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AMD Challenges NVIDIA To Graphics Throw-Down
MojoKid writes "Over the last couple of weeks, the two most powerful graphics cards released for the PC to date made their respective debuts, the dual-Cayman GPU powered AMD Radeon HD 6990 and the dual-GF110 GPU powered NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590. With such powerful products in their line-ups, both AMD and NVIDIA have claimed they offer 'the world's fastest graphics card.' AMD says it's theirs. Dave Erskine, the Senior Public Relations Manager for Graphics Desktop at AMD, challenged NVIDIA directly. 'So now I issue a challenge to our competitor: prove it, don't just say it. Show us the substantiation.'"
is indistinguishable from a rigged benchmark
(disclosure: I have Radeons stashed in various machinery throughout the house - especially the Macs)
Anyrate, them are pretty big words, but I'd take them more seriously if they agreed on a neutral testing lab and benchmarks that aren't geared towards one over the other.
Oh, and for the love of all that is holy, please provide comic relief by including an Intel video chipset. Pretty please?
(please insert evil grin here)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's not hard to create a benchmark which shows that your product is faster.
This is gonna be as interesting as Browser benchmarks are. Chrome, IE9, FF and Opera all win in their own benchmark. What does it mean to the enduser? Nothing.
Nu-uh, u first!
I love dork drama.
is that 99.99999% of PC games are just console ports which run perfectly fine on circa '08 hardware.
Thats fine if you want to run a game on a 1080p monitor. These sorts of cards are designed to run 3 x 30" 2560x1600 monitors at a decent frame rate.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Yea, I'm still getting blue screens on my AMDs. Yea, I'll get modded down by the AMD fanbois. Such is life.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
...so gamers can get closer to the real life they don't have.
I don't give a shit about which is faster. Neither seem to be able to consistently write stable drivers. Video driver stability issues are far more of a problem than being 0.1% slower than the competition.
AMD doesn't even have good drivers, who cares what they hardware they put or don't put on their new card?
For true nerds, nvidia is the only game in town.
How about a driver stability shootout? Include the major platforms (Windows, OS X, and Linux) and compare:
* Stability in desktop environments (Windows Aero/OS X/KDE/Gnome)
* Stability in the major productivity apps (Office suites, Photoshop/Gimp/etc., Lightroom/Aperture/etc, Final Cut/Premiere, AutoCAD)
* Stability in games
* Ease of installation
THAT is a shootout I would like to see. Even entry-level cards are "good enough" for casual gaming, and mid-range cards are great for even newer games at high resolution.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
...so gamers can get closer to the real life they don't have.
I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. People play video games to avoid "real" life, so ... yeah, some gamers *are* looking for a life they don't have. Temporarily, to be sure. No one wants to be a black ops marine for any length of time when it involves torture and such. But in a game? Make that as lifelike as possible ... that's *why* I play games. To avoid real life. Because if real life was as interesting as, say, dragon age, I think I'd just go play that.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
What do Slashdot readers think about the scientific butter that awards crack addicted babies with even more?
Thank You. Your comment, coupled with a couple of glasses of wine, just caused my brain to reboot.
You are the equivalent of the crazy person that has uncontrolled outbursts on the subway that make the Mad Hatter seem cogent and lucid.
+5 W.T.F
Take a look at HAWX 2, the only game in the universe where a GTX 460 beats a 6990
So I have a 5870 and the drivers are for sure better than when it came out. Also ATi drivers are lots better than they were years ago. Used to be a time when I wouldn't touch ATi, they were crap. Now, as is obvious, I don't have a problem with them. I do not prefer them but I'll get them if they have an offering I like and nVidia does not (when I bought the card, nVidia did not have DX11 cards).
So the drivers aren't horrible, but they aren't nVidia quality IMO. This is not only in terms of stability, but also features. nVidia provides some really excellent per-application profile support. You set stuff up and it just works. ATi's is a good deal more complex and not as smooth.
The fine print on his blog states: "His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions". Unless an authorized, official representative of AMD officially challenges NVIDIA on graphics performance, the corporation 'AMD' is NOT challenging the corporation 'NVIDIA'. It is merely one opinion of the many employees at AMD.
I'd say sure, and lay out a set of OpenGL benchmarks and utilities to try. Reason is ATi's OpenGL drivers have never been as good. They aren't horrible, but they are not as good as their DX drivers. nVidia, however, supports both APIs as native and they are both just as fast.
Rigged? Sure, but it makes a point: It is all in what you want to do that determines what is the fastest.
In terms of Windows games it looks like the 6990 is the faster card. Of course it is something where if ti matters at all is really questionable. You are talking like "Which card lets you get slightly higher FSAA settings with a game running at max quality in 5,760x1200?" HardOCP generally found the 6990 was the winner, but it was small things like that. The 590 would have no FSAA, they 6990 could have 2x FSAA or whatever.
So maybe it matters if you have 3 24" monitors, but if not the real meat of it is that both cards are way faster than you need and will run things great.
Either marketing department can find things to claim they are the "Fastest" I'm sure. If you care depends on what you do.
I've seen this movie. One beats the other so the loser then claims the testing software wasn't optimized to properly utilize their new fantazimo-gizmo processor so the test is moot.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
I usually base it on the above, as far as I can tell the Nvidia GPUs are both faster than ATI and pound for pound they are cheaper too!
Been Canadian, I used to be a big fan of ATI video cards having owned several all-in-wonder cards (from PCI to AGP types) I have had plenty of experience with the product. Unfortunately, I have found the quality of their drivers to be very inconsistent from release to release.
I stopped using ATI in favour of Matrox and Nvidia. Matrox has provided the most stable drivers and Nvidia has been "more" consistently pushing out reliable hardware with a quality driver.
Which can bake my muffins and cupcakes the fastest! See thanks to the Lightbulb Law, I can no longer use my EZbake Oven so I need an alternative.
Ante-up AMD and NVDIA! I need my baked goods!
I need my cards to be able to do GPU-enabled crunching on Matlab, which means NVidia > AMD. Yes, this is a highly niche field and I do spend more time gaming than this but an eight-hour difference in computing time means more time for games!
(yes, I'm aware I could just get another computer dedicated for this)
But does it have a Linux driver.
Hello, What the fuck /. ! Post My comment already You Fucks !
OK, to be fair it's been over a year since I ran ATI hardware (a 4650), but I replaced it with nvidia hardware because I couldn't get the darn thing to stop crashing. I miss my ATI hardware. It has nicer image quality and better tv out/in support for my old TV card and games. I ran a 1650 for years, but than again that was just an overclocked 9800, and every bug under the sun was worked out 10 times over on that. Maybe it's my fault for running less popular games, but come 'on. Psychonauts should not crash like clockwork just because the floaty neon things are on screen...
I guess what I'm saying it, AMD, call me when you're drivers can run something other than this years Call of Duty game & WoW
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This computer's motherboard has an AMD CPU and NVIDIA chipset.
hey, i got a idea, they can do the benchmarks in stereoscopic shutter glasses 3d. that is, if amd has any real support for it yet.
What do Slashdot readers think about the scientific butter that awards crack addicted babies with even more?
Thank You. Your comment, coupled with a couple of glasses of wine, just caused my brain to reboot.
You are the equivalent of the crazy person that has uncontrolled outbursts on the subway that make the Mad Hatter seem cogent and lucid.
+5 W.T.F
Purple monkey dishwasher.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
I think everyone should stop being bogged down in any kind of fanboi arguments and pay attention.
This is what we want from our companies. If every major company had this kind of PR, we would live in a much better world. Aren't you all sick and tired of companies blasting you with lines like "Here at CorporationX we value our customers, and that is why we are initiating our new 99 point plan on Customer Feedback Appreciation and Service Excellence. This new plan will allow us to further define future solutions to the current problems that plague you, our customers. In addition, we are rolling out a new platform designed to bring us closer together with our customer base. Through our new Prime Integrated Solutions and Services(TM) model we will be able to develop more press releases like this one that don't actually say anything and serve as nothing other than foreplay to what will certainly be the Board Room Lemon Party"
Seriously, I've worked for a ton of companies that had no idea how to communicate outside to real people and for once I am just happy to see a company say "We make X claim about our product and THIS IS WHY. Here's some people that agree with us. Here's our competitor making claim Y, where is their basis for making this claim?"
Every word of that blog post is valid and welcomed by a consumer that has always felt amazingly disconnected from the corporate machine that produces what I consume.
If the iPad 2 is capable of 1080p without whirring fans and RRODs, then so should these cards. Graphics cards are becoming increasingly cumbersome and huge in a world where laptops and tablets are gaining market share over desktops. If AMD can fit the 6990 into an iPad then it will get my next purchase.
Right. Enjoy your 4L V12.
Still got that can of whoop-ass handy?
A superb insight!
My 3DFX card from an alternate future is the fastest in the world!
Thank you for pointing that out because I read right through that without even realising just how fucked up that was. After seeing your response I had to go back and read it again a few times while my brain just kind of stared at it dumbly asking "Alright what am I looking at and what do you want me to do with this?"
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Giving up mod points in this thread just to say that I don't care which gfx card in the universe is faster. What matters to me is that AMD is kept alive and kicking, so that competition stays healthy & fierce for the benefit of all of us.
What do you think would happen to Intel & Nvidia prices if AMD went bankrupt? This is why I still buy and recommend AMD gear.
Haha nvidia and opengl ? The gtx285 kicks all the new cards because nvidia made the decision to cripple the consumer cards. You should google glreadpixels and gtx480... They crippled their drivers so that they can sell more quadro cards.
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=284014&page=1
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=181574
Want to see a GTX 590 burning because of some shitty nVidia drivers? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRo-1VFMcbc&feature=player_embedded .... ATI, really?
Now I am wondering who has bad drivers
Anyway, I am running Linux most of the time, and nVidia Linux support is really shitty. Sometimes, I am wondering if they still hire software engineers.
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
I own a AMD chip which I use. I also own a useless Nvidia chip. I use GNU/Linux and I use the free r600g driver with KMS. I really don't care how the cards are doing in the Windows world. I also don't care about their closed source binary blob Linux drivers. What I do care about is the support and performance of the free drivers.
The only thing I would like to see is a free software/free driver challenge between the two. Everything else does not matter. I never tried how any of them are doing in the Windows world, but my impression from what I have read is that it comes down to drivers there too and Nvidia seems to be doing better than AMD in the windows world.
Hardware really doesn't matter if there's not software to utilize it.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Consumers should better be interested in the efficiency of the 3D engines, such as CryEngine, UnrealEngine or FrostByte!
In 2007, I bought an ATI HD3570 in order to play Crysis, and it performed perfectly.
Today, Crysis 2 is out, it looks just about the same graphical complexity as Crysis 1, but I am expected to get a new 3D card to play the game in good condition. NO, THANK YOU!
I am fed with the game developers artificially driving the sale of lateset expensive, 3D cards from ATI and nVidia.
It reminds me when Intel and Microsoft allied to push users to get the very latest CPU and twice more RAM to run the new version of Windows.
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
by [H]ard|OCP
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/03/24/asus_geforce_gtx_590_video_card_review
from summary
"We truly thought the GTX 590 was going to make the Radeon 6990 look bad, but the fact of the matter is that NVIDIA made the 6990 look that much better. The GTX 590 is not the "World's Fastest Single Card Solution" as stated on our page 1 slides; the Radeon HD 6990 is very much retaining that title. Hail to the King, baby!"
Is having the biggest epeen for fastest single GPU for gaming worth it when you can barely even hear the fucking game over the noise of the fans? Naa... I'll take 2 individual GPUs and still be cheaper, have better overall performance, lower noise, and undamaged hearing, thanks.
Oh, and having half-way decent linux drivers is kind of a useful thing, you know?
Nice try AMD.
In order to move towards photo-realism, we need to move towards real-time raytracing.
This is best implemented in OpenCL (cross-platform).
A real-world OpenCL graphics (raytracing) benchmark is therefore required.
Suggest using vray-rt/gpu and a typical test scene for benchmarking.
If you're going to spend $700 on a video card, you'll probably spend on monitors too, especially since monitors tend to have a longer usable life cycle than video cards.
Show me free software/free drivers running four to six physical displays with full 3d acceleration. Let me choose whether it's a single desktop with one logical display, a single desktop with multiple logical displays, or multiple desktops. While I'd personally prefer GNU/Linux of a Debian flavor, ship it for any open environment you want, we'll take care of the rest.
Ship this software environment at the same time you release the card. Betas and patches are fine. Yes, that means collaborate in advance, and leave behind the last vestiges of pretense about competitive advantage via secrecy. Marketing, do-not-discuss-before-date NDAs are fine. Withholding the engineering data that will eventually be public anyway is counterproductive.
That's not always true.
(FF4 came out rather well).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I've been trying to be a modest AMD fanboy for more than a decade. Yet, seeing AMD engage in smack talk is disturbing. Even if NVIDIA is correct in its claim, I would rather see AMD directing finances towards 1) improving upon the stability and functionality of the Catalyst software suite and 2) a more usable driver download website. This, basically, amounts to AMD treating its software / driver developers better. Licensing SLI technology from NVIDIA would also be nice of AMD. That way, I could yank my Radeon HD X2 and replace it with a more stable graphics option, without purchasing a non-AMD chipset motherboard -should AMD fail to address items 1 and 2.
how about 1 30" monitor at 7680 x 4800?
now thats getting to the correct pixel density. Or better yet 3 or 6 of them, while decoding a bluray to play on my spare monitor...
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I have a pair of XFX Radeon 6870s in CrossFire at the moment. The recent Control Center rewrite combined with the performance upgrades for the 11.4 drivers (still in testing) make it seems like AMD is really caring for a quality customer experience these days.
However, the latest games that could take advantage of this hardware, aren't. "Can it play Crysis" is a fucking joke now since Crysis 2 was just released with buggy/failed CrossFire/SLI support. That and the configuration options for graphics quality have been reduced to resolution and an enumeration (high, very high, extreme). The title that had the potential to demonstrate the power of today's latest cards shows that it's just a POS console port. Crytek failed the basic customer Crysis originally catered to.
Sure there are other games out there that can stress out today's platform a touch, but they are last years games. It also seems like it's a 50/50 chance that a game released for PC this year will be another console port, and in turn have the quality and QA such a title is expected to have: piss poor.
I have a sinking feeling that being a PC gamer is nothing more than being an alpha tester for the 2015 consoles.
Actually most PC games run perfectly fine on '03 hardware. High-end 2003 hardware I admit (actually high-end 2001 hardware with a 2003 GPU upgrade) but still more powerful than an xbox360, and thus perpetually fast enough (until xbox360 is retired).
And in the end it doesn't even matter which one you have since nearly all games are designed to be console compatible., aka 4 or 5 gen old hardware.
I am basing my subject-line on this review:
"In terms of Windows games it looks like the 6990 is the faster card." - by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Sunday March 27, @12:25AM (#35627346)
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1098&type=expert&pid=15
Now, I'm FAR from the "hardware enthusiast" I used to be about 5-10 yrs. back, but I'd wager it's @ least, in part, due to the fact that the AMD card has 4gb of RAM, vs. 3gb on the NVidia unit!
(If you take a peek at the tests, that's when AMD's stuff "smokes" the NVidia stuff... i.e.-> When you go EXTREMELY "Hi-Res" & max-out the "eye-candy" in AA & AntiIsotropics etc. - & personally? I think that has to do with being able to "stuff more" into memory, because of MORE memory being present on the AMD unit than the NVidia one...)
APK
P.S.=> I'll take better informed opinions than mine here, because again, I'm not nearly as "into" hardware as I used to be... & things MAY have changed (as they always do in this field) since I had a more sincere interest in this end of things, which was again, years ago... apk
umm they have benchmarks already up and the 5990 lost from what I saw.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
from the benchmarks I've seen, NEITHER has the superior solution this time. Sure AMD's claim on a synthetic benchmark may be better, but as far as games go, it's a pretty big toss up, some games play better with AMD, others with NVIDIA. AMD is just being douchey about picking a fight, just like NVIDIA has in the past. I hate rivalries.
Have you actually found any that output that much res? Cause the only ones I have seen run at 2560x1600. Apple, Dell, HP, frankly, they even use the same panel from the same manufacturers.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There are about 3 people in the world than can afford to pay for those 700$ bleeding edge video cards so who gives a damn. About the ONLY practical thing about it, is people MIGHT see some high end technology that they MIGHT put into an affordable card SOMEDAY.
Now pit your 150-250$ cards against each other on identical machines, against identical software (*cough* games *cough*), with what drivers you plan to ship the damn things with, then THROW DOWN. I might be interested then.
As much as I like to see a Lamborghini VS a Ferrari I don't really care all that much as I cannot and will not ever be able to actually own either one.