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.'"

Comments

Anysufficiently advanced technology

[Anonymous Coward]

is indistinguishable from a rigged benchmark

Re:Anysufficiently advanced technology

[davester666]

Who wants to see two computers running the same game at 10 frames/second at 640x480?

Re:Anysufficiently advanced technology

[houstonbofh]

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.

Big words...

[Penguinisto]

(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)

Re:Big words...

[houstonbofh]

If you are going to pick on an integrated video solution then you don't have to bother with Intel. None of the integrated chipsets would stack up at all against these top of the line cards.

If you want a comparison, try showing what other things you could have bought for $700+. Perhaps an XBox AND a PS3 plus a mainstream video card? Or maybe just one console, a few games, a mainstream card and a vacuum cleaner to run while playing (to simulate the sound of the high end cards).

Three hours with a mid range hooker? I know you still get screwed longer with the PS3, but it is more fun with a hooker.

Hope their drivers have improved

[Bigbutt]

Yea, I'm still getting blue screens on my AMDs. Yea, I'll get modded down by the AMD fanbois. Such is life.

[John]

Re:Hope their drivers have improved

[Anonymous Coward]

The bulk of Vista and 7 graphics driver code is implemented as user-mode driver DLLs. No BSODs normally, just an app crash or driver restart.

Re:Hope their drivers have improved

[Xest]

Yeah but how many systems have you and the parent had? If you're talking a handful then your personal anecdotes are meaningless.

I did tech support for local government/schools for 7 years and we had over 5000 PCs to look after at any one time, and of course over that period we went through a number of hardware refreshes so I saw closed to 15,000 machines of various configurations.

I can tell you now that the number of times we had widespread issues with nVidia cards was one due to one bad driver release, but rolling back to old drivers was rediculously easy with nVidia.

In contrast ATI cards were a constant persistent headache, and sure there were some ATI based systems that never really caused a problem, but there were literally hundreds that did. The issues ranged from instability due to shit drivers, through to perhaps one of the most annoying issues- the fact that you could download the right drivers for a card from the ATI site and sometimes they just would not work with the only way to get graphics working properly to find the original CD that came with the system/card and install the version from that because later versions of drivers for a specific card didn't always work right with those older cards. Even when you found the old driver CD if those original drivers were shit- i.e. poor performing, or unstable then you were left with a choice between an unstable/poor performing system or, well, no drivers at all.

ATI cards don't have a poor reputation because the odd gamer has had a dodgy system, they have a poor reputation for drivers because people like me who have dealt with large sample sizes of systems have seen that ATI cards over the years have consistently had these problems whereas nVidia's screwups have been relatively few and far beween in contrast.

I can similarly tell you from my experience of such a large sample size that whilst HP printers are generally some of the best hardware, they have equally had some terrible driver releases through the years. I can tell you that Maxtor drives have a drastically higher failure rate than that of other manufacturers.

It's not fanboyism if a particular product or manufacturer has a bad reputation for some reason, no it's generally based on the fact there's a lot of truth in that reputation. If it was as you say individuals building questionable systems then why don't nVidia equally have a bad rep, or are you suggesting nVidia users are more competent at selecting good components and configurations than ATI/AMD users? Obviously that seems unlikely.

Drivers

[_merlin]

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.

Re:Drivers

[houstonbofh]

I haven't had a video driver issue with any video card from either NVIDIA or ATI/AMD for at least a few generations.. What systems and hardware are all these people with driver problems running?

MSI motherboards? :)

Driver quality

[kimvette]

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.

Re:the only problem with these state of the art ca

[Auroch]

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.

Re:That's absolutely true, but...

[EdIII]

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

If I were nVidia

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Yeah but, ATI still unstable...

[rsilvergun]

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

AMD and Nvidia, Take a FOSS challange

[xiando]

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.