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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)"
At what point is there simply too much noise Vs. signal about how good one card is VS. the other. If you're a fan of nVidia you're going to buy their card no mater what and likewise for ATI no? -nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
But the lack of Linux-drivers is holding me back. Not only does NVIDIA have Linux-drivers, they have 64bit drivers as well! Yes, X800 is better overall than 6800 is. But fact is that one of them works well with Linux, while the other one does not.
Ati: If you want to have my money, you better pull your thumbs out of your ass and write some Linux-drivers!
Or maybe I will buy this card, and hope it works well with the Generic Ati-drivers that ship with Xorg/Xfree...
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Is there any point in getting one of these cards for any reason other than playing the latest games?
Someone please divide price by benchmark and plot this in a graph please!
Maybe I'll do it if no one else can be bothered.
A blog I run for the wealth
Make no mistake, I'll eventually buy one like these .. after it's well down the price curve, bugs fixed, drivers updated, in a couple years.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It NEVER hurts to have the best performance.
Sure, both nvidia and ATI's latest cards will play all current games at great framerates, but once you start to pile on things like high resolution, anti-aliasing, antisotropic filtering... you need all the performance you can get. Even these newest cards probably won't be able to play FarCry perfectly at 1600x1200 16xAA 16xAF with full details...
More performance is never superfluous.
with ultra shit support.
The fanboy following video cards is endlessly annoying. I own a Radeon 9800, and it was good value for the dollar all around, but quite frankly, the support sucks.
ATI relies on big benchmark numbers over real world results, I guess that's what 'uber pc geeks' want. nVidia seems to cater to gamers by working with developers to make sure games USE all those fancy new functionalities of the GPU. Ie; nVidia's "The Way it was Meant to be Played" program. ATI plays lip service to it with it's "Get in the Game" program, but they don't provide the same support (like sample codes for killer shader effects, etc)
So we end up with TRON 2.0 having really cool glowing effects on nVidia, but flat and tacky looking on ATI. We have soft shadows in Splinter Cell for nVidia, blocky PSX-era crap for ATI.
Hell, I could go on for months listing all the anomalies in actual real-life games I've encountered. Texture corruptions in Tomb Raider: AOD, outright crashes in Halo.
For all the hype around FSAA and anisotropic filtering - just about EVERY GAME I've enabled them for has crashed hard. Unreal 2, Halo, XIII.
Oh, and the worst, the absolute worst, is frame drops to 5fps and worse in CounterStrike when there's smoke onscreen. I mean COME ON, I had a RivaTNT2 that played the game properly. There's no excuse for that, save a piss poor opengl implementation.
So I tried Will Rock, the game whos screenshots were on my 9800's box, and is a member of the "get in the game" program. This ought to SMOKE on an ATI card, right? Almost, awful looking texture corruption in menus, stuttering in-game for no apparent reason (nothing on screen).
Missing proprietary nVidia features is fine, substitute your proprietary ATI features. Just make them stable and working.
I've used ATI forever, they used to be a cut above the other retail level cards. Now they've slipped hard.
This is a case where nVidia will slowly strangle the competition, because the competition sucks. I'd really like to see ATI turn around and focus on the gaming experience, not the mutual masturbation you see on rage3d.com (the unofficial "support" forum) - with a bunch of kids comparing benchmarks and overclocks, with two or three frustrated folks chronically posting for advice on with mishmash of driver files will actually work with Counter Strike.
Anyhow, hooray for leapfrogging nVidia in phony-baloney do-nothing benchmarks. Will this fabulous new technology actually work with games or is this just more MARKETING BULLSHIT for the likes of toms hardware and hardocp to spread?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I plumped for an NVidia card for my new machine, but did consider the ATI ones. In the end I went for NVidia because the drivers seemed better supported. My question is, did I miss anyone? Are there any other cards that can run modern(ish) 3D games under Linux?
"Even if the new ATI card wasn't as fast as the 6800"
x 800-09.html , Radeon 800XT uses about 18W less than 6800 Ultra. But if you are buying $499 video card, few bucks on the power supply won't make a difference.
I doubt that you can consider buying $499 card anyway.
Many seem to miss the point that only Geforce 6800 Ultra ($499) will take a two slots. Normal 6800 will use only one slot.
According to the Tomshardware measurements: http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040504/ati-
ATI makes no bones that the radeon series is for gamers. If they can give you enhanced performance during the product cycle at the sacrifice of a new feature that no game will use during this card's usability, who cares?
The real question for the gamer is how large the intersection is of the set of games that will (in the future) be able to run on these cards at a playable speed and the set of games that will use this feature. The answer is not clear to me that this intersection would be large.
Case in point: I believe that the original FX was the first "DX9" card to market. The only problem is that whenever a game was written to DX9 spec it would run horribly, hence the moans and groans of people looking at HL2 benchmarks. This was to the great annoyance of people who shelled out a lot of money for a card and presumably expected to keep it for a while, but not so much to those who bought lesser midrange or bargain versions with the intention to replace their card anyways. After all...the only DX9 blockbuster that comes to mind at the moment is Far Cry.
Honestly I thought it was just the mac side cause tech support for most companies loath us mac guys because they refuse to have one mac tech on call. But hearing it from two PC guys who homebuild their systems I felt a little better.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I don't want to have to retrofit my computer with a 500-watt power supply, and I don't want my video card taking up TWO goddamn slots. :)
The X800 matches or betters the nVidia card while having a lower transistor count and lower supply requirement (350), thereby meaning I can run the damn thing in just one slot!
OEMs are going to balk at needing to suck up two slots when they can just go to ATI and get an equal card that takes up one.
The only different I can see is PS3.0, which ATI chose not to bother with since it won't affect image quality for the next 12-18 months. Makes sense to me.
The difference I see this time (and which I wrote about in a related post here) is that the new nVidia card is a power hog and requires you to buy a new power supply if you don't meet the requirements for its two-slot design. The X800 takes up just one slot while generally matching the quality.
I guess I just see that two-slot, power-sucking design as a huge hassle. I can't imagine how noisy it must be, though I haven't heard it really mentioned in review. But I think the non-fanboys will take a look at the two cards, see that one takes up one and the other takes up two, and go with the one...
Actually, they have problems even today.
I had a GeForce4Ti4600 in my machine and it died so I replaced it with an ATi 9600 XT. Since then, there are many things that just don't "work right" as they did before. Specifically these:
When playing EverQuest, I can no longer go into windowed mode and then back to full-screen mode. I get to windowed mode fine, but if I try to go back to full screen all I get is a black screen.
Also, when I leave some games now, the signal gets "lost" somehow and my monitor goes black and it puts up a box saying "unsupported video mode" on it until I reset the monitor. This did not happen ever with the nVidia card.
Installing new drivers:
For nVidia:
Step 1: download new drivers.
Step 2: double click on it and go through setup.
Step 3: reboot and all is nice.
For ATi:
Step 1: download new drivers.
Step 2: uninstall old drivers.
Step 3: reboot into VGA mode
Step 4: install new drivers.
Step 5: reboot
Step 6: screen is black, something is wrong
Step 7: reboot into safe mode
Step 8: reinstall drivers again
Repeat Steps 5 through 8 about 6 more times for about 30 minutes and eventually get a "good" install and finally get to use my computer again.
From the benchmarks it seems as though ATI's offering have the edge over Nvidia for DX9 games. For OpenGL though it's quite the opposite.
So my prediction is that Nvidia will spank ATI on Doom 3 and ATI will trounce Nvidia on HL2. I wonder how much the popularity of the two games will affect hardware sales. Probably not at all.
I used to be an NVidia guy. I have a dual slot 5900 Ultra right now, and it's getting replaced with a smaller, less power hungry X800-XTPE in two weeks. Power isn't an option since I have an Antec TrueControl 550 supply, but when you take a lot of power which the 6800 obviously needs, you also throw off heat. And in Arizona, computers running hot is an issue.
The X800-XTPE is more quiet bang for the buck than a 6800U.
Re: Why do you need a card that produces games at that high of a res? a) 1024x768 looks like crap on a big monitor. b) If I'm running at 1600x1200 in a game and we're running at each other across a field, I'll see you first. With a decent res mouse you can pluck someone off when they're only 10 pixels wide. c) Because the women love it.
I think the only problem with it not supporting all the 'newest API's' is if games were coming out in the next 6-12 months that really required that support.
Nothing on the horizon seems to make use of any of what you mentioned, so it'd be safe to buy either card and be totally happy.
There is no such thing as an upgrade that will keep you happy in 2 years if you need to see all the eye-candy. Even though the 6800 supports PS 3.0 and 32bit I highly doubt it'll hold a candle to the cards that are coming out in the future that will coincide with applications that take advantage of these extras.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Why does nVidia recommend a 450-watt power supply, and ATI recommends 100 watts less?
The X800 has a lower transistor count and power requirements. How about reading all the reviews and not just Tom's Hardware (who always loves nVidia).
Two slots? Huge and noisy? Forget that. Next.