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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!
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.
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.
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)
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.
Lets see:
Extasy GeForce 3: after 8 months the fan fails and it burns out the network card two slots over. Geforce survives. Fan replacement arrives and its still running to this day.
Chaintech Geforce 4: after 3 months the fan fails and burns out the video card itself. Still waiting to hear back from chaintech for warranty service.
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.
You can see this demonstrated on the page you linked to which says that the Dish PVR's 250-GB hard drive can store 25 hours of HDTV while the MyHD FAQ (a popular HDTV tuner card) lists the card as storing HDTV signals at a rate of 9.4 GB/hour.
As to why current HD recorders (both PC-based and stand-alone D-VHS) can't take satellite signals, it's because DirecTV and DishNetwork use a different signal from the OTA standard (FCC-mandated) 8VSB modulation. So, somewhat like NTSC VCRs and DVRs, you can't store the raw (compressed) satellite signal unless the unit is integrated or a method is provided by which the compressed signal can be transmitted (after the actual demodulation of the original satellite transmission) to the outside recording unit.
This is where the IEEE-1394 (Firewire) interface on the new Dish DVR 921 will eventually (when the software is enabled) comes in. It will have at least the ability to connect to a D-VHS VCR so that HDTV programs can be permanently archived (compressed, of course). It *may* (given the right software on the PC) be able to connect to a computer so that the compressed stream can be dumped to a PC hard drive/server. Of course, such a PC would need either decoding software (and a pretty decent amount of power) or a decoder card like the MyHD to decode the stream.
As I read back over this, it may be even more confusing, so I'll sum up:
1. As it currently stands, no high-definition recording solution decodes and then re-encodes before saving to hard drive. This is done a) to reduce the hardware overhead and b) because there are no current consumer-level hardware HDTV encoding solutions.
2. The DishNetwork PVR you mentioned (again, the 921) WILL have the capability, through Firewire, to connect to outside HDTV recording solutions - at least D-VHS and very likely PCs.
Hope that helps! :)
Unfortunately that probably isn't feasible with the current stat of things. You see the memory bus is pushed to it's absolute limits as it is with the chips soldered to the PCB, a socket connection would degrade the signal enough you wouldn't be able to run the memory bus nearly as fast. Not to mention a socket system that could even come close to the 700+MHz bus speeds we currently see would be prohibitively expensive.
What we can hope for is the return of SLI type configurations when PCI-X becomes the card interface of choice and MBs support multiple full speed slots (yep, initialy PCI-X motherboards will only have one 16x slot).
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..
We've been over this:
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.
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.
3) There's IP in there that's not NVIDIA's to open-source.
4) ATI's latest drivers are binary-only as well.
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.
NVIDIA is still my manufacturer of choice. I've got half a dozen of their cards. ATI's Linux drivers are still much slower than their Windows drivers. I see no point in being a second-class citizen with the graphics hardware I buy. Especially not when I have an excellent alternative.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
Why then have I seen the majority of Dells with Radeon 7500 or 9000s (in Optiplex systems) and NVidia GeForce 4s (in Dimensions)?
Dell picks the Intel integrated solution when it has a low cost system where anything besides displaying Word documents isn't in the machine's target market. This is only one market that Dell sells to. They do produce something besides the sub-$700 PC.
ATI doesnt actually produce their cards. They develop a reference implementation and license it out to manufacturers. One of the few places the manufactureres are allowed to differentiate from the reference model is the cooling system. This means you get what you pay for. The cheapest cooling solutions come with the cheapest cards. The blame for your problem here is entirely with Apple, for choosing a crappy fan. It's also worth pointing out that the fans arent always neccesary. The fan on my Abit Geforce 4 Ti 4200 died and it ran for months before I even noticed.
no high-definition recording solution decodes and then re-encodes before saving to hard drive
I think maybe we're both confused.
Right now, if I to hook up a TiVO to my digital cable system, the cable box decodes the MPEG, gives it to my TiVO, which ends up re-encoding it before saving it to the disk. This sucks.
The same happen would happen with digital satellite, with one notable exception that I'm aware of: DirecTV and TiVO jointly produce a unit which saves the MPEG stream directly to the disk.
This is how I want to see it being done for HDTV.
What you're talking about doesn't exist... where are you getting these signals from? Over the air? That doesn't interest me. I'm not going to invest the kind of cash to make this work just so I can watch CBS broadcast in HD.
What else are you going to plug your PC HDTV card into? As you point out yourself, the signals fed by cable/satellite are going to be different, and even if they weren't, they are going to be encrypted or whatever.
So while you may be correct on the technical specifics here, I think you're missing my point. To be able to actually watch something, I'm going to have to go with a solution that the satellite/cable companies offer or endorse.
And the unit I linked to earlier is far better than using the standard tuner the cable/satellite co. gives you, and then plugging that into a HD PVR.
Because the signal gets encoded twice.
Right?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Yes it does (and my ReplayTV works the same way). And it's NTSC, having nothing to do with HDTV.
The same happen would happen with digital satellite, with one notable exception that I'm aware of: DirecTV and TiVO jointly produce a unit which saves the MPEG stream directly to the disk
Your one notable exception isn't the only one. The same thing happens on DishNetwork with their PVR501/721 line (the 721 was the full-featured dual-tuner big dog before the HDTV-capable 921). The reason that it doesn't happen outside of satellite right now is because the vast majority of channels are NTSC, and NTSC channels aren't "naturally" compressed. Thus, if you want this kind of capability with current digital cable/satellite, yes, you have to go proprietary.
This is how I want to see it being done for HDTV.
You listed the DVR721 from DishNetwork which IS that way. DirecTV I'm sure will be releasing a similar unit at some point. What's the question again?
What you're talking about doesn't exist... where are you getting these signals from? Over the air? That doesn't interest me. I'm not going to invest the kind of cash to make this work just so I can watch CBS broadcast in HD.
What are you referring to? Everything I described in my post exists. There are currently at least two over-the-air PC HDTV card solutions that I know of, both of which can interface with D-VHS recorders. The DVR921 (again, YOUR example) is planned to be able to interface via Firewire with a D-VHS VCR, allowing you to archive HDTV programs on tape. It's not a stretch at all to assume that this will probably be compatible with PCs in the same fashion. Again, at all points until actual viewing, the MPEG-2 HDTV stream will REMAIN compressed.
Keep in mind that when I talk about signal modulation (8VSB and whatever the satellite companies are using - I can't recall the acronym off the top of my head), that's different from MPEG-2 compression. The former is the method by which the latter is transmitted through the atmosphere - once it hits the satellite or set-top box it is DEmodulated (before being decompressed) into the MPEG-2 stream. That stream can then be read and decoded by any HD-capable MPEG-2 decoder, whether it ends up on a satellite box hard drive (in the case of the DVR921), a D-VHS video tape or a PC hard drive. HDCP (high-definition copy protection which the MPAA is trying to force on everyone) adds a layer of complexity, but the basics I describe still hold true as long as the decoder can handle and pass HDCP.
And the unit I linked to earlier is far better than using the standard tuner the cable/satellite co. gives you, and then plugging that into a HD PVR.
I will only say that not once in my post did I describe anything like a standalone HD PVR. You're reading something that isn't there.
I'm fully aware that people will need to go through a cable or satellite box to receive all the available HD signals (right now, about half). That's no different, really, than the way the current NTSC signals are handled - I can't watch ESPN, Comedy Central, etc. without having a satellite decoder and most digital cable systems have the same limitation (though in many cases cable companies are required to offer a basic analog package that doesn't require a box).
Again, summing up: You seem to be confused as to what the DishNetwork DVR921 is capable of. Specifically, it can receive and store both NTSC and HDTV signals via satellite and "over the air" (regular broadcast networks). Said signals can then be decoded immediately for viewing and/or stored (BEFORE decoding) on the hard drive. With the Firewire, once it is enabled, it will be able to send the STILL-COMPRESSED recorded streams to other devices (such as a PC or D-VHS VCR) for archiving.
As to other devices that are available, they are indeed all restricted to over-the-air broadcasts unless they are sent a stream from a cable/satellite device such as the DVR921.
It's funny that you should mention this... 3dfx's last card (the Voodoo 5 6000 which never ended up making it's way into the consumer channels) did EXACTLY this. It required that you plug it into the wall via it's own external power cable. Not even hooking it up to your power supply was enough at that point (which the Voodoo 5 5500 and some modern cards require).
And for those of you not in the know, nVidia of course bought out 3dfx. And shortly thereafter (6-12 months I'd say), nVidia's products really did seem to start inheriting the flaws of that later generation of Voodoo's that helped to kill off 3dfx. Things like excess heat, power consumption, and the reliance on brute force (namely adding more and more transistors, the cause of the extra heat and power consumption) rather than the genius ingenuity it seemed they had previously relied on.
So don't be surprised when the next nVidia card DOES need a direct line to the wall plug.
I think it's especially telling that ATI's top card right now, the 9800XT, is still using a .15micron process, while nVidia is on their third gen of .13micron cards (5800; 5900; and now 5700, 5950) and yet can barely (in some cases -can't-) compete with ATI. ATI now has .13micron experience under their belt as well, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before their 9800XT's get a pretty nice clock speed boost as they move to .13micron - which could certainly spell trouble for nVidia :/
I should note that I do own stock in nVidia. And while I'm doing well with it, I honestly think they're going to have to pull off something miraculous next spring if they want to get ahead of ATI in terms of performance. Just my two cents. Or so.
Actually ATI does manufacture their own cards as well as license the design. I don't think Nvidia produces any cards though.
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
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.
Good luck!
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.
According to the Mercury Research numbers released just a couple weeks ago (found here), the overall graphics market is split as follows:
Intel: 35%
nVidia: 25%
ATI: 22%
Via: 9%
SiS: 8%
Matrox: 1%
For discreet graphics chips, ATI and nVidia absolutely dominate with over 90% combined market share. nVidia has the lead in desktop discreet units with 62% (ATI has 32%). ATI has the lead in mobile discreet units with 71% (nVidia has 21%).
However, in the quickly growing integrated space, Intel does quite well with 67% desktop units and 45% mobile units, enough to give them the overall market share lead.