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AMD Challenges NVIDIA To Graphics Throw-Down

Posted by Soulskill on from the fight-to-the-death dept.

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.'"

6 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Drivers by _merlin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Drivers by AbRASiON · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ahhh my mod points, do I rate you flamebait or just call you out?
      I used to be silly enough to believe what you just wrote. Infact! What you just wrote was absoloutely true - about a good TEN years ago,.. not 6, not 8 - 10 goddamn years.

      I believed the silly rumours you just posted up until about 4 or 5 years ago and my boss (who is actually a fanboy of ATI) suggested I get one, still I refused - eventually I read some reviews, saw the cost to speed ratio at that time was superior to nvidia and I caved and got an ATI card.
      Surprise surprise, no driver screwups, no faulty cards and I think I'm on my 3rd card since then. Generally the top end ATI cards are 90% as fast as the top end Nvidia but for 75% of the price. It's a completely logical choice when we're arguing about "do I want 140 fps or 120?"

      Also, nvidia just went through a terrible spell about 18 months back where they had nothing to offer and AMD thrashed them soundly, when nvidia did finally release a card which caught up, ATI was so far ahead they just released their next one - they missed an entire generation. I believe it was between the 2xx series and the 4xx series.

      Long story short, your post has far too many insightful points and an insufficient amount of overrated or flamebait points.

  2. Drivers by Aighearach · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:the only problem with these state of the art ca by Auroch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    These sorts of cards are designed to run 3 x 30" 2560x1600 monitors at a decent frame rate.

    ...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?
  4. Re:Anysufficiently advanced technology by houstonbofh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Give it a week. It will be on http://www.phoronix.com/ And it will be more likely to be accurate. Of course it will have real god and useful data soon at http://openbenchmarking.org/ but that is actually helpful and will not be reported by anyone.

  5. If I were nVidia by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.