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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!
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...
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.
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.
The above was posted from a computer hand-carved from oak.
Signed,
Anonymous Coward
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
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.
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!!!
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.
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! :)
Pong and Frogger?
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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