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Previewing ATi's Radeon X800 XT & X800 Pro
Giant_Panda writes "A few short weeks ago, it looked like NVIDIA was back on track as they were
able to overtake ATi and reclaim the 3D performance crown with their GeForce 6800
Ultra. Now, it seems like ATi has fired back with a killer card of their own.
HotHardware just posted a preview of the new
12-Pipe ATi Radeon X800 Pro ($399) and 16-pipe ATi Radeon
X800 XT ($499). The X800 XT seems to be faster then even the new GeForce 6800 Ultra
Extreme cards that were rumored to exist on a few sites this past weekend
and the X800 Pro is a great performer as well. (Other sites have just
posted previews:
TechReport,
Hexus, Lost Circuits)"
A complete list of articles related to this can be found @ OverclockersClub.com.
At the levels of performance that you are talking about with the ATI and NVidia cards, there really isn't a large difference between a few frames here and there. I mean, most of the time, the declared "winner" only bests the other card on a majority of the test, not all of them
Just pick whicher brand you like better and you'll feel better off letting go of that $500...
Here's another two other reviews, one at AnandTech and another at TomsHardware
While it's true that both ATi's and Nvidia's new cards scream, it has to be noted that ATi decided not to compete with Nvidia on quality. The new 3.0 versions of the Vertex and Fragment shaders, as implemented in the NV40, are a stunning advance over the 2.0 shaders in the newest ATi cards.
At my company, we had considered using hardware for the final rendering on some of the shots in our current visual effect movie, but the 2.0 shaders just didn't have the capability -- they really are suited only for games (not too surprising, that's where 99% of the market is.) The lack of fully-functional floating point buffers, the limitation on the size of the shader programs, the lack of texture mapping in the vertex shaders -- these are all devastating to the notion of doing high-quality hardware rendering.
All of these limitations, and more, were addressed in the new 3.0 shaders.
I am sure that ATi will support these features eventually, as games come to require them -- but right now you are really comparing apples and Porsches when you compare ATi's and Nvidia's latest offerings.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Is there any point in getting one of these cards for any reason other than playing the latest games?
:)
nVidia cards tend to have good OpenGL support and OpenGL is used by a number of "high end" CAD and rendering packages. These cards will work well for folks who don't want to spend the $1500 for the high end CAD cards which are almost the same thing (there are some differences but these will do well on a smaller budget, though $500 for a card is pretty pricey to me
Err, no. I first bought Nvidia, then ATI, then Nvidia twice, then ATI again, and am probably going to go with ATI this time because I don't want to spend a fortune on a new power supply, or the electricity bill...
Could the drivers be better? Oh yes. Are they up to nvidia's standard? No. But they ARE listening, and since the last update you can play winex games with hardware acceleration, so there's no problem there...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Here's a simpler answer -- people buy the high-end cards to play new games in Windows, but they still want the thing to at least work in X Windows.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Um, Quake 3 and America's Army? Yes, I can play those under Linux. Also, we have such titles as Savage and UT2004, recent games avaliable for Linux, and the upcoming Doom III. The MOST graphics intensive games seem to come out for Linux as well.
/usr/games/fortune
stolen from Anandtech
HardOCP
Ascully
DriverHeaven
TrustedReviews
K-Hardware
Hardware Analysis
Hexus
The Tech Report
Beyond3D
Neoseeker
ExtremeTech
Gamers Depot
Lost Circuits
Firing Squad
Tom's Hardware
Bjorn3D
Hot Hardware
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Contrary to the parent, the ATI Linux drivers only work 'fine' for very liberal definitions of the word. They are slow. They are buggy. They do not support Xinerama. They do not support FSAA in any usable way. Hell, they don't support 16-bit video modes. ATI may be 'listening', but that doesn't necessarily get drivers written. I, and many others, are still stuck using ATI drivers released mid last year because all their subsequent releases have been worthless.
I bought a 9600 Pro thinking that whatever drivers ATI had would be 'good enough'. Well, they aren't. Not by a long shot. If I weren't so fundamentally opposed to separate power connectors for video cards, I might've traded it in for a nvidia months ago. Those drivers are the sole cause of instability in my system. If you're buying a card for Linux, buy Nvidia. Case closed.
For those that aren't familiar with it, that's a Voodoo 5.
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The original poster is technically wrong, but as far as I'm concerned, in spirit they're about right. Comparing the ATI and nVidia Linux drivers is an absolute joke. With nVidia, you download a simple shell script, it checks for a precompiled module for your kernel, and if it doesn't find one, it builds one for you and installs it. After that, you chance *one* line in your XFree86 config file and you're done.
ATI, on the other hand, was a complete nightmare the last time I installed their drivers on a Linux box for someone. I'm fairly proficient in Linux, and he was running Slackware which is the distro I run myself day in and out. It still took us a couple of hours of playing around to get the drivers working properly due to a combination of quirky behavior and EXTREMELY poor documentation. I wouldn't mind doing it all manually, as long as the documentation is clear and concise and helps you get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
Personally, I do keep a Windows box around for gaming, but the parts from this get hand-me-downed to the Linux machines as I upgrade. For that reason, Linux drivers are important to me, and I'll be buying nVidia next time I upgrade. I can deal with spending 5 minutes on a shell script and a reboot to upgrade my video card - I can't handle 2 hours to do the same thing with an ATI card.
Radeon VS. GeForce, Cost per Frame
*CPF = Cost per Frame
**Per Aquamark 3: 1024, P4 3.2, 1024MB CAS2, i875P
Radeon X800 XT
Cost: $499 (MSRP)
FPS: 57.96
CPF: $8.60
Radeon X800 Pro
Cost: $399 (MSRP)
FPS: 54.89
CPF: $7.26
Radeon 9800 XT
Cost: $396 (Pricewatch.com)
FPS: 47.9
CPF: $8.26
GeForce 6800 Ultra
Cost: $499 (MSRP)
FPS: 62.65
CPF: $7.96
GeForce 6800 GT
Cost: $399 (MSRP)
FPS: 61.3
CPF: $6.50
GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
Cost: $365 (Pricewatch.com)
FPS: 50.93
CPF: $7.16
Winner: GeForce 6800 GT
NOTE:
This is ignoring other factors that go into TCO such as power consumption (the Radeons use far less power and may not require a power supply upgrade)
This is based on the Aquamark 3 benchmarks at 1024x768 only. If you wish to gather the mean of the other benchmarks in the linked review to figure a more percise CPF please reply.
Intended to make you think about what your getting when you pay the extra $100 for the top of the line card.
If you were wondering, I'm an ATI fanboy and would personally buy the Radeon X800 Pro if I had $400 to blow.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
PS. Please, don't troll me about the free drivers. I want/need real drivers, and not some partial implementation. What you don't seem to realize is that, while NVidia is better about keeping up to date binary linux drivers, ATI is better about releasing hardware info to the driver devs for older harder, meaning that if you're okay with the second string hardware (as opposed to these $500 monstrosities), you get much better support out of your system because the kernel devs will support you if something breaks...
Great for you!, What I was getting at is that IMHO most people, when faced with two video cards, closely related in specification will likely buy the same brand as they had before
True statement. However this does not happen to be the case today. Both cards do perform fairly equally, but there is an important difference between them that some readers are forgetting about. The nvidia card requires two free molex connections. In addition, the video card requires a 480watt power supply. On top of that, nvidia wants each molex connection to be on it's own dedicate line from the PSU. In otherwords, no other device may be on those main lines. That's a pretty fancy PSU you are going to have to purchase to use this card.
And of a minor note, the nvidia card takes up two slots of your motherboard because of it's cooling solution. The ATI card only needs 1. As well, as it only needs 1 molex connection.
So yes, they do perform rather equally, however they are not indentical to each other.
Since the two cars are manufactured similarly, we can rule out any manufacturing technology differences from causeing this.
Next since the cards perform similarly and take up about the same die space, we can rule out the possibility that one company just has "better" designs for the internal components.
My money is on ATI either having or hiring a thermo expert (you'd be surprised how many EE's don't get coursework in fluids, thermodynamics, and heat transfer particularly as they apply to chip design) who helped the team better place, route, and design the internals of the chips to minimize waste and maximize dissipation. They probably also suggested some minor tweaks at the transistor and manufacturing levels that ended up having a major impact.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
Some people (myself included) have had trouble with shared resources on that first PCI slot. The AGP cards seem to require fairly dedicated access to them, so other items that also require a lot of access (sound, NIC) can sometimes argue with them, leading to locks and crashes.
Doesn't happen with everyone, but since I've always had the spare room, I've always just moved the cards off so that I had a space between everything.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.