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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."
...use that kind of money for something more useful... like say... a down payment on a new car. And a last-generation videocard which is nearly as good but at 1/100th of the price.
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
A fruitful connection
From The Economist print edition
A new Steve Jobs; a second coming. But is it the same old Apple? The firm's predicament is that in the desktop computer market there is bound to be only one winner--markets based on standards tend to work that way--and the IBM-compatible PC is it. Apple, dazzled by its own brilliance, chose to go it alone, refusing to allow an industry of cloners to arise, as IBM did. As far behind as the original PC may have been, it was only a matter of time before the collective efforts of Microsoft, Intel and a horde of others would overtake Apple. Now that day has come, and no amount of restructuring, marketing or price-cutting can disguise the fact that Apple is the Betamax of computers.
Those who expect the returning prophet to change this ghastly situation reckon without the change in the prophet himself. [In 1997,] Mr Jobs demonstrated his own grasp on reality by selling all but one of the 1.5m Apple shares he had received for NeXT. He did not, he said, see much of a future for Apple. Moreover, he has told Pixar staff that he will not be leaving [...]
This is hardly the Steve Jobs that Apple enthusiasts know and love. Where is his vision for restoring Apple to its rightful place in the industry it did so much to create? Intact, actually: the newly level-headed Mr Jobs knows that Apple's rightful place is a niche, at best, despite its glorious history. Today he talks about refocusing on its strengths in the publishing and education markets, tomorrow he may steer it to the cheap "network computers" Mr Ellison is so enthusiastic about. But it is hard to see a future in which Apple is not a smaller firm, less obsessed by the victory of the inferior PC, and probably without Mr Jobs.
His own fortune assured, and Pixar a success, Mr Jobs has little to prove by taking the helm of a sinking ship, even one he built long ago. At least he is well placed to break the bad news that, having lost the desktop war, Apple must now find something different to do. Having once distorted reality, his duty now is to make Apple face up to it.
""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.
So the nVidia card wins because they used 3 games that are designed to work better with nVidia boards than ATI boards?
Good job(TM)
I'll still never buy an nvidia board. Their fab process and Q&A suck, they cannot be bothered to properly follow the farking API specs for dx9 or openGL causing those of us that write code to have to work around their bugs, and I've see far too many of their cards TOAST from being OC'ed by their own drivers.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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.
7900 is a full 6900 better than 1900. Am I the only one who sees this?
geez.
"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?
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.
Someone Moderated me troll - how cowardly, immature and innappropriate. My post wasn't trolling- my post was a simple statement, and was true. As far as I can recall those games it [nvidia card] performed better on were designed to use it more efficiently than it would the ATI card. And my expirience with driver issues from nvidia and it's burn up rate aren't trolling either they're the truth.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
...not hard-crashing my linux kernel in the middle of a 32-player UT2004 match?
Will it run compiz+xgl?
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.
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
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...
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.