Nvidia Vs Ati

CompExpert

Hello this is a post and discussion i really would like to talk about what do you guys think about the nvidia and ati graphic cards.
I had many ati cards but i really enjoy nvidia its because for its simplicity with drivers and for the performance in the games.

And to start our discussion use arguments
My argument will be this video you can see the difference in unigine heaven 2.0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXFkHLIyl5Y
And use strong arguments all spam such as " Ati rule" will be reported.

marco_polo

ATI are the cards of choice at the moment IMO, the GTX480 is too noisy, too power thirsty, runs too hot and doesn't give enough of a performance advantage for the price premium and in some games even has no advantage at all.

It tesselation scores are nice and all that, but the uniengine benchmark is extremely tesselation heavy and not really an accurate reflection of the graphical capabilities of the current generation of games.

Since ATI must be at least 6 months ahead in their development cycles at this stage, I am sure that tesselation performance will be addressed for the next generation, their focus on vastly reducing power consumption etc between the 4xxx the 5xxx series was of much greater immediate benefit to gamers and the right area to focus on, over a DX11 feature that is still in its infancy.

That aside the current state of affairs is certainly bad news for gamers in the market for new graphics cards and whos wallets are consistantlty getting raped due to the competition deficit.

Overheal

Nvidia drivers are indeed excellent but im with marco, the hardware itself is lacking. I'm still wary of nvidia for the G8 and G9 clusterf#$k and from what I've read and what I've seen in other builds, they are still running incredibly hot, and loud and often require Baking (!) which doesnt give me much confidence in the hardware's life expectancy.

Cuddlesworth

ATI rule!!!

PogMoThoin

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

ATI rule!!!

No they don't, they've not dropped the prices of their latest gen gpu's as Fermi didn't live up to expectations, a 5870 is 380-400 quid, when it should be 300 like the 4870 was when it was introduced. I want Nvidia to fight back just to bring prices down. I want to see both them compete with each other and not use nasty tricks like try to lock us out of their tech if we don't buy their gpu's.

Overheal

PogMoThoin wrote: »

No they don't, they've not dropped the prices of their latest gen gpu's as Fermi didn't live up to expectations, a 5870 is 380-400 quid, when it should be 300 like the 4870 was when it was introduced. I want Nvidia to fight back just to bring prices down. I want to see both them compete with each other and not use nasty tricks like try to lock us out of their tech if we don't buy their gpu's.

Then you've conveyed a self-defeating argument. ATI does indeed rule the market evidenced by their command of the price point against supply and demand.

Personally I kinda hope Nvidia crumbles and the useful people run off to start something new.

Solitaire

I don't! If that happened a HD5570 would cost over €800 due to MONOPOLY FAIL :eek:

PogMoThoin

Yep, remember Nvidia 8800GTX Ultras were once nearly €800, some peeps even Sli'd them :eek: Just to watch Crysis look lovely, till You got one third of the way in and it turned to shíte

Overheal

True. But from mere quality perspective nvidia has been really bad the last few years. They've badly got to either recover or reform their company to get back into the race.

For that matter, where is the competition???

Solitaire

Don't get me wrong; nVidia are a company well deserving of getting a lovely big kick in the teeth from God Himself for persistently acting the maggot, trying to "consolize" the PC, paying publishers to force their dev teams to de-optimize their engines' performance on AMD GPUs (the infamous TWIWMTBP, "The Way It Was Meant To Be Paid" :rolleyes::p), constant benchmark- and website-tweaking asshattery including "Tom's Payola" and even getting cheap on manufacturing and managing to screw up the actual physics profoundly because their own teams hadn't a clue about the effect that basic materials science had on semiconductor manufacturing thus leading to the dreaded underfill issues that results in frequent visits to the oven and makes almost any nVidia-based laptop a time bomb with an 18-month fuse from purchase! And when they did start to realise the problem, the management tried to hush it up, attacked any journalists that tried to tell the ugly truth and in the end hired the wrong experts to sort the problem after the clueless bosses started to believe their own propaganda! :rolleyes:

As it happens I wonder what happened to the "vector processing unit" called Larrabee? Because nVidia won't regain their feet until the next die shrink at least...

lmimmfn

Uniengine 2.0 is a crap comparison, simply because it uses insane levels of tesselation simply to show the effect, not only that they increased the level of tessellation in the latest Uniengine( most probably funded by Nvidia because the Fermi perview videos were Nvidia showing off uniengine version that wasnt available to the public and which came available as soon as Fermi was launched ).

Nvidia cards are over twice as fast at tessellation as they have loads of tessellation units( software emulated ), ATI has 1 dedicated tessellation unit, nvidia has 16( emulated on Cuda cores aka SP's ). Its a complete win for Nvidia for tessellation, HOWEVER no games in the forseeable future will use such high levels and very few games use it anyway. Aliens v's Predator uses it and Metro 2033, but not to such a degree as the Uniengine banchmark.

The other thing is because ATI has a dedicated tessellation unit its not reducing performance of the stream processors when in a mixed environment like a game whereas nvidias solution will take away from general rendering so in your average game there should be next to no performance difference in FPS with similar performing cards, i.e. Nvidia 480 vs 5870( although the 480 is slightly faster anyway but costs wayyyyy more and is terrible hot and needs a lot of power )

Bottom line, on price/performance/Temps/Running costs and features, ATI wins hands down. The Nvidia cards run far too hot to overclock, i get 5870 performance overclocking my 5850, if i bought the new Nvidia 460 or the most likely shirt lived 475 i wouldnt get that extra juice( although 460 is an excellent overclocker )

theres a reason - http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/graphics/graphics/nvidia-shares-still-plummeting

And just to be clear i am definately not a fanboy, i get the best price/performance ALWAYS. Previous cards are Nvidia 260, Nvidia 8800GT and Nvidia 7800GTX( second hand buy ). Nvidia 8800GT is still running strong in my current rig for physix and running a 3rd screen

and as Solitaire says Nvidias practices leave a lot to be desired, they ruined AA on batman AA for ATI and apparently are deliberately slowing down CPU execution of Physix by using ancient no longer officially supportex x87 code( which has extended precision that physix cant even uses as its 32bit ) - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/07/did-nvidia-cripple-its-cpu-gaming-physics-library-to-spite-intel.ars

Cuddlesworth

PogMoThoin wrote: »

No they don't, they've not dropped the prices of their latest gen gpu's as Fermi didn't live up to expectations, a 5870 is 380-400 quid, when it should be 300 like the 4870 was when it was introduced. I want Nvidia to fight back just to bring prices down. I want to see both them compete with each other and not use nasty tricks like try to lock us out of their tech if we don't buy their gpu's.

Are you complaining that a profit orientated company is pricing according to market demands? Shock and horror.

Ati/Amd doesn't have massive failure rates, huge heat and power draws and underhanded marketing and tech restrictions.

As for the tessellation bit, Gpu company's have been doing that for years. Our card does "insert tech here" so buy it. In reality by the time games come around to using it the card is pretty much useless. Nvidia have been the worst at this by miles. Shader Model 3.0 anybody?

Overheal

and slapping dx10 into every tom dick and harry of a card to boost their sales. nevermind the 8400m gs in my lappy gets set to explode anytime its asked to to what it was bought for.

Jonny7

Nvidia just managed to release a pretty good card -the 460

Great news as ATI might actually have to possibly perhaps drop their prices a wee bit ..

Funnily enough though, its not much faster than a 4890 (100 euros on ebay second hand) and who on earth actually notices DX11?? we are all chumps really

Solitaire

I'm still waiting to see what XBit have to say about realtime power consumption but one thing that's for sure is that the GTX460 spanks even the OC-friendly HD4890 in the OC stakes. Given they could probably take on the HD5850 once OCd to >800MHz (and 850MHz is more than a 25% OC over stock!) and its obvious that all we need is some aggressive pricing and the GTX460 could finally start a price war

lmimmfn

Solitaire wrote: »

I'm still waiting to see what XBit have to say about realtime power consumption but one thing that's for sure is that the GTX460 spanks even the OC-friendly HD4890 in the OC stakes. Given they could probably take on the HD5850 once OCd to >800MHz (and 850MHz is more than a 25% OC over stock!) and its obvious that all we need is some aggressive pricing and the GTX460 could finally start a price war

Max overclocked im sure it( the 1Gb version ) will match a stock 5850( or come very close ), but then again the 5850 can overclock to 5870 performance

Either way, its the best price/performance card out there now and hopefully will force down ATI's prices. If i hadnt got my 5850 and was in the market for a mid range card the 460 is definately what i would buy.

marco_polo

Solitaire wrote: »

I'm still waiting to see what XBit have to say about realtime power consumption but one thing that's for sure is that the GTX460 spanks even the OC-friendly HD4890 in the OC stakes. Given they could probably take on the HD5850 once OCd to >800MHz (and 850MHz is more than a 25% OC over stock!) and its obvious that all we need is some aggressive pricing and the GTX460 could finally start a price war

That and an adequate supply.

PogMoThoin

Good article here on why PhysX doesn't run well on cpu:
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/NVIDIA-Sheds-Light-On-Lack-Of-PhysX-CPU-Optimizations/