quite better review of the FireGL X1, QuadroFX 2000, FireGL Z1, compared to 6 others pro boards (including 3DLabs Wildcat VP970), Tom's Hardware has a nice one, dated March, 21st (so not only HW has an all but complete review, it is much late, too)
Tom's Hardware FireGL X1 vs QuadroFX 2000 Review
Have fun...
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.
Man, trying to keep up with all the things you know nothing about is hard but I'll try.
NVidia can't provide hardware interface specs for their boards because they don't own the rights to do so. That's why they go out of their friggin way to make the best 3d drivers and experience for games and graphics for linux out of the kindness of their hearts on their time on their dime. It's not like they are making money doing it. Me and some other guys started a petition a while back, and after about a year they started paying attention.
I wouldn't say NVidia services the market in a limited way given they walked away the hands down performance winner in at least this poorly conducted benchmark. There are plenty of people that trust and use their products. It has a lot to do with driver quality. Don't fall into the pathetic fanboy trap that a lot of people have and start predicting their demise. They are highly diversified. the NForce mobo chipsets alone have made them a fortune. It was pretty nice of them to release Linux drivers for those too. It's not like they had too. They also didn't really have to bother releasing AGP support for other peoples cards either.
If you'd do a little bit of research into how SCSI works, and how it is manufactured, you'd probably understand why it is priced the way it is. You'd probably eventually understand why it's the only choice in a number of situations. Lets see you put together a 60 drive rack mount EIDE raid 5 solution. For a home user? EIDE or SATA is probably going to be fine. Someone doing massive amounts of graphics processing and realtime video editing? The drives are definitely going to end up being a bottleneck if they aren't fast as hell. Transfer and seek time. Raid 10 with 15,000 rpm drives dangling off of 3 channels doing reads and writes fast enough to keep up with the rest of your system. A friggin boatload of cache with speculative read ahead caching. Godlike control over every switch and variable you need to maximise throughput based on the size of the files you are working on. Basically, things you can't commonly do well with any IDE raid solution at this point.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
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
The reviewers didn't seem to be quite the experts in the field they were commenting on. The article was short and used very few factors. I'd like to see a Tom's Hardware review. Even though ATI seems to have the edge right now with consumer video cards, I must say I'll probably stay with Nvidia. My past experiences with ATI's software and drivers has been bad. Besides that I can't afford to have the latest and greatest so it doesn't matter what I buy. ;-)
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