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ATI, Nvidia Reveal New $250 Graphics Cards
ThinSkin writes "As part of their 'Spring Refresh,' both AMD and Nvidia reveal new $250 graphics cards, the Radeon 4890 and GeForce GTX 275. ExtremeTech takes both cards and runs them through a gamut of gaming and synthetic benchmarks to decide which card triumphs over the other. Long story short, the GeForce takes the cake with impressive performance at its price, while the Radeon didn't show a high improvement over the cheaper Radeon 4870."
Yet HotHarware tests their 4890 and shows that it outperforms the 4870 in every category...
http://hothardware.com/Articles/ATI-Radeon-HD-4890-RV790-Unveiled/
and I quote:
"In every test, the Radeon HD 4890 (Asus EAH4890) was faster than the 1GB Radeon HD 4870, and the overclocked 4890 (Asus EAH4890 TOP) simply increased the card's overall lead. In comparison to competing offerings from NVIDIA, the Radeon HD 4890 is faster than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 overall, but it didn't quite keep pace with the just announced GeForce GTX 275."
This might be useful to someone like me, Phoronix just reviewed the 4890 on Linux with the ATI catalyst drivers: :)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeon_hd4890&num=1
I'm not sure on how to analyze that post after reading TFA. It seems that the radeon beat the nvidia in most of the cases, even at the $ per average FPS..
Thus why is this tagged with nvidia as the winner ?
yea...but don't think it's a "they"...just one crusader (don't think he wears a cape): Charlie Demerjian
He just hates nVidia with a passion.
Supposedly, there was some sort of "tiff" between them...them, like many companies, wanting to limit negative reviews, etc.
either way, grains (not just grain) of salt required for his articles regarding NV.
Kind of a useless test from my point of view, that of someone that would be looking to upgrade, for one simple reason.
These comparisons never seem to include the last generation of cards, and thus of no real value to me since I cannot determine how much of an upgrade I would be getting.
I don't care how many fucking cores it has if it doesn't perform better then what I have right now.
Benchmark testing my own machine(as a comparison tool) is sort of useless as well since the REST of my machine may be totally different then what they used.
Which is better then which is an entirely moot point if neither is better then what I have.
Check out GPUReview's video card compare and see what the theoretical performance differences are:
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php
It does appear that the just announced cards aren't listed on that site yet to compare against unfortunately.
This space is not for rent.
Depends on the purpose of the soundcard. In the pro arena, it is number of inputs and outputs, and quality of said inputs and outputs. In the consumer arena it is also I/O quality and to a lesser extent variety, but hardware effects as well.
The effects are pretty simple. Some cards, like the X-Fi, have a DSP onboard and can process 3D spatialization effects in hardware. This is of use for some games. Some games, like say Unreal Tournament 3, only do rudimentary software processing. So if you lack a card that handles OpenAL acceleration, you get only 2 channels and little effects. If you have a hardware OpenAL card, you get full surround and all the effects. Some games can go both ways and simply sound a little better with hardware, or just load the CPU less. Others can't use hardware acceleration at all. It isn't a magic bullet, but useful if you are a gamer (and I am, very much so).
The quality of inputs and outputs is a bigger one, and one you can spend a lot more money on. You are correct that basically every converter these days is 24-bit. However, that isn't the tricky part. The tricky part is all the supporting analog hardware that you use. This is the difference between a system with a high and low SNR and things like that. For example you will find that nothing comes near the theoretical 144dB SNR that 24-bit offers. You may find that a cheap soundcard gets 90-100dB, and it may even by lying about that and reporting the D/A component values, not the final signal, whereas a pro card might get close to 120dB (and really get that).
Also they often have outputs to better deal with special things like low impedance headphones. If I plug my headphones in to the onboard sound, there is audible noise. Why? Well in part the lower SNR but most because its opamp is getting overloaded. The headphones are rather low impedance (40 ohms) and that's more than it can handle. My X-Fi has a headphone port, which has either a buffer to provide more current or a better opamp (or both) so it has no problem powering them and generating no audible noise.
So higher end cards get better overall sound quality, at least if paired with higher quality components later on. Does it matter? Depends on you mostly. Me, I like high quality sound. I have a "home theater" setup for my computer, not computer speakers.
It isn't necessarily something for everyone, but some people like it. Also it may fall by the wayside in consumer systems if HDMI becomes popular. That carries surround audio, in addition to video. So instead of a soundcard you could hook that in a receiver and handle all the D/A conversion there. The digital signal would be output by the video card, of course.