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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 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.
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.
Yeah, they will end up like 3dFX did. They are going to miss the boat on some break through in the near future.
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
Fanless would always be preferred, but I should also say that on the cards in which ATI does use fans, they appear to be of higher quality than the fans Nvidia uses. I've had two GeForceTi cards that I've had to replace the fans on when they died as opposed to four ATI cards in which the fans are still going strong. The other frustrating issue with Nvidia is support. When you call them about support for bad fans, they refer you to the OEM manufacturer (Apple in this case) whose response to a bad fan was to replace the whole card!!! Now, I have been a fan of Nvidia's performance (thus my purchase of them in the dual G4's), but their cooling needs some more attention and in my latest dual G5, ATI got the nod with their 9800.
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Did you even read the article? Admittedly, I'm not a huge fan of Tom's Hardware, but their numbers are generally good. Using your Battlefield 1942 (not 1945, which show's you're probably not the target demographic for these cards), the GeForce 5950 does 98.7fps at 1024x768 with 4xFSAA and 8x fnisotropic filtering at 32bpp. By comparison, your Voodoo3 can't even display 32bpp, nor would it be able to pull even 10 fps at 1024x768 with 4x FSAA and so on. That doesn't sound like +0.7fps to me. Adding more RAM isn't going to magically make your Voodoo3 be able to display 32bpp color, or do 4x anti-aliasing at 1024x768 at almost 100fps.
As I mentioned before, you're apparently not the demographic at which these cards are targetted. There are always early adopters and people that like to play on the bleeding edge. This is true for almost everything from home theater hardware to kitchen appliances. These high-end cards are targetted at that portion of the market at their release. In a year or two, when another few revisions have been released and this card is down to $100 or so, you'll be in the targetted demographic. Of course, at that point in time, the 5950 Ultra will no longer be top of the line, either. Fanboys gush because this is an area in which they are passionate, and reviewers gush because they know their audience (fanboys).
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.
I have to agree with your post. ATI has some work ahead of them on their drivers. They don't seem to have what it takes in that area.
Rage3D Forum For Driver Incompatabilities
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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.
Funny you should say that. This week I learned first hand what it's like to scale back. My Nvidia Ti 4600 finally was crashing my computer too much, so I had to take it out and use my old 2MB S3 Virge card, while I try to get Visiontek to give me an RMA. (Check my sig for how that's not turning out)
Anyway, bootup seems just the same speed, and most of the time, all the screen elements seem to work about the same speed when I'm just browsing the web or doing email. It's only when I'm trying to load up a database or spreadsheet or something like that that it's really noticeably slower. Of course, I can't play any of the newer games, but I've been playing PS/2 mostly, lately.
Get off my launchpad!
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.
I'm definately for passive cooling where possible, my Gigabyte Radeon 9700Pro had the stock fan die on it within a couple of months, I've replaced it with a Zalman ZM80A-HP passive heatsink, while it cost a bit more ($50AU), its keeping it cooler than the stock cooler with zero noise.
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.
"Interesting too that you don't consider support (including driver updates) to be relevant."
Espically given that was THE reason I bought nVidia, until receantly. I mean nVidia cards always performed well and were on teh cutting edge as well but that wasn't what really made me buy them. It was the 100% rock solid drivers. I just don't like playing around with that kind of thing.
Well I feel ATis drivers have reached that level too, but it's an important question. I want to know if the cards have any reliability problems before I plunk down cash on them. I'll pay more and take less performance if it means no crashes/bugs.
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.
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
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