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New NVidia Graphics Cards Reviewed
UnixRevolution writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Nvidia's new FX5950 and FX5700. According to Tom's Hardware, ATI's Radeon 9800XT is still at the top of the heap." They're still some pretty slick cards, if only for their heat sink designs.
is over three weeks old.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Look pretty slick, I'm going to get one with my new computer (if I have enough money by then. Goddamn minimum wage job).
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
You know what I find pretty damn interesting? That my Radeon 9600 operates with NO active cooling at all, only a simple heat conductor. Quite is good.
TODO: Something witty here...
I suppose it depends on how you define it. If you've got a more holistic view of things, they are bad; their productions materials are made with a disregard for toxicity and sustainability, and their electrical consumption goes ever upwards. They're not slick to me.
When did Slashdot take over from the Wayback Machine?
The article's old. Really, quite old. As in, "Hello? The 90s are calling -- they want their articles back" kind of old.
...I want a video card with an HDTV tuner built in, not just NTSC like the misnamed ATI all-in-wonder, or NVIDIA's version. I want to build a portable media center PC with HDTV!
How ya like dat?
Is Nvidia doomed to not have learned from 3dfx? Seems to me all they're doing now is adding slightly faster/better boards, while charging the same prices. Where are the new cutting edge features and options? It seems ironic, 3dfx was put out of business by Nvidia, and now Nvidia may be put out of business by ATI, and 5 years from now we'll be talking about how ATI will be put out of business by XYZ. The problem I think is once the company starts making serious cash, the founders just don't care anymore.
So I suppose my question is why do people get more excited these days about +0.7fps out of a $200 card when they could just drop a bit more memory on the mainboard? Reviewers and fanboys still gush about these things when there are so many better improvements to be made in other areas.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
They're still some pretty slick cards, if only for their heat sink designs.
Er, no they're fucking not. They are ugly, too hot, too noisy, and nowhere near as good as a simple & small heatsink/fan on an ATI 9800, or even smaller & cooler 9600.
Their heat sink designs give away a shitty GPU.
Choose ATI.
My 9800pro is the greatest card I've ever owned. The more I enjoy the fluid gaming experience, the less the $300 I paid for it sounds.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Does NVidia offer open source, GPL/LGPL'ed drivers yet? If not, then this is hardly "news for nerds".
lets face it nvidia once produced good hardware, but now all the stff they put out is crap.
Considering they take up half of the card. Why don't they come out with better technology rather than patching their old stuff (ie clocking it higher and putting an even more massive heatsink on it)?
I planned on inserting something witty here but never got around to it.
I have a GeForce 4 4600 128mb (the highest end card on the GF4 line) and the performance is excellent. If my card runs Doom 3 well, then I don't see myself upgrading for a while yet.
Nonetheless the review is interesting. What is even more interesting is that, as some people have already noted, Nvidia may be heading the way of 3dfx. Think about it harder for a minute. I am looking at the Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmarks and the Nvidia cards are slower by a SMALL margin.
A margin that small will not put them out of business, unless the gap grows larger in future cards.
On a side note I do not pay close attention to hardware companies. Do other video card companies even exist anymore? (S3, Matrox, whomever) Nvidia and ATI are the only ones I hear about nowadays.
At home, my PC came with a 8MB Starfighter in 1998. I upgraded to an ATI Rage Fury 32MB card in 1999. Then I rebuilt the system in 2001 and purchased a Nvidia Geforce 2 MX400 card with 64MB ram for like $70 two years ago. And that seems to run the two games I play quite well.
The "who has the fastest video card" no longer has much of an effect on me nor most people. The latest ATI card isn't going to render text any faster than the 1MB trident card in my old 486...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Who cares about the high-end graphics card market? Intel owns the graphics department, and they do for several important reasons.
Firstly, they border on monopolistic and can force manufacturers like Dell to use their integrated chipsets. By offering the cheapest video cards on the market and likely offering package deals (CPU and GPU together) to drag the cost down further, there are a number of Benjamins on the line for the likes of Dell in using Intel's graphics chips.
Secondly, however, the "Average Joe" comes into play. Quite simply, very few people buy high-end video cards because no game makes use of it, and many people do not game on their computer (it's typically less expensive to game on a console). As much as I hate the "Average Joe" spiel, it fits perfectly with the graphics department.
The difference between my Radeon 9600 Pro and NVidia's latest offerings is surprisingly little, and I, a Slashdotting, video-gaming, computer nerd, will probably not be moving from my 9600 Pro until games come along that choke my system. Most users will probably just stop buying the latest games and wait several hardware revisions before becomming a gamer again, or they will buy a gaming console like everyone else, leaving their Intel chipset to crunch through webpages and Word documents.
The Political Programmer
If you look at these numbers you can't help but come to a completely different conclusion. I guess that -as always- you have to remember caveat emptor and YMMV!
The model name of the unit I linked to starts with DVR...
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I know this will never happen, because it would be a huge loss for the card manufacturers. Or maybe it will. Once upon a time, you bought computers with the CPU and RAM soldered to the motherboard (think pre-386 and some 386's). True, the was a socket for a math Co-processor, but often upgrading the CPU was out of the question. This is where we are with video cards now. The upgrade path is rather steep.
I'm waiting for the day when you buy a video card and then have the option of buying the fast processor, the really fast one, or the processor-thats-so-fast-it-melts-the-card, and then have the option of buying lots of RAM, a lot more RAM, or way too much RAM. Of course, I'll take option 3 :-)
Anyway, I know I'll update my video card a lot more often if that ever happens.
ATI nVidia
speed 10 9
price 5 5
heat 9 1
noise 9 2
features 10 9
TOTAL 43 26
Choose ATI.
Sure. If all you're looking for is umpty-bazillion frames a second, the 9800 is going to be what most power-gamers go drooling after.
But, until ATI can actually come out with a stable driver that works with all games and apps, neither I, nor anybody I know can, in good conscience, actually recommend an ATI card.
Additionally, if you want a decent 3D card for Linux, you can pretty much forget ATI.
And don't just take my word for it. Go browse around a few of the ATI-centric sites that cater to ATI's users. Take a look at the issues being raised.
And before some frothing fanboi starts yelling about driver cheats, DX9 compliance, etc...I acknowledge the issues with nVidia. But, even in the light of those issues, nVidia's drivers still work.
PERIOD.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well, if you follow the news, ATi is making the XBox 2 video chipset.
I guess I'll be getting my graphics cards from S3
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
1. ATI doesn't provide OSS drivers either.
2. OSS drivers would be nice from a philosophical point of view, but the fact that you get Linux drivers at all from NVIDIA is a damn good thing. They do care that Linux users use their products. There are infinitely many products out there that aren't OSS, and manufacturers/software companies and whatever that don't give a shit about even supporting Linux, so lets not push away people who are guardedly friendly towards us....
2. The NVIDIA drivers for Linux are pretty damn good, and more importantly are ultra stable in my experience both for home and professional use (much more so than ATIs offerings).
3. ATI will be making XBOX2's graphics cards...
Obviously there isn't any point in paying extra cash if you're not able to address more than 128MB of video memory. Know if there's anything like this for recent generation processors (either AMD or Intel?)
I had an NVIDIA TNT2M64 card in my computer for the longest time (well, a few years). Eventually I upgraded to a Radeon 7500 because there were a few games I wanted to play that the older card wouldn't.
I should have upgraded earlier. The difference was like a new monitor; text is much sharper on the new card. It's not even a genuine ATI part, but a cheaper (and slower clocked) Sapphire part. I've heard that the GF2MX parts are just about the worst you can get for blurry and washed out images. You may well find that a newer card offers better visuals on text and 2D graphics, as well as speed.
on technology im still running a TNT2, sigh cant do anything w/o money. sell plasma sounds like a plan to me. Tap a vein get paid
I just got the ATi 9800 Pro with Half-Life 2 included (DL later when available).
ATi has always had the best video quality but they always released buggy drivers that were updated every 5 months. Not any more.
New Catalyst drivers are released every other month and are no longer buggy.
The card's performance is outstanding. My card settings are 6X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering with all of the eye-candy. I run all my games at 1600x1200 and there is no stuttering at all.
Simply amazing.
If the time comes that ATI's Linux drivers actually get as good as NVidia's, there won't be any reason to buy NVidia cards anymore.
SiS- Dead S3 - Dead Matrox - Dead Trident - Dead There is a new up and coming one though that I guess has some of the engineers and such from SiS, Matrox, and Trident. They are based in Taiwan and are call XGI. There is more information including benchmarks on their beta board (keep in mind it is also with beta drivers). The gross things about their cards is that their high end model will require TWO!!!!!! molex connections. Considering the past failures of their engineers I can't say I have big hopes for this company.
Actually, there's a GeForce 4 4800 that you may have been unaware of.
seeing there's no such thing as a ti4300. There is a 4200 and a 4400.
*See Subject*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Wow you are correct. I didn't know about that. Has the 4800 always been around?
the FX series has full Direct X 9 support. This is mroe than just a little bit more ram. The new high end nVidia cards are not targeted toward 5900 owners, they're targeted at GeForce 4 owners who want more performance, and more new features.
Photos.
please review sites, include some last gen cards as a baseline, if only the GF4 and Rad8500.
I want 2D games back.
Maybe if all you're doing is playing the latest games.
Try actually using the Cats with older games, and several video-based apps.
The phrase that springs to mind is "Problems out the ying-yang"
*Edited for content*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
*nt*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
From DRI website:
----
nVidia
Status:
nVidia provides their own closed source, binary drivers and therefore nVidia cards are not supported by DRI.
Specifications:
Hardware specs are not available to the DRI developers.
-----
ATI
Status:
Supported chipsets:
* Mach64 (Rage Pro)
* Rage 128 (Standard, Pro, Mobility)
* Radeons up to R9200 are supported
Example graphics cards:
* Rage Fury
* Rage Magnum
* Xpert 2000
* Xpert 128
* Xpert 99
* All-in-Wonder 128
TVOut:
Check the GATOS project for video and TV capture and playback features of cards made by ATI.
Specifications:
ATI has a developer program. Specifications of all ATI cards up to the ATIRadeon R200 were made available to DRI developers under NDA on a individual basis. Please read carefully the NDA page before you consider applying.
>Well, if you follow the news, ATi is making the XBox 2 video chipset.
That's very bad. Microsoft ties strings to toes and pulls. Maybe Nvidia will turn around.
Look at some of the benchmarks in the article. Eratic isn't the word for it. While ATI has a clear gain with image quality settings, the FX 59x0 has a clear gain in OpenGL-based games. The Doom 3 benchmarks will be interesting.
I'm sure they'll get around to rewriting the electrical laws of physics one of these days.
-
Um.. No.
The best video quality (in the x86 market) has always been Matrox. They've just gotten themselves way behind the curve in terms of performance.
End of line..
Nvidia really isn't close to being put out of business. Sure, ATI's $500 card is slightly better than Nvidia's $500 card, but guess what, very few people spend $500 on a video card. Look at the GFFX 5700 Ultra vs Radeon 9600XT if you want to see a more mainstream comparison. Nvidia is very competitive in the mainstream market where are the business is at. Oh, and if you are running anything other than Windows you might want to go grab a Nvidia card because their drivers are still better than anything ATI has for Linux/BSD.
It's just the Ti4600 with 8x AGP.
ATI is Made in Canada!
AVOID!
What happened to SourceForge today? It is still unreachable...
A margin that small will not put them out of business, unless the gap grows larger in future cards.
You have a point, but it only works in terms of people upgrading, for example, from the ATI 9800Pro to the ATI 9800XT, or the 9700 to the 9800XT, or the GeForce4 5800 to the 9800XT, so on and so forth.
What you're not taking into account is that most people (even the majority of the "hardcore") don't upgrade in those kinds of tiny increments. Most people will tend to upgrade about once a year (or when they notice a performance drop in new games), in which case they WILL get a significant performance boost from the newest card. It's also worth noting that none of the crazy high-end, hotly anticipated DX9 games (Half-Life 2 and Doom 3) have even hit the market yet, which has probably delayed the upgrades of the majority even further.
In short, the longer ATI stays on top the higher their market share will grow. After all, it worked for Nvidia. Two years ago, a hardcore gamer wouldn't have wasted their bodily fluids to spit on ATI's cards - now they're the performance leader and those same hardcore gamers are either buying ATI cards or at least considering it.
The situation will probably be different again in another two years because it's a dynamic business. The question is whether or not Nvidia is set up well enough to stay in the game if they continue to be in second place. I don't know myself, since I'm not a business analyst. It sure is fun to watch, though. :)
How long before one of these cards needs its own direct line to the wall plug? The only trickey part I see is fitting the Belden connector on the card's mounting bracket.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But with a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra in your computer, it will feel like the summer games.
But, until ATI can actually come out with a stable driver that works with all games and apps, neither I, nor anybody I know can, in good conscience, actually recommend an ATI card.
Oh, stop trolling. Have you even tried any of the 3.x Catalyst series? When 3.0 hit, the driver quality matched that of the Detonators and has ever since.
I have never had a single problem with any driver compatibility except with Enter the Matrix on my Mobility Radeon 7500. All the textures were being misaligned. With the latest drivers, they suddenly started working. And my card's not even a supported card.
"Sufferin' succotash."
You are right most people don't upgrade in tiny increments. If I was going to upgrade tomorrow, I'd do some research and note that Nvidia and ATI cards had roughly the same performance, with ATI's slightly faster. But since they were so close I would base the purchasing decision mostly on price. Are ATI's cards significantly cheaper than NVidia's? I have no idea, I haven't looked it up.
Also you say HL2 and Doom 3 are DX9 games.
As far as I know, ID used OpenGL in GLQuake, in Quake 2, and in Quake 3. As far as I know they will continue to use OpenGL, esp. since they port their games to Mac and Linux. Has this changed? And what is the relationship these days between DX9 and OpenGL. I would've thought they are totally seperate.
Then there's this endless fascination with how many FPS you can get on some antique game. That's not what it's about. The question is how detailed a scene you can render at full frame rate.
WARNING: link of g**tse type, proceed at own risk!
So being one of these humble 5, I must say that I am very happy about that I now have a job, and that I am better than 4 American men. My many wives think that of me also. Thankyou.
While the nvidia article is a little old, there is an interesting article about a new company called 'XGI', which was formed when SiS spun off its graphics division Xabre. According to THG cards based on XGI chips could arrive within one or two months and their top model could retail for a good $100-200 less than the flagship models of NVIDIA or ATi. The article includes a review of the prototype card called 'Volari Duo V8 Ultra' based on the XGI chip.
My apologies. You're right about Doom 3. I was referring to the capabilities of DX9 as opposed to DX8, and those differences translate to some extent to features currently available in OpenGL. Saying "DX9" was just a convenient frame of reference for me (being a Windows foo'). :)
I am a Linux user, how many fps can i get on tuxracer with this card? Should I stay with my Rage128 with 32Mb?
Gee, I upgrade about once every 3.5 - 4 years... That Radeon 9700 I bought last January is still pretty sweet, and I expect it'll last a few years too.
see subject.
Yup, that's wayyy better than NVidia's weenie one-reboot per driver scheme
Searching for which drivers suck less is an exercise in futility... all I can find is anecdotal evidence on either side (the anecdotal evidence seems to favour the nVidia drivers, but gets less conclusive if you weed out the older stuff).
I wish one of these freakin' hardware benchmarking sites would stop bragging about how they spend the last month running the latest set of benchmarks on every graphics card under the sun (which are probably misleading and completely inaccurate due to driver cheats anyhow) (and if they just used a reference platform and stuck to it for a year they wouldn't have to re-run everything every time a new card came out, anyway). A stable driver is worth *way* more than an improvement in framerates...
Tom? Anand? Anyone? Please? Let me know which drivers suck less for 3dsmax and Maya?
Your card will not run Doom 3 well. What will you do now?
And quiet is even better.
Quite.
Most western urban lifestyles are full with consumption products whose production is very earth raping.
Some cheeky people managed to run a benchmark...
4 920 9
Here...
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12
Also details and possible specs here....
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=116
Looks quite nice! Let's see what the prices are like.... If they're good (compared to nV & ATi) then SiS/Xabre will likely have a volume seller. Nice. This graphics war has got boring. 2 "competitors" and the prices and features are more or less the same.... Mind you, that was garaunteed! It's a tech race which seem to based on who falls first....
"None of this shit works" -W.Shatner
As IBM is gonna make the processors for Xbox. Tough choice here fellas. They support both Linux and MS.
With All-In-Wonder cards and v3.9 drivers, OpenGL games no long work (crashes). See this thread.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Linux drivers do work, but they aren't easy to install and setup. It is not impossible.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
We can not demand that companies release their products open source, but we can support the companies that actually choose to take the time to develop drivers for Linux.
I do not own an ATI card, so I'm not sure how their Linux driver support is, but from their homepage I get their impression that they link to an OSS project instead of distributing their own driver.
This I think hurts the OSS community, that hardware companies get the impression: "We don't have to write drivers for Linux, they can do that themselves". When I spend my money I want a complete product, not something that requires me to run Windows or unsupported 3rd party linux drivers.
One thing you don't see in these reviews is how compatible the cards are. I bought a 9800 Pro and am kicking myself for it ever since. I get better FPS in Half Life mods with my GF2. I've actually reinstalled my GF2 to play Half life, and my $300 dollar card is just sitting on a shelf. Like most problems, not everyone has it, but if X video card has problems with Y game, you may want to factor that into your buying decision. Just go to support forums for the card you are interested in, and if you see a 41 page monster of a thread on problems with the game you want to play like this one for Half Life: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&thre adid=33718666
You might reconsider.
Tom's Hardware (and other sites, of course) regularly do a "all-in-one" review with benchmarks, e.g.:
d ex.html
http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030714/in
Just browse to the "benchmarks" section of that review, and you can compare all the cards (not the latest, though - the review is from July, so the e.g. the Nvidia 5950 and the 9800XT is not in there).
Much to the delight of any possible Xbox2 Linux porting effort... Such a porting effort would love OSS drivers.
I have the MSI 5900 ultra and it makes less noise than my GF3 TI500.
Rather than relying on third person, buy it and try it out. My first experience was with ATI was me being extravagent and buying the original radeon aiw. Dismal drivers. Tried ATI again with a 9500. Again, dismal drivers. Returned it, and got a $70 gf4 that actually works.
I suppose I'll check out ATI's stuff again(why I bother considering what I know of them..), but until they deliver functioning drivers at THE TIME OF PURCHASE, their stuff will keep going back to the store.
Because ati will be doing xbox, don't buy a nvidia card for a pc. Riiiight. The logic of
a teenager I bet.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
"NVidia develops a driver for Linux, that is better than 99% of the companies out there."
There are a number of companies supporting Linux drivers - and they release GPL code. Intel is great example.
"We can not demand that companies release their products open source, but we can support the companies that actually choose to take the time to develop drivers for Linux."
We can demand that hardware companies release their programming info. Whether they do or not is up to them. If they don't, we should refuse to buy.
Is your car bonnet welded shut ? Or can you open it up and play with it ? Since you own it, that is, you aren't licensing it from the car manufacturer, you should be able to do what ever you like with it, including pouring sugar in the petrol tank. If you choose to, that is up to you. The car manufacturer doesn't care what you do with their car, as it's yours - they have made their money. Set it on fire for all they care.
You own your video card, you don't license it from NVidia. You should be able to have access to the programming information, so that you can do what ever you like with it.
"I do not own an ATI card, so I'm not sure how their Linux driver support is, but from their homepage I get their impression that they link to an OSS project instead of distributing their own driver."
I'm not sure how that is a bad thing. OSS is good. The Linux kernel was developed using OSS methods. Are you somehow disagreeing with OSS methods, yet at the same time happy to benefit from OSS products such as Linux ?
What is wrong with OSS drivers ? If they failed on you, did you go looking for a solution ? Did you report the fault to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, or report it to the driver maintainer ?
"This I think hurts the OSS community, that hardware companies get the impression: "We don't have to write drivers for Linux, they can do that themselves".
Excellent. I'm happy with that. OSS drivers are usually better. And if they aren't, somebody, in fact, anybody, with access to the source code, can improve them. Everybody has access to the source code, so they are a potential candidate to improve them. Even you could if you have the right programming talent and skills.
"When I spend my money I want a complete product, not something that requires me to run Windows or unsupported 3rd party linux drivers."
I'd like you to think about what happens to the NVidia binary drivers once the NVidia hardware becomes obselete, say in 3 years time. NVidia won't continue to maintain binary drivers forever - it costs them money. Eventually they won't want to wear the continued support costs, and just stop developing them or fixing bugs. You will end up with "unsupported 3rd party linux drivers".
If they open up the hardware specs, the community can take over. If they open up the specs from day one, the community is better prepared and more willing to take over, because they know and are happy with the code base, because they wrote it.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
& why not? this stuff is unbreakable, wwworks on several (more than 3) dimensions, & there's never a liesense feechurn/cover charge to restrict yOUR progress.
the daze of the greed/fear/ego based felonious payper liesense ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys stock markup fraud execrable, is WANing into coolapps/the abyss, at the (increasing) speed of right.
talk about pressure? those fauxking foulcurrs on wall street of deceit/capitollist hill, are having a whoreabull time attempting to hide the news (buy use of phonIE scriptdead ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys) of their felonious payper liesense billyonerrors' latest softwar gangster hostage taking attempts, &/or the adolescent dictator megalomania of the georgewellian fuddites/walking dead perpetraitors of the greed/fear/ego based life0cide against humankind.
there's a real risk of overheating (peacing off) the main processor. you don't want that?
for each of the creators' innocents harmed, there is a badtoll that must/will be repaid by you/US, as the aforementioned walking dead will not be available to make reparations, when the big flash occurs.
the lights are coming up now. consultations are in order. you know where to look/who to trust? see you there? tell 'em robbIE?
yes, yes, i'm sure it's a wonderful review and all, very informative. i was a bit, um, distracted, however. so my real question i'm taking away from this story is: how do we get the model in the front of the Tom's review up for Miss Digital World? whew...
ATi's unstable drivers have become a bit of an urban legend. Yes, we all know that ATi's drivers were piss-poor back in the Rage 128 days. But if you've used ATi cards recently you'll probably notice an improvement. Their drivers have been steadily improving ever since they moved to an integrated architecture, and they're now pretty solid.
I've been using ATi cards since the Catylist 3.2 drivers and and they've been very stable for me. I only get lockups when I do something stupid, like try to render a vertex array from unassigned memory, or bind a texture which doesn't exist; which I think is probably fair enough.
That's the windows drivers anyway. The Linux drivers are another thing entirely.
With many tests falling to last place, being edged out by ATi 9500 and 9600 products, so I hope they can fix things before going to market.
The fact that they are using SiS's and Trident's technologies doesn't inspire me. Both have had a knack for making a great deal of fuss about how much their graphics product will dominate the industry, and then fall flat on their face with effectively last year's product.
I often try to root for the underdog but too often they simply don't have what it takes to compete well.
They have major, minor, and speed release cycles. Every couple years you have a major release cycle. The GeForce FX, or ATi 9700 would be an example. So would the GeForce 3. This is when they go to a new architecture with majorly different feautres. Fore example the GeForce 3 instroduced (for the nVidia line) programmable pixel and vertex shaders.
Well, within those major releases, they also have minor releases. The ATi 9800 or the GeForce 4 would be an example of that. Both had some actual different features over their predicessors,but only minor ones. The platform with still fundimentally the same. Both the GF3 and 4 are DirectX 8 cards and there is no real important feature difference between them.
Then there are the little speed releases. This is when they just bump speeds up, or release a slower economy version, maybe move to a smaller fabrication process, etc. The GeForce 3 Ti lines were an example of that. Two new cards. Totally functionally equivalant to the orignal 3, one was just slower, and one faster.
The problem 3dfx had was they, literally, kept remaking the same Voodoo chip over and over again. The Voodoo2 was the orignal chip, with support for 3 texture units, though only 2 were ever implemented (the orignal acutally supported 2 and some Quantum 3d units implemented both), SLI and a higher clock speed. The Voodoo 3 was just all 3 Voodoo 2 chips on a single chip with a higher clock speed and a larger unified ram. And there it sat for a long time.
That's why they had their problems. BEcause all the while nVidia and ATi were moving up, in line with DirectX increases. The TNT2 was the last DirectX 6 card from nVidia. The GeForce was a DX7 card and supported the fixed function T&L unit that implied. Then when the GeForce 2 was out and the 3 was nearing completion, the VSA-100 that composed the Voodoo 4 and 5 came out. Basically, it was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have any of the new DirectX 7 or upcomming 8 features. It was also a return to the expensive multi-chip designa nd non-shared memory. So while it had neet feautres like FSAA, it was too expesnvie and too dated to really make a big showing. Then The GeForce 3 and DX8 came out. This introduced a programmable T&L line (programmable pixel and vertex shaders). This was something really worht having and completely out of the question for VSA-100 anytime soon. PLus the 3 was quite a bit faster and it ALSO did all the FSAA stuff. It was done for 3dfx soon afterwards (they also made some other mistakes along the line like buying STB).
No, nVidia has kept up well with the technology trends. The FX series are just as capale as the Radeon series, function wise. However, they've lost their crown as speed king, ATi is offering a better preice/performance ratio AND a higher high end right now, though not a whole lot. Couple tha with ATi drivers that finally work right, and nVidia is threatened. But, it's not the same as with 3dfx. nVidias products are still competitive, and they still have new designs in the pipe, not just rehashes of what they've got now. Doesn't mean they won't get run out of bussiness, but means they have a fighting chance at least.
The problem with a benchmark like this is that UT2003 is a DX8-level game, so it doesn't take really take full advantage of these newer cards as it doesn't use features such as PS2.0. We're not really going to know how the two brands truly stack up until next-gen games (Doom 3, HL2, etc.) which take full advantage of the hardware start to show up.
:)
Early indicators seem to be that nVidia's cards struggle to handle DX9-level pixel shaders. While I'm taking the pre-release benchmarks on HL2 from Valve with a grain of salt, the Aquanox (DX9) benchmark and comments I've read from John Carmack as well as others seem to echo the fact that nVidia's hardware's just not up to snuff when it comes to next generation performance. IE: nVidia's cards are fine for anything that's out now, but if you want to hold onto a card for a couple of years, I'd stay away personally.
Let me also add in a disclaimer that I've been a long time fan of nVidia's hardware, having owned a TNT2, GF2, and GF4 previously. In fact, I'd sworn off ATI as crap back in the days of the Rage and it's absolutely horrendous drivers. So let's just say it wasn't an easy decision for me when time to upgrade rolled around this time and I ended up going with a Radeon 9600 Pro.
And since you asked, I'm not sure about Matrox (I assume they're still around), but S3 was recently revived from the dead. It seems they were bought out by VIA when they went bankrupt, who continued development of the hardware, and we'll be seeing a new chip from them called Delta Chrome sometime in the next few months. All the rumblings I've heard have indicated that this thing could be competitive with nVidia and ATI in the low and mid-range market segments. This should be interesting to watch play out.
I'm sold on ATi's new drivers. Been a longtime nVidia fan (since the GeForce DDR) and still use them in most of my systems, but I think ATi is ready for prime time. Thus far on the two systems with 9800s in them, I've seen no crashing (at all, not just none that appears to be GFX related) and no visual flaws in any of the games tried.
I completely agree wtih you, I want a card that WORKS, and if it has to be slower for that, so be it. However I now feel, and this is a first for me, that ATi can make that claim as well, at least with their lastest gen hardware.
Now please not this is all from a Win NT (as in 2000/XP based systems) perspective. I've never messed with ATi on Linux or Win9x. All our Linux boxes still use nVidia hardware and we just don't do 9x.
Actually, the thing that is saving nVidia nowadays is the release of the Detonator 52.16 driver for Windows 2000/XP.
Not only did they fix a lot of weird bugs that plagued earlier releases, but also the new driver has actually made nVidia's latest cards run quite fast with excellent 3-D graphics quality.
I think nVidia will probably within six months introduce a whole new line of graphics chipsets that will probably beat ATI's, mostly because nVidia is aware of the known weaknesses of their current chipsets and will redesign them for faster performance everywhere.
I see I'm not the only one. Running 'nv' because the binary drivers eventually lock up 'X' (and in the past the whole machine). Especially GNOME, and Mozilla(1). I guess that people haven't sufficiently learned their lessons from the Windows world, and wish to repeat it in the Linux world.
(1) When has anyone had this much grief with 'nv'?
I know of lots of problems with Nvidia drivers, trouble was, most were never the official release.
In fact, its common on many message boards for people to be guinea pigs for the lastest dot release.
This is actually another great thing about Nvidia (I don't know if ATI ever followed suit - I avoid their cards like the plague after my friends experience) in that you can get all these special versions to toy with. Sure your helping them debug it, but hey, you benefit too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"We've been over this:"
Yes we have. When will you actually listen?
"1) An OpenGL driver is an entire OpenGL implementation. Its not like a NIC where the whole thing is small, hardware-specific, and mostly useless to any other manufacturer. There is tons of stuff in there that ATI would love to get their hands on."
You're *assuming* that everyone else is incapable of deriving this information. History show that's a poor assumption to make, especially when money's involved.
"2) Apparently, NVIDIA's hardware interface is very different from most current 3D hardware. Read the XFree86 mailing lists sometime. They feel that it is different enough to be worth protecting."
Well they're entitled to "feel" anything they want. Doesn't mean they're correct.
"3) There's IP in there that's not NVIDIA's to open-source."
Let's see is that SGI, or Microsoft? Intellectual *Property* changes hands as much as the real thing.
"4) ATI's latest drivers are binary-only as well."
Yup. Do as others do is a valid reason. Excuse me while I go oppress a foreign country.
"GPL'ed drivers are nice, but OSS'ing GPL drivers are nothing like OSS'ing other types of drivers. When you get stories about Adobe, you rarely see posts demanding that they open-source the program, and the NVIDIA situation is really no different."
Adobe not open sourcing their code doesn't represent a loss of control of my machine. You think that what happens in the Windows world would have driven the point home? Apparently not. Does NVIDIA (or anyone else for that matter) have to fall behind on revisions, or stop releasing updates when your card hits their idea of EOL (Aureal), or give you the run around with driver issues (Guillmont), or they try to force you to update, even when what you have works just fine (don't put out an update for W2K), just so they can sell you the newest, or just go out of business, or get bought up? Does any of that need to happen before you start understanding why binary drivers are both a bad idea, and are NOT the same thing as higher level software?
Prove to me that you can learn from history, and will not repeat it.
"On a seperate point there is no reason why Nvidia should GLP their drivers. They belong to them and it is their work and that is that. They have every right to protect their work. (I do not say it wouldnt be nice to have them open, but hey WTF!) To demand these things is impolite."
Of course, but let's not pretend that that decision doesn't have consequences. And *asking* that they open source their drivers is no more impolite, than someone asking that they add feature this or that. We are as much *consumers* as any Windows user, with the same rights.
Apple, meet orange. (as another slashdot poster well put it)
"Is your car bonnet welded shut ? Or can you open it up and play with it ? Since you own it, that is, you aren't licensing it from the car manufacturer, you should be able to do what ever you like with it, including pouring sugar in the petrol tank. If you choose to, that is up to you. The car manufacturer doesn't care what you do with their car, as it's yours - they have made their money. Set it on fire for all they care."
i think this is a bad example. It would be more like everyone having the capability to replicate/duplicate and distribute a car based on the modification of a single engine mold, that costs nothing but time to modify. After that that mold can reproduce as many offshoots of that car as wanted, at 0 cost, metal, machining , painting and deployment don't cost a penny, or at least you can mass distribute through at a cost of 20-39 dollars per month fixed.
Using soft and hard good comparisons is apples and oranges. no matter how you look at it.
i am not saying I agree or disagree. (well, I guess if my wallet is an indicater, I strongly agree as looking whats in my computer). If you want open source drivers, i am sure you can find one that was released for your old Trident hardware. who knows. If youw ant bleeding edge, you have your choices of 2 companies, and binary drivers. I am happy that both companies are supporting ANY amount of time into a market that has 5% (+- 2%) desktop marketshare. I commend them actually for making such a silly business decision, because they know how strongly the community feels about it.
"I think nVidia will probably within six months introduce a whole new line of graphics chipsets that will probably beat ATI's, mostly because nVidia is aware of the known weaknesses of their current chipsets and will redesign them for faster performance everywhere."
Maybe, but then that prediction depends on everyone else staying were they are. Not a wise thing to do in any market, but especially video.
Parent post is a troll.
First, you dont have to uninstall their drivers to put new ones in.
Second, ATI's most recent drivers all have the option of being downloaded as a single file, so you dont have to reboot twice to install new drivers.
Third, the DX9 argument isnt even related to ATI, its a microsoft issue.
In the end, you only really need one reboot.
Drivers.
Add at least 10 to previous score for Nvidia. Add a big fat goose egg for ATI. That brings the scores to within reasonable distance again.
Not as great a difference as you might have us believe. To this day, when I build a system, I can't in good conscience build one with an ATI card because of its continued driver instability with WinXP. When my video editing clients are trying to run a production environment, either a high-end GeForce or Quadro will go in because of the simplicity and universality of the drivers. Add that to the fact that Nvidia still supports in their drivers cards as old as the Riva TNT2, as opposed to ATI's famous abandonment of older products in newer OSes (and shoddy Linux support either), and you may not even be able to keep that card as long as you might want to.
damn that was fun
You seriously cannot expect NVidia to release their IP simply so a handful of people can hack around with the Linux drivers. 99.99% of us really don't give a damn that we can't modify the drivers - only that they work.
Your 'car bonnet' argument is ridiculous. Releasing fully-featured open source drivers would be nearly as bad as releasing the design for the GPU - it's showing everyone a significant part of what makes them money.
The NVidia Linux drivers are simply excellent, and provide among the best 3D support you can get for Linux. Some people are never happy.
It almost always seems to be an AGP chipset issue with nvidias binary crapware. Since I changed mother boards from an oldish VIA chipset to a newish one, I've not had any lockups from the binary drivers.
But I still resent them...
Epic's Mark Rein confirmed that in some cases, high-res detail textures were not displayed in some areas by ATis drivers and that standard, lower-res textures are used instead. Randy Pitchford of the Halo development team also mentioned that there were optimizations present in ATi's drivers which are detrimental to Halo's image quality. However, Randy didn't want to go into more detail here. Finally, Massive's new DX9 benchmark, AquaMark 3, also displayed some irregularities of ATi drivers in the overdraw test.
This page shows some screenshots that do seem to show that ATI is cheating. And, part of the conclusion:
The irregularities ATi's drivers allegedly display in AquaMark 3 and UT2003 require further investigation. Factors such as image quality, driver reliability, and compatibility are hard to convey in a review anyway. Then again, game developers such as Gearbox (Halo), Epic (Unreal Tournament), and EA (Battlefield 1942) all give NVIDIA good grades in this respect. Surely, NVIDIA's close contact with game developers will help to improve the image quality and the performance of current and future DX9 games even further.
Even more interesting, Nvidia is touting a new policy and procedure for dirver optimizations. Details are here. In summary:
These are NVIDIAs optimization guidelines for driver developers:
An optimization must not contain pre-computed state
So far, this kind of self-imposed discipline in the form of rules and mechanisms are unique within the industry.
/. headlines. Then even more front-page attention (2 stories) was garnered by Nvidia's dubious benchmark optimizations earlier this year. Here we have some pretty compelling evidence that ATI is still cheating at the numbers game, while Nvidia seems to have had enough. Wonder why this wasn't mentioned in the summary? It's a lot more interesting than benchmarks showing ATI and Nvidia neck-and-neck throughout.
When ATI first cheated way back when, it hit the
everything in moderation
What can be cutting edge about a video card? A video card, well, pushes video to a monitor. What kind of "features" are you looking for? Ideally a video card should be 100% transparent to the user. Personally, I don't want features on my video card. Quite honestly, I don't even want to know it's there.
Most of us can't afford the new tech every time it comes out, so we grab on to any excuse*ahem*good reason to justify upgrading we can.
Myself, I bought a GF4 that very much definetly had a fan on the board in the picture in the box, but when I got it home; no fan. It works ok, but doesn't tolerate overclocking too well.Eh, that's just as well, since the board it replaced roasted after the fan died.
mmmm... burning geforce....Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
...if only for their heat sink designs
My friend bought parts yesterday and is having me put the thing together. The salesmen must have seen him coming, because they sold him an MSI NBox GeForce FX5900, for $530.
This thing looks neat. It has TWO fans and heatsinks, one on the back and one on the front. With real copper. Unfortunately, it wouldn't fit into the case. The heatsink on the back wanted the same space as the motherboard's northbridge heat sink.
Looking in the manual, it seems that the back heatsink was designed to be user removable, without voiding warranty. So I go remove it, damaging one of those pins holding it on. This forced me to repair it so the front heatsink won't fall off.
Did my friend get any money back for not using the back heatsink? Of course not! From the looks of things, I suspect 75% or more users have to remove it. That's not a good design.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Buy something with the intent of trying it out and returning it if it doesn't work. Forums and reviews are a hint but with so much fud they spew, if you really want to know you have to try it yourself.
"Why do they put the world's cheapest fans on these things? Saving 10 cents can't be worth the warranty replacements when these things burn themselves out."
Oh I can't image why manufacturers would be cheap when it comes to parts.
"You seriously cannot expect NVidia to release their IP simply so a handful of people can hack around with the Linux drivers. 99.99% of us really don't give a damn that we can't modify the drivers - only that they work."
And when they don't? What does that do to your argument against? You have no fallback. We with our "hacked" drivers do. I see no one's learned their lesson on the Windows side.
"Your 'car bonnet' argument is ridiculous. Releasing fully-featured open source drivers would be nearly as bad as releasing the design for the GPU - it's showing everyone a significant part of what makes them money."
Two things.
1-The hardware makes them money. No hardware? No money.
2-You only have their (both of them) words that that is indeed the case. Were's the independent proof that everything's in the pudding?
You'd think Slashdoters would learn to be better skeptics.
" You seriously cannot expect NVidia to release their IP simply so a handful of people can hack around with the Linux drivers. 99.99% of us really don't give a damn that we can't modify the drivers - only that they work."
I'd think 99.99% figure is way too high - do you have some sort of survey results ? There are a huge number of Linux users who care whether their hardware has GPL drivers or not.
I'd be of the opinion it is only the people who have started using Linux in the last 3 or so years that don't care. I'd suspect most of them are NVidia owners.
Linux has been available since at least 1992 - which was when I started using it. Subtracting 3 years from 2003, that leaves an 8 year period, where the majority, if not all Linux users have had to use, rely on, and come to believe in OSS device drivers.
Linux is the result of a philosophy - OSS. If you don't believe in the philosophy, I struggle to understand how you can be comfortable benefitting from it.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
someone touched a nerve too close to someones new religion.. OK, time for you to go back outside and chew on some bark. Oh, and in your zen way.
ps. don't forget to prayers to your holistic god, the squirl.
We are talking drivers with GL acceleration here. What you show are plain vanila 2d drivers. NVIDIA is the only company for good Linux 3d cards. Nothing else even comes close. All of my computers run NVIDIA. ATI is simply not an option with Linux. And I know full well that the various documents are written by people that do not own the cards, use them to start up KDE and report status. We are talking about cards that CAN actually play 3d games under Linux. ATI is NOT an option.
XiG has a pretty damn good Linux X server, which supports ATI in all its glory (apparently better than XFree86 does). http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/atilinux_o ct03/ati_linux_comp_oct03.html
No, I don't work for XiG.
There is another factor to consider that has different ramifications for Linux users. Should I buy a kick-ass card today it will someday seem like my Matrox G200 -- still solid, respectable, and capable of doing everything it could when I first bought it but outdated. I can't use it to play America's Army. Still, it calls to me from its anti-static baggie: "Put me to work. I'm still good at what I can do." Any R300/R350 will eventually say the same thing... and I doubt there will ever be a DRI driver for my Ti4200.
Yup, I own a Ti4800 card from XFX. This baby is a standard Ti4800 on steroids; it comes overclocked to 620 Mhz out of the box.
Actually, I replaced a low-end Geforce FX card for this one (don't play many DX9 games anyway).