Umm, why?Originally posted by Keikan@1 February 2004 - 00:30
Lets see motherboard ummmm most likely it's gonna be the
Asus a7n8x-x
Poster
Umm, why?Originally posted by Keikan@1 February 2004 - 00:30
Lets see motherboard ummmm most likely it's gonna be the
Asus a7n8x-x
Perfect video card for the best price! http://www.pricewatch.com/1/37/5113-1.htm
Geforce FX 5200 128mb
Sure there are $300 cards better than it, but... THERE'S NO GAMES THAT REQUIRE ANY $300 VIDEO CARD. I'm sick of arguing with people over which card is the best and the fact is you DON'T need the best video card to play hit games. Unless you're render-farming, putting together CGI movies, or dealing with millions of polygons per inch, you are well-off with this fine piece of graphics acceleration right here. I put these in every computer I build and they run like a charm. Not just computers for myself, but my clients as well. Ati is to Nvidia as Intel is to AMD. The only difference is the price. You will NOT notice more than a few fps better any high-end video card these days. Trust me.
I still prefer MSI. I don't mind paying the extra cash just to get quality (long-lasting type).Originally posted by adamp2p@1 February 2004 - 16:12
Benchmarks are not the issue:
MSI GeForce FX 5700 Ultra-TD128
It's all about quality gaming.
Sure, but there is no need to pay $300 for a quality card anyways. $140-$250 is all you need. You see, I take my gaming experience very seriously. I think you do too; however you either don't have much cash, don't have a powerful enough system to appreciate what it means to get 70 frames per second on QUALITY settings = 4X AA and 16X AF all day.Originally posted by jasonmog@1 February 2004 - 16:53
Perfect video card for the best price! http://www.pricewatch.com/1/37/5113-1.htm
Geforce FX 5200 128mb
Sure there are $300 cards better than it, but... THERE'S NO GAMES THAT REQUIRE ANY $300 VIDEO CARD. I'm sick of arguing with people over which card is the best and the fact is you DON'T need the best video card to play hit games. Unless you're render-farming, putting together CGI movies, or dealing with millions of polygons per inch, you are well-off with this fine piece of graphics acceleration right here. I put these in every computer I build and they run like a charm. Not just computers for myself, but my clients as well. Ati is to Nvidia as Intel is to AMD. The only difference is the price. You will NOT notice more than a few fps better any high-end video card these days. Trust me.
For myself and other serious gamers out there, $140-$250 USD not an extravagant amount of cash to lay down for something that we cherish. And after experiencing such an enthralling virtual reality-like simulations, how could we step down to using a card that is not able to really perform on the DX9 level without a recompiler which recoded FP32 shader operations in FP16?
Nvidia was basically forced to make heavy optimizations once 3dmark03 was released since their cards aren't dx9 compliant and 3dmark03 uses dx9 shaders. The compiler introduced with the forceware drivers eliminated most of the need for these optimizations, and thus why current benchmarks show the 5950 and 5700 more closely associated with ATI's offerings. But there are still issues with the use of FP16 and FP32; especially since the FX cards simply aren't powerful enough to run anything decently in FP32 mode.
If you still prefer nvidia good for you. I don't.
9600xt for $155...
NO, LOOK:Originally posted by KinXen@1 February 2004 - 17:27
9600xt for $155...
9600 XT With Half Life 2 Coupon $150 after mail in rebate
Here
So after the game that only will cost you $100 USD.
NO, LOOK:Originally posted by adamp2p+1 February 2004 - 18:48--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (adamp2p @ 1 February 2004 - 18:48)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-KinXen@1 February 2004 - 17:27
9600xt for $155...
9600 XT With Half Life 2 Coupon $150 after mail in rebate
Here
So after the game that only will cost you $100 USD.
[/b][/quote]
Then again, you could get an FX5900 for 160$, and it's one of the best cards around. It was 200 dollars like 2 months ago... price is down, time to buy
EDIT - btw, I still don't understand why ATI's prices still haven't go down....
Then again, you could get an FX5900 for 160$, and it's one of the best cards around. It was 200 dollars like 2 months ago... price is down, time to buyOriginally posted by DWk+1 February 2004 - 19:34--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (DWk @ 1 February 2004 - 19:34)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Originally posted by adamp2p@1 February 2004 - 18:48
<!--QuoteBegin-KinXen@1 February 2004 - 17:27
9600xt for $155...
NO, LOOK:
9600 XT With Half Life 2 Coupon $150 after mail in rebate
Here
So after the game that only will cost you $100 USD.
EDIT - btw, I still don't understand why ATI's prices still haven't go down.... [/b][/quote]
No link?And as far as the performance of the 5900: not very impressive. Not very efficient either. And to boot, the image quality will be comprimised for the simple fact that none of NVIDIA's offerings can handle FP32. Their complier converts FP32 back into FP16 and then runs the code, while ATi's cards are totally comfortable with FP32 because they were built around the DX9 code.
Reply: Let me quote my friend Delta for his observations:myself
I have a question for you. Is it true that the nominal frequencies of current nVidia cards are several (hundred) megahertz higher than todays ATi cards? I know that the current high end ATi card is the 9800 XT. Its engine clock runs at 412 MHz and the memory clock runs at 365 MHz (730 MHz DDR). Currently the 9800 XT is the highest performing gaming card in today's market.
The nVidia 5950 Ultra, nVidia's current answer to the 9800 XT has an engine (core) speed of 475 MHz and a memory clock of 475 MHz (950 DDR).
Man that is a lot faster! Why isn't the 5950 Ultra, with a 63 MHz faster core, and a 220 MHz faster memory clock trouncing the 9800 XT?
Something is fishy here? Or maybe the ATi card is more efficent? No, that couldn't be possible...
See you around my friend...
Actually, I looked at the technical comparisons somewhere and it was stated that nVidia's 5950 Ultra was actually the more powerful than ATi’s 9800XT. But that’s just in raw power. I can't recall where I saw that, but I remember reading something to the effect of ATi being a well balanced and powerful race car, whereas nVidia was more like a drag racer. nVidia would win the race, so long as there were no turns in the course. In other words, raw power doesn’t mean squat if you can’t use it.
Due to the architecture of nVidia’s chip, they needed to write a compiler in order to boost performance. Unfortunately, compiling takes time and makes the card appear to be slower as a result. ATi doesn’t have to take the additional step of compiling code, so they are able to avoid this problem altogether. So, even *IF* ATi’s cards are less powerful, they still finish first.
That said, I still prefer nVidia. But that’s because I’m not much of a gamer. For my purposes, nVidia’s offerings fit the bill better than ATi. If I were interested in gaming and wanted the best possible performance, ATi is the unmistakably better choice. At least for now anyway.. the gaming market is volatile and that's a good thing. Competition is good for everyone's business.
Really, it all comes down to the right tools for the job. If I want to haul a bunch of people around, a van would be the appropriate automobile to drive. If I wanted to haul a bunch of furniture around, a pickup would be the more ideal option.
More? Source: Anandtech
Q.E.D.
Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
Date: September 12th, 2003
Topic: Video Card
Manfacturer: Valve
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi
By now you've heard that our Half-Life 2 benchmarking time took place at an ATI event called "Shader Day." The point of Shader Day was to educate the press about shaders, their importance and give a little insight into how ATI's R3x0 architecture is optimized for the type of shader performance necessary for DirectX 9 applications. Granted, there's a huge marketing push from ATI, despite efforts to tone down the usual marketing that is present at these sorts of events.
One of the presenters at Shader Day was Gabe Newell of Valve, and it was in Gabe's presentation that the information we published here yesterday. According to Gabe, during the development of Half-Life 2, the development team encountered some very unusual performance numbers. Taken directly from Gabe's slide in the presentation, here's the performance they saw initially:
As you can guess, the folks at Valve were quite shocked. With NVIDIA's fastest offering unable to outperform a Radeon 9600 Pro (the Pro suffix was omitted from Gabe's chart), something was wrong, given that in any other game, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra would be much closer to the Radeon 9800 Pro in performance.
Working closely with NVIDIA (according to Gabe), Valve ended up developing a special codepath for NVIDIA's NV3x architecture that made some tradeoffs in order to improve performance on NVIDIA's FX cards. The tradeoffs, as explained by Gabe, were mainly in using 16-bit precision instead of 32-bit precision for certain floats and defaulting to Pixel Shader 1.4 (DX8.1) shaders instead of newer Pixel Shader 2.0 (DX9) shaders in certain cases. Valve refers to this new NV3x code path as a "mixed mode" of operation, as it is a mixture of full precision (32-bit) and partial precision (16-bit) floats as well as pixel shader 2.0 and 1.4 shader code. There's clearly a visual tradeoff made here, which we will get to shortly, but the tradeoff was necessary in order to improve performance.
The resulting performance that the Valve team saw was as follows
Taken from Valve Presentation
Oh...your video card, (MX 440) doesn't have a single pixel shader!
Now, do I have to explain to you what "FULL PRECISION" is? Is that the way you want your video games to be rendered? Is it any wonder why the entire FX's image quality suffers in newer DX9 games that are based on pixel shader 2.0?The very fact that Valve had to develop a special 'mixed mode codepath' in order for the FX to run decently in HL2 while all Radeons run it very well without any special coding should scream foul play. Why can't you realize that? The 'forceware' drivers convert the dx9 code which as you may know can lead to imperfections in the rendering. Not only that but the image quality is not on par either. All these things combined are what account for the half decent framerates in the latest benchmarks but it does not change the fact that the NV30 was not designed with dx9 in mind.
Not to mention all the sneaky little tricks their driver team tried pulling off like running with objects and particles missing. And detecting when a screenshot was being attempted so as to increase the image quality specifically for that shot in order to trick the viewer!
I like knowing that what I spend my money on isn't a half assed product which is what you are getting from nvidia.
How would you know? Your video card (MSI Geforce4 MX440 64MB DDR 8x AGP) does not use a single pixel shader.
For what? the 5900?
PriceWatch.com
but since you look lazy (as usual), here you go
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search...+Cards&mi=N&m=N
Edit - btw, make that 170$, i forgot about shipping
Then again, you could get an FX5900 for 160$, and it's one of the best cards around. It was 200 dollars like 2 months ago... price is down, time to buyOriginally posted by DWk+2 February 2004 - 03:34--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (DWk @ 2 February 2004 - 03:34)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Originally posted by adamp2p@1 February 2004 - 18:48
<!--QuoteBegin-KinXen@1 February 2004 - 17:27
9600xt for $155...
NO, LOOK:
9600 XT With Half Life 2 Coupon $150 after mail in rebate
Here
So after the game that only will cost you $100 USD.
EDIT - btw, I still don't understand why ATI's prices still haven't go down.... [/b][/quote]
Adam, using a long outdated test, that used older drivers for one of the cards isn't really fair.
I've heard about the picture quality thing also... from what I've heard ATi beats nVidia in that.
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And as far as the performance of the 5900: not very impressive. Not very efficient either. And to boot, the image quality will be comprimised for the simple fact that none of NVIDIA's offerings can handle FP32. Their complier converts FP32 back into FP16 and then runs the code, while ATi's cards are totally comfortable with FP32 because they were built around the DX9 code.
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