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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)"
Seems like they're cutting the traces on the extra pipes when creating the 12-pipe Pro version. Not that soft-mods were universally successful anyway.
I think a real big advantage for ATI is the fact that their card doesn't take up two slots, require a monstrosity of a heat sink and fan, and recommend/require a 450W power supply like the '6800 does. Even if the new ATI card wasn't as fast as the 6800, I wouldn't consider buying a video card like that. And I've always considered myself a fan of Nvidia cards (I used to hate the "ATI OS" that ATI's old drivers used to install -- it was very invasive). ATI has produced a very competitive card performance-wise, while keeping the same form factor and with a reasonable (relatively speaking) level of power consumption and heat dissipation.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
As much as I like the nVidia kit "just working", I wish they would get their head out of their arse and implement true DirectX9, not just the shite that's part driver.
Have a look through the feature sets between ATI, nVidia and DirectX9 - nVidia supports the barest of minimums to work with DirectX9 written games.
No wonder Carmack shunned nVidia
There has to be a time when they support the games, instead of just paying for a prissy ad at the start of a game.
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
I know that ATI has their little RPMs going, but the reason I have switched to using nVidia is because of the crap that went on with ATI and lack of Linux support. And now, they finaly released some drivers, but no support for older cards, and no way to actually install it properly on a Debian system.
nVidia at least allows for distribution of their drivers
This is the only reason why I switched to nVidia. I don't see how anyone using Linux can support the bad support for Linux from ATI (as compared to nVidia, of course).
As to the card itself, well, I think nVidia and ATI was always close enough :) Sometimes competition works, and ATI & nVidia are prime examples of that.
PS. Please, don't troll me about the free drivers. I want/need real drivers, and not some partial implementation.
The performance might be similar at the top end, but there is a difference that could swing it in favour of ATI. Power consumption on the X800 cards is a lot lower than the nVidia alternative (its actually lower than ATI's own 9800 cards). Less power for the same performance means lower temperatures, and quieter slower fans..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
As much as I want to like this card, I fear that they've taken a wrong turn on the path they plan to persue.
As a 3D developer, one of the most exciting things that has come about recently is Shader Model 3.0. It allows you to get greater effects with less operations using some new developments. However, it requires a 32 bit precision. Read more about it here.
ATI has chosen to continue with it's 24-bit precision architecture. While fine for most applications, some of the exciting new developments require this newer spec technology. I'm sure that it will be interoperable, but all that speed may end up being wasted while computing certain operations.
I'm left wondering why I would buy a brand spankin' new card video card when it doesn't support the newest APIs all that well. Oh well, I guess I get to stick with nVidia...
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I was a die hard NVidia/Dell fan for years. Click, click I got my nice neat box in two days and watch as my roommates who built their boxes local with cards other than Nvidia chipset have problems. I quietly chortled in my dark room of Tribes while they rebooted.
:)
But over the Christmas holiday, it finally came time to upgrade. I decided to save a few bucks (actually, this was more a mandate from the wife) and build the box myself. This actually meant that I had to do some research instead of the click and ship of my beloved Dell.
Cutting to the chase, I tried my hardest to find an Nvidia card that beat what most reviewers claimed was the cream of the crop, the ATI 9800XT. None really did. That, and I got a free version of HL2. Point, set and match.
I'm one of the converted. I will put my first list together of what I'm familiar with. Then, I'll do the research and see what's the best. The lists may not match, but I'm becoming geek enough to weigh loyalty vs what is best for me. Needless to say, I and the wife have been ecstatic with our little Shuttle/ATI monster and the extra couple hundred dollars in shoes. Respectively, of course
I'd love to see some program that does "reverse VRAM reclaiming" so those of us who don't need 128mb of video RAM power can get some of that ram back for compiling or something.
Okay... that WAS geeky.
I was talking with people on another board (hardware mavens), and for most of us with a late model card from last generation (Radeon 9800, any of the competing nVidia cards), the X800 really isn't worth it.
A good denominator is fpspb (frames per second per buck, a made up value from Tom's Hardware. For the cash, you can squeeze a lot more out of a $200 Radeon Pro 9800 (especially with overclocking) than you can with anything else right now. You're only talking a marginal difference of fps between this generation and last at high (1600x1200) resolutions, and an almost non-existant difference at "normal" resolutions. The $200-300 extra price premium isn't worth those extra frames.
The article gives me the impression that it's atleast 20-30% faster. It isn't, and it isn't in all games, the 6800 beats in out in a lot of them too. It's only by a few FPS as well, nothing that you would really even notice playing games either. That's only on Windows and Mac OS X, when you get to Linux, nVidia will kill ATI on every game, no question. Also, feature wise nVidia is king there too. nVidia is still my choice.
It may seem that simple, but for a lot of people it isn't. I have only had NVidia cards, but my next one, if I have a choice (and I probably will), WILL be an ATI card. Not because anything was particularly wrong with my NVidia cards, they are still running actually, but because I think that ATI's cards in the range I want to buy in, are superior. Plus I'd like to try an ATI card at least once. I can't make any true judgements or be a fan boy for one particular brand when I've not tried them both.
Somewhat off topic, but can someone here explain the difference between these high end gaming cards and a workstation graphics card (for Autocad, 3D Studio, Maya, etc). As I understand it, it has to do with how they deal with dedicated rendering windows, but on the other hand, these high end game cards often come with Autocad drivers, and seem to work perfectly fine for the above programs. So why get the latter, and these cards are often $1000+. What are the speed/quality differences?; most game sites don't review these other cards.
Personally, I think this very point brings up some questions about nVidia's engineering. If ATI can make a comparable product with a quiet, compact cooling system and lower power requirements, then what is nVidia's design team doing wrong? Or perhaps more to the point, what is ATI doing right?
I'm not an EE, but even I can see where better engineering comes into play. I just bought a new case with a 380W power supply, and I about choked on my soda when I read the 480W recommendation from nVidia (although several sites have since said that this power level is not required). I like my new Antec Sonata case, and do not want to drop another $100+ on a high-end P/S when I still have a CPU, memory, and video card to upgrade for the coming games (D3, HL2, et al). That's close to a grand there (I want a top-o'-the-line card for once), and I can barely afford that.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Obviously this thing exists only to go after the performance crown, and keep the coolness factor that gets the gamers interested in your product.. The gamers won't buy this, but it will keep them interested in other ATI products.
After another generation or two of cards, they should be able to have similar technology available in a realistic card. One that will not require more power than the rest of your system, or a huge fan to dissipate all the heat.
I would like to see a version that has 1/5 of the 3D performance, but has the video processing capabilities (MPEG2 encode/decode, WMV9 accel, etc.) at 10-15W power.
Here is a good example why being a fan boy is plain stupid. Look at what happened with long distance service. Before the price wars (early nineties) I was paying around $.25 a minute to talk long distance. After a decade of people just up and dumping their phone service for the next lowest priced offering you can now get unlimited long distnace plus local service for about the same price as a 2 hour long distance call in 1990.
The less loyalty people (fan boys) show to either company the bigger the advances we'll see with each new card that is released as well as a lower price. Buy the fastest card you can afford for the cheapest price and forget who's name is branded on the side. Before you know it we'll have hardware capable of photo-realistic on the fly rendering for under $200.
Visualization. We do large scale effects for nightclubs. Think 360deg wrap around displays showing effects bouncing and moving to the music. It looks rather silly if all the walls on your nightclub suddenly light up in blue while some famous dj is spinning tunes.
Personally, I was expecting PS3.0 to be in these parts, it _sucks_ that it isn't. There's lots of really cool stuff we've been prototyping in renderman that we've wanted to push out to clients. Think "the pines of rome" from fantasia 2000 type stuff.
Sadly, card vendors seem to think that only videogamers use linux. So we get crappy binary drivers with little to no support. (nvidia, ati) Unless you're paying hp megabucks for workstations for your high profile animation shop, in which case you get great support. But still binary drivers.
I would kill my own mother for quality open source drivers with PS/VS support.
they're only good for games
Guess again. Medical volume visualization.
Now, if you're point is that for MOST consumers, they're only good for games, you may have a point. But the other way to look at it is that, since consumers have demanded such amazing video technology, the price to deliver advanced medical visualizations to doctors has dropped dramatically.
What you used to need a $40,000 SGI O2 for, now you can do with a $1000 computer from Best Buy. That computer might actually save your life some day. Pretty amazing, if you think about it.
Education is the silver bullet.
PS 3.0 offers 32 bit precision and an "unlimited pipeline", vertex textures, etc.,. Here's a good article on the differences.
Let's put it this way, ATI pretty much just doubled the vertex and pixel pipelines and did not change much architecture wise beyond it's last version of cards the R350. NVIDIA's new card is much more innovative actually, but it's questionable whether its timing is right with the current lack of PS 3.0 capable games. Also, a bad omen for NVIDIA is the fact that ATI's PS 3.0 R500 architecture is nearing completion and they have already shown their PS 3.0 cards, if you will.
It's also, unfortunate that these R420 ATI cards still beat the NVIDIA 6800's in a lot of the current benchmarks, despite their superior tech.
I'm sticking with my second hand R350 ATI 9800Pro that O/C's to 9800XT speed now, personally and I'll skip this iteration of cards. The 9800 will do PS 2.0 plenty quick (at a slightly lower res.) for the latest games including Far Cry and Doom3 and HL2 when they come out.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
I've actually done perception research.
200fps is an estimate based on the electrochemical reaction rate required to change the signal going into your brain. Beyond 200fps or so (depending on the person) you reach the point where the eye simply doesn't make changes fast enough to transmit different data to the brain.
The tests I have run with people run along the following lines:
At what point can a person no longer identify a letter placed in a single erroneous frame. (as an example you see a movie, one frame of which has been replaced by a large letter H, at what frame rate can you no longer identify the H). For most people the H goes away somewhere between 60 and 120 fps.
Another experiment shows people 2 animations. One is at X fps and the other is at X+10 fps. They are asked which is faster. At the point where people can truly no longer distinguish which is better, they should be wrong 50% of the time. People choose the correct display quite reliably up to at least 100fps. X and X+50% is differentiable for a good percentage of the population up to 150 fps.
As to the TI DLP's I have no doubt you're correct. However, having everyone happy is not the same as impossible to improve upon. The real question is when do you reach the point where no one can tell the difference anymore.
I will agree with you that 35mm films are mostly 24fps. I can see the individual frames, as can many people. The animation is fine, but it is easy to notice the framing if I concentrate. If I've had too much caffeine or am otherwise on edge, it can be difficult for me to enjoy a movie due to the low frame rate.
Regarding high def TV, try comparing 720 @ 60 fps vs 720 @ 30 fps and see which people think has better quality. You'll need an exceptional source and display for this experiment though, make sure your display doesn't downgrade 720@60 to 30 internally (most do).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Here is a chart that shows what you are looking for. It doesn't cover cards made after December 2003, but it is still useful.
c harts-16.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-
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