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GeForce 7900 Vs. Radeon X1900
Gamespot has an article comparing the shiny you get when using a Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX SLI and an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX Crossfire. From the article: "All told, the barrier to entry is enormous; but once you're there and running your games at 1920x1080 with 4x antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering, any regrets you might have had about spending a small fortune will be thrown out the window. We're sure that one of these setups offers a better experience, however. The two could differ in terms of raw performance or the subtleties of image quality depending on the game. Either way, if you're going to lay down the smack for the best performance, we're going to make sure you get it."
Do they do that? I'm talking with everything turned on full on EQ2 at those resolutions. It brings my system down to it's knees with a 7800GT. Yeah, I may be one of the few people that actually play this, but it's gotten a LOT better since launch.
Guess there's no set test they could do though to make it all fair. No "demo" script they can run on different configs.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
""All told, the barrier to entry is enormous; but once you're there and running your games at 1920x1080 with 4x antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering, any regrets you might have had about spending a small fortune will be thrown out the window."
Funny, I was just headed that way.
A NEW car? Not even close! One of these cards would hardly even cover one or two payments.
I know, I just got a new car. =^(
I know you want to think these are expensive, but after a couple thousand-dollar processors, a kilowatt powersupply, and the RAID array, they're pretty affordable.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
The most I ever paid for a video card is $200USD. These days I been buying whatever is in the $50 USD range. A nVidia 6200 with 128MB AGP card for $50 USD gives you all the latest eye candy except speed at higher resolutions. Doom 3, Quake 4 and HL2 all play fine at 800x600 at the highest settings, and older games such as UT2004 play fine at 1024x768 at the highest setting.
Well keep in mind you need two of those for the suggested setup, and they're like 500 bucks each, plus the SLI compatible motherboard, power supply needed to power those two beasts, etc, and you've got yourself around 1,500 just to get the gaming parts for this monster PC. That is a lot of money for gaming equipment. I honestly don't know what could possibly drive a person to buy these cards, except wasting money, when you can just step back a generation and pick one up for 200 bucks which will do just as fine with the games out right now. Give them a couple of months and your monster $500 card will be down to the ~$200 range. What will your extra 300 give you? an extra 20 fps with FSAA on (which at high enough resolutions I can barely tell the difference anyway) for a couple of months longer than everyone else?
Oh yeah, and the "Oh but I've got to get ready for the new awesome wave of games coming out!" excuse doesn't cut it. By the time those new and awesome games come out a new card will be out and your money splurging inner self will go out and buy another card, and that'll be a couple hundred dollars down the toilet.
BTW, I'm still on my Radeon 9700, which I picked up when they dropped below 200, and it still does fine on everything I want to play. Granted I have 2GB of RAM, and a 3500+ Athlon 64, but then again those also have alternate uses, and aren't limited to a "gaming" investment.
Yea, but nVidia has better linux support, so you would think that most of the /. crowd would LOVE nVidia
Yay, I have a sig.
Personally, I agree, however people value things differently. To some people, having the latest, greatest gaming box at the LAN party means a lot to them, and they'd get much more enjoyment the new top of the line video card than from say new rims on their car. I'm glad there's gamers out there that are willing to pay top dollar for the latest & greatest, because it motivates nVidia and ATI to be competitive and in the long run drives the prices down for consumers like you and me.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Articles like this are not for you. Your stuff plays fine for you. It does not play fine for the target audience of setups like are discussed above. A Ford gets you down the road well enough for most people, but not for a car enthusiast. This is no different.
We're all proud of your frugalness, and are glad you're having a good experience with the games you play. But others like to compare and discuss the bleeding edge of graphics technology, and comments of the formula above don't really add to that.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
I'd recommend nVidia over ATi to peopel, even for Windows. For Linux, no contest. I'm not Linux savvy, but I've actually gotten nVidia cards to work accelerated in Linux all the times I've tried. I still have yet to successfully make an ATi card work completely. However even in Windows the nVidia drivers seem a little more polished. For example in World of Warcraft there are certian areas that will cause an ATi 9600 and 9800 (and probably more) to have a GPU reset, meaning in essence that the graphics card crashed and the driver had to reset it. ATi allegedly fixed it a few driver releases ago, but it persists. nVidia card have had no such problems.
I generally believe these are the more important factors to look at. The good news is that new cards are fast to the point that no matter what you get, you'll be happy. Any 7800 or 7900 card is enough to rip apart any game out there. You won't find yourself saying "damn, if only I'd bought an ATi this would run better" or vice versa. Because of that I really think the thing to look at is overall system and app stability.
Also, though it might be fun to have a mitching high end setup, I recommend against it unless you've simply tons of money to spend often, and nothing to spend it on. Some people might be tempted to get something like that with the idea that you don't need to upgrade for quite some time. Fair enough, after all that performance is such that it's way ahead of current titles' requirements. The problem is that video cards come out with new features at an amazing pace. The upgrade the abilities of their shaders and rendering engines to do new, more realistic graphics. So it becomes not a question of raw pixel pushing power, but what they can do with it.
Once could get a professional visualization system built in 1999 that far exceeds the raw pixel stats of new boards, using a large array of Voodoo chips (Quantum3D makes such products), driving amazingly large displays with super high fidelity anti-aliasing. Yet, you'd find they were incapable of running a game like Quake 4. Why? Well for all their power, they lack the new features that are used now to create visual effects like visual distortions due to flame. Those capabilities weren't introduced to cards until receantly.
Thus your best bet is to find a price point that you think you can afford around once a year and look at buying there. Rather than trying to spend $600 once every three years, look at spending $200 every year, and so on. In general, you get a better experience for it. This holds true at basically any price point I've ever looked at.
If you can afford to buy around the upper end of the mid range cards, which is generally $150-200, you tend to find that nearly all games out there will run well, which a reasonable amount of eye candy. Developers aren't stupid, they know that most people don't have the latest $600+ card, and they need to sell to everyone they can. However even if you get a more low range $100 card, you still should find game run fine, just with details turned down.
On numerous occasions, those nVidia drivers you refer to have made me wish to gauge my eyes out :-(
I'll never buy an nVidia board again, regardless of the reviews.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
7900 is a full 6900 better than 1900. Am I the only one who sees this?
geez.
What if you don't need another car, and like to play games?
c e+6800&pid=2223881873561302977&oid=299528262137621 7068&btnG=Search+Froogle&scoring=mrd
... the performance you get compared to the 6800 is nearly linear with the price increase.
7 &p=7
And that would be more like 1/10th (or less) the price for a previous generation card (here's a froogle for a 6800 at $170, compared to roughly $1000 for a 7900 SLI).
http://froogle.google.com/froogle_cluster?q=gefor
But it wouldn't be nearly as good, unless you consider 8x slower nearly as good. In fact, given the prices
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=271
(note that the 7900 sli is consistently more than 4x as fast as the 6800 sli, and that we're considering how it would compare to just one 6800 in the pricing above).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"But others like to compare and discuss the bleeding edge of graphics technology, and comments of the formula above don't really add to that."
So were are all the graphic supercomputers? Or the discussions about the latest in algorithms?
the only better linux support i've seen from nVidia is XVMC which is useful for mythTV
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
On the flip side nVidia still blows ATI away in terms of Linux support. Although neither companies are near perfect, nVidia has been way ahead of ATI in Linux for years. For example, the recent Xgl live CD, Kororaa, locks hard after short usage on the two ATI cards I've tried it with (9600XT, X300 Mobile) but runs perfectly on the nVidia cards I've used (5200, 5700). ATI has certainly gotten better over the last two years, but I constantly have issues with their fglrx drivers (eg. my X300 locked X unless I limited the kernel to 732MB of RAM, this wasn't fixed until 8.16). Personally, if anyone asked who to go with when building a system that will run Linux, I'd suggest nVidia every time.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
It aint frugality in my case, its poverty. I have to eat ramen for a while if I want to upgrade something cheap like my memory. I paid less for my entire PC, including monitor (bought at an auction) than even one of those cards costs; again, not because I really wanted to, but because otherwise I simply couldn't have afforded it.
The car analogy is a good one. I bought a cheap car because I need to get from point A to point B, talk about how cool BMW's are is great for those who can afford 'em, but it sure isn't meant for me.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
...not hard-crashing my linux kernel in the middle of a 32-player UT2004 match?
Amen, my 9700 Pro is still playing all the latest games just fine.
-Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat-
And if I had mod points, I'd mod you as troll + offtopic again.
So the nVidia card wins because they used 3 games that are designed to work better with nVidia boards than ATI boards?
What are you talking about? While Quake 4 has always run better on Nvidia hardware, Half-Life 2 has always performed better on ATI hardware, to the extent that ATI hardware came bundled with Half-Life 2. You have to give it to Nvidia for designing a card that would beat ATI's flagship at their own game (pun intended), and this alone deserves to declare them the winner of this comparison.
Their fab process and Q&A suck
Again, you show that you don't know what you're talking about. Their "fab process"?? Both Nvidia and ATI used TSMC to fab both of those chips. No difference between the two. As for Q&A, then you have to talk to the specific board manufacturer. Nvidia doesn't design the graphics boards, only the chips. Other vendors like Asustek and eVGA design the boards, and sell them to you. So they are responsible for any Q&A.
they cannot be bothered to properly follow the farking API specs for dx9 or openGL
Again you're spreading FUD. The NV3x (GeForce FX) had issues, which NVidia were the first to acknowlege. The tables have completely turned with the Geforce 6x and 7x series. Can you point the parts of the spec that those cards don't implement properly?
I've see far too many of their cards TOAST from being OC'ed by their own drivers.
The drivers don't just OC the cards. You have to do it. You know that this voids the warranty, don't you?
Personally, I miss 3dfx. They were doing great work until they decided it would be a good idea to cram huge amounts of unnecessary memory on to cards with aging chipsets. It would be nice to have three major companies competing rather than just two.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Will it run compiz+xgl?
So do you go post a lot on BMW forums saying you just bought a cheap car and it works fine for you? No. Because that's stupid. And so was your "my lowend card gets me by just fine" in a thead about comparing the two highest-end video cards that are currently out.
Hey, I've got an idea... lets make sure everyone cranks up their contrast, and prays for a cure to color-blindness... why did they make BOTH bars in their graphs RED? I had to adjust my monitor just to tell that there WAS a difference.
Why would you want to *measure* your eyes out?
gauge:
1 a : a measurement (as of linear dimension) according to some standard or system: as (1) : the distance between the rails of a railroad (2) : the size of a shotgun barrel's inner diameter nominally expressed as the number of lead balls each just fitting that diameter required to make a pound (3) : the thickness of a thin material (as sheet metal or plastic film) (4) : the diameter of a slender object (as wire or a hypodermic needle) (5) : the fineness of a knitted fabric expressed by the number of loops per unit width b : DIMENSIONS, SIZE c : MEASURE 1
2 : an instrument for or a means of measuring or testing: as a : an instrument for measuring a dimension or for testing mechanical accuracy b : an instrument with a graduated scale or dial for measuring or indicating quantity
3 : relative position of a ship with reference to another ship and the wind
4 : a function introduced into a field equation to produce a convenient form of the equation but having no observable physical consequences
gouge:
1 : a chisel with a concavo-convex cross section
2 a : the act of gouging b : a groove or cavity scooped out
3 : an excessive or improper exaction
I think you meant to *gouge* your eyes out...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Why do people make posts like this when they know its a simple typo? It is obvious that I meant gouge, and its also a very understandable error since in general people type gauge a lot more than they type gouge. I guess some folks just love those dictionary hunts! :-D
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
A new car? Wouldn't you rather use that kind of money for something more useful, like say, a quad SLI system and get a used car which is nearly as good but at 1/2 the price?
You gotta set your priorities, man.
I probably shouldn't bother, but I need to as you this: When was the last time you bought a video card manufactured by NVidia? Never? Wow, same here. What a coincidence. NVidia only makes the chips. Someone else makes the board. If you got a crappy card it's more likely going to be the fault of whoever made that board.
Wikipedia:
Nvidia
Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units
GeForce_7_Series
ATI_Technologies
Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units
Radeon_Series
Anandtech:
ATI's New Leader in Graphics Performance: The Radeon X1900 Series
X1900 XT/XTX Roundup: A Closer Look at the Performance Leader in Graphics
NVIDIA's Tiny 90nm G71 and G73: GeForce 7900 and 7600 Debut
Indeed, it's almost as fun as easter egg hunting (the software / dvd type)
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I know these threads are always full of the "I only pay X for video cards, Y is too much. My stuff all plays fine." Articles like this are not for you. Your stuff plays fine for you. It does not play fine for the target audience of setups like are discussed above. A Ford gets you down the road well enough for most people, but not for a car enthusiast. This is no different. We're all proud of your frugalness, and are glad you're having a good experience with the games you play. But others like to compare and discuss the bleeding edge of graphics technology, and comments of the formula above don't really add to that.
Ehem... alow me...
I know these replies are always full of the "my penis is only X inches, Y is too big"
Replies like this are not for you. Your penis size is fine for you. It does not ejaculate fine for the target audience of penis sizes like are discussed above. A 5 dollar hooker gets you down the road well enough for most people, but not for a chronic masturbator. This is no different.
We're all proud of your small penis, and are glad you're having a good experience whacking off in your mother's basment. But others like to compare and discuss the fact that the gaming industry needs to work on good software design, and not rely on 300 million transistors of GPU processing power to make a good game, and replies to the formula above don't really add to that.
Havoc Video
Awww, you're telling the world all about how big your penis is on the internet.
We all know that means you sport about 3 and a half hard inches. Sorry, flappysack. Go post in a thread that interests you instead of trolling the ones that don't, please.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I'd probably put it in my IRA and take the income tax saver's credit for an instant guaranteed 20% "return" on that investment, but that's just me.
"We all know that means you sport about 3 and a half hard inches."
Yes, but some women like it that wide.
if their fab processes have improved recently it doesn't change my mind and it isn't FUD - it's honest first hand expirience with thei craptacular hardware.
So what exactly was the problem with the fab processes? The mask ? The feature size? The dielectric? Current leakage? What?
Oh I'm sorry, have I caught you trolling about something you don't even understand? How embarassing.
Bottom line is i don't trust them and they have done nothing to regain my trust.
I bet they're devastated about that. Who were you talking about anyway? ATI or Nvidia? I can't be bothered to try and read your original post. Trying to parse the one above gave me a headache.
The problem with the fabrication process would result in a higher rate of burnups - as far as i can tell it was probably current leakage
Oh I'm sorry, have I caught you trolling about something you don't even understand? How embarassing.
Oh I'm sorry, have i caught you accusing other people of not knowing what they're talking about when you're just being an ass because they do? How embarassing.
I bet they're devastated about that. Who were you talking about anyway? ATI or Nvidia? I can't be bothered to try and read your original post. Trying to parse the one above gave me a headache.
I'm sorry you have the reading comprehension of a five year old, but it does match your maturity level
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Redundant?
How about this then.... To the mods - Fuck You!
Having Karma to burn is fun indeed.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
You know, in an honest attempt to be serious, say what you mean - don't mean what you say.
Typos don't just happen. People LET them happen. They're lazy, careless and a simple *typo* as you say, could lead to dire consequences if the mistake is made in the wrong place.
Slow down, take the time to cross your Ts and dot your Is.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
dude uhh, this is the internet. Not only that, but it's a post on teh fucking slashdots. The only dire consequences here are when you accidentally click a goatse link at work.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
0mg d00d, you w3r3 pwnz0rd on t3h int3rn3t5!!! pls stop talking OUT OF YOUR ASS
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Personally the variation between both cards in performance is ususally BARELY discernable by pretty much anyone. Another key point isn't the processor on the GFX cards but the system itself. I could have a nice 3000+ amd cpu with 256mb ram running the 7900 SLI config or 1900XFX and have total CRAP performance. the other aspect is personal preference. both cards are fairly evenly matched from the specs and benches yes one has a bit better then the other in everyother catagory but bottom line is. If you can afford the pretty 5K computer then Yea the SLI/XFX performance is going to be phenonimal. Now the question is who's going to make the first Quad SLI single display push? now with extreme highend box like a dual or quad CPU dual core chip like maybe the 4800+ amd's with 4 or gigs o Ram and hell Quad SLI piped through a single display 1920x1080. /cry I want one now dammit...
Yes, but do you really want evidence of your ignorance, or impatience living on through google cache forever?
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I'm glad there's gamers out there that are willing to pay top dollar for the latest & greatest, because it motivates nVidia and ATI to be competitive and in the long run drives the prices down for consumers like you and me.
Their numbers aren't all that great compared to gamers, but there are graphics professionals who can easily and gladly purchase cards for $500 or more each when they are spending $50K on a motion base or tens of thousands on multiple projectors and screens for scientific visualization or flight simulators etc. Companies like Silicon Graphics are getting out of the graphics business because nobody needs the super high-end anymore, but there still needs to be something high end, and nVidia and ATI do and should continue to fill that need.
Just when I thought I'd built the ultimate game rig (in my budget) that would laugh at all the current crop of games... the cruel joke is that the one I play the most is the one that I still can't tame.
I've just upgraded to an AMD-64 3500+, 2GB of pc3200 400mhz Ram, SATA hard drive, 2000Mhz FSB, and a connect3d ATI X800 GTO PCIe x16 card. The machine runs like a scalded dog.
I can run every game under the sun at max settings at my monitor's top resolution (1600x1200)...
Doom3? piece of cake.
Far Cry? no test at all.
Call of Duty 2? maxed out and gorgeous.
EXCEPT EVERQUEST 2!! it chugs a little but it sure does look beautiful fully cranked up...there's no better looking game in the MMO world. It's breathtaking.
Of course the online element bogs down the game some, but if you can honestly play this thing with every setting maxed (including bloom and shadows and AA) not only do you necessarily have a beast of a machine, you will have to periodically wipe away the drool from the loveliness of Norrath.
Nope, not with FC5. But I have a Radeon and use Windows...
Just making a clarification, though.