Ati Schoolz Nvidia

[adamp2p]

a picture tells a thousand words...

[bigdawgfoxx]

niceeee

How can I play that video? I dont wana get quicktime really...

[adamp2p]

Originally posted by bigdawgfoxx@4 May 2004 - 20:18
niceeee

How can I play that video? I dont wana get quicktime really...

get the quicktime ALTERNATIVE here free

[lynx]

Originally posted by adamp2p@5 May 2004 - 04:13
a picture tells a thousand words...

So far all you've shown is videos and pictures and impressions, no hard facts.

A picture which is garbage not only tells you about the dump, it tells you that the people who took it habituate the dump.

[adamp2p]

Originally posted by lynx+5 May 2004 - 01:50--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (lynx @ 5 May 2004 - 01:50)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-adamp2p@5 May 2004 - 04:13
a picture tells a thousand words...

So far all you&#39;ve shown is videos and pictures and impressions, no hard facts.

A picture which is garbage not only tells you about the dump, it tells you that the people who took it habituate the dump. [/b][/quote]
That screenshot comparison is a fact&#33; You draw your own conclusions&#33;&#33;&#33;

[j4y3m]

Originally posted by adamp2p@5 May 2004 - 04:13
a picture tells a thousand words...

"The ATi cards peform better in that game." is only eight words.

I&#39;m not sure if it&#39;s a game though.

[adamp2p]

Originally posted by j4y3m+5 May 2004 - 06:57--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (j4y3m @ 5 May 2004 - 06:57)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-adamp2p@5 May 2004 - 04:13
a picture tells a thousand words...

"The ATi cards peform better in that game." is only eight words.

I&#39;m not sure if it&#39;s a game though. [/b][/quote]
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/6800x8.../conclusion.htm

Conclusion

Let’s start with the Geforce 6800 Ultra, its one hell of a fast card. There are some tests/game engines where the 6800 Ultra just streaks ahead of the X800 Pro at 1600 x 1200 – such as Painkiller and Prince of Persia. Testing wasn’t without issue though, which was strange – even for a reference design board. Zero Hour had the texture issues, Shadermark wouldn’t run and Max Payne wouldn’t work at maximum settings. In our opinion the Zero Hour bug will be easily fixed however in the case of Max Payne it may be that the maximum settings of 8xAA 16xAF will never work at 1600x1200. This does raise some concerns over using this mode in future games, will it become more un-useable as the use of video memory increases…or maybe you’ll require the 512mb 6800 Ultra to fully utilise it. If it’s a case of the later then the question of will it be useable from a playability point of view? Our “Maxing it out” section showed that 8xAA and 16xAF just didn’t provide playable frame-rate’s on the games we tested. Looking at the AA/AF results overall shows that weak AA/AF performance may be an inherent design issue in the NV40. The hit taken when enabling 4xAA 8xAF really hampered our card when compared to the R420 card. Even in benchmarks where the 6800 Ultra was well ahead of the R420 without AA/AF enabling both allowed the R420 to match or pass the 6800 Ultra in performance. The move to rotated grid multi sampling is has however resulted in much improved IQ over the last generation of Geforce product and it’s now much harder to choose which brand of video card has the best IQ.

The X800 Pro was a surprise to us in terms of just how fast it was. Considering it has a four pipeline deficit over the 6800 Ultra the card still keeps up and in some cases surpasses the Geforce. Testing went really without issue, all games we tested ran with no display concerns and the card was completely stable. It seems that the drivers are mature enough , even at this stage, that you can go out and buy a R420 based product and games will “just work”.

Where the NV40 core receives a major performance hit when enabling Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering the R420 core has no such issues. The performance penalty received on the R420 is minimal resulting in games which maintain playable frame-rates at higher image quality than even the top end NV40 model. The fact that the X800 Pro manages to outscore the 6800 Ultra with AA/AF enabled in most cases further enforces the excellent AA/AF performance. It was also nice to see the X800 Pro maintaining playability in Farcry, one of the most demanding games available even at 1600x1200 when 4xAA and 16xAF was enabled. Our sample was an excellent overclocker, and providing your cards manufacturer uses decent memory there is no reason why you couldn’t achieve the same levels of performance when overclocking, an additional bonus.

There have been some rumours circulating around the past week over the core/clock speeds for the 6800 Ultra. We asked Nvidia about this and they confirmed that the 6800 Ultra reference speeds were still 400mhz core and 550mhz memory in 3d use however partner companies can choose to clock their boards higher if they wish. Based on our overclocking experience it would seem that a 50mhz increase on both core and memory will be about the maximum most partners will aim for. This will certainly improve results however it will only make the 6800 Ultra more competitive with the X800 Pro, the X800XT (read our review here) will still be a fair amount faster than the 6800 Ultra when AA/AF is used. This is the real deciding factor in our view. Yes both the X800 Pro and 6800 Ultra are fast, yes they give good image quality by default however with cards this fast you really need to enable at least 4xAA and 8xAF to get the full benefits of your purchase. At these settings there really is no competition. The X800 Pro is a clear winner.

[adamp2p]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=2044&p=22

Final Words

QUOTE&nbsp;
I don&#39;t think anyone thought the race would be this close after what has been going on over the past couple years with ATI and NVIDIA. Clearly, both camps have had their wins and losses, but it is safe to say that ATI comes out on top when it comes to DX9 and PS 2.0 performance, NVIDIA leads the way in OpenGL performance, and NV40 and R420 split the difference when it comes to DX8 (and older) style games. Even though we haven&#39;t yet seen the performance numbers from NVIDIA&#39;s 6850 Ultra part, it is likely that there will be a price premium that goes along with that performance. On top of that, the 6850 is really just an overclocked 6800 Ultra part. We will take a look at the issue further when we are finally able to run some numbers.

It is very clear that both NVIDIA and ATI have strong offerings. With better competition in the market place, and NVIDIA differentiating themselves by offering a richer feature set (that doesn&#39;t necessarily translate into value unless developers start producing games that use those features), consumers will be able to make a choice without needing to worry about sacrificing real performance. Hopefully we will be able to say the same about image quality when we get done with our testing in that area as well.

Of course, we are still trying to gather all the pieces that explain why we are seeing the numbers we are seeing. The problem is really the amount and level of information we are able to gather is based on how the API maps to the hardware rather than how the hardware does things.

The two rather large issues we have encountered when trying to talk about hardware from the software&#39;s perspective are the following: it is easy to get lost when looking at performing tasks from slightly different perspectives or angles of attack, and looking at two architectures that are designed to accomplish similar tasks obfuscates the characteristics of the underlying architectures. We are very happy that both NVIDIA and ATI have started opening up and sharing more about there architectures with us, and hopefully the next round of products will see even further development of this type of relationship.

There is one final dilemma we have on our hands: pricing. From the performance numbers from both this generation and the previous generation, it doesn&#39;t seem like prices can stay where they are. As we get a better feel for the coming market with the 12x1 NVIDIA offering, and other midrange and budget offerings from both NVIDIA and ATI, there will be so much overlap in price, performance, and generation without a very large gap in functionality that it might not make sense to spend more money to get something newer. Of course, we will have to wait and see what happens in that area, but depending on what the test results for our 6850 Ultra end up looking like, we may end up recommending that NVIDIA push their prices down slightly (or shift around a few specs) in order to keep the market balanced. With ATI&#39;s performance on par in older games and slightly ahead in newer games, the beefy power supply requirement, two slot solution, and sheer heat generated by NV40 may be too much for most people to take the NVIDIA plunge. The bottom line is the consumer here, and its good news all around.&nbsp;

[adamp2p]

http://www.gamers-depot.com/hardware/video...ti/x800/005.htm

Getting games to really push these cards can be quite a challenge, we had to start enabling a lot more features like Anisotropic filtering and Anti-Aliasing so the games wouldn’t be more CPU bound than GPU bound.

After looking at the benchmark results, it’s not hard to conclude which company has the faster GPU. What may be hard to decide, however, is whether or not you believe you’ll keep whatever video card you buy long enough to have SM3.0 be an issue or not. Even so, the NV40 inherently prohibits itself from many end-user PCs, especially the Small Form Factor owners.

Secondly, the cooler-running R420 is a lot more forgiving in a wide variety of hardware configurations - this issue alone will be a major reason why ATI has a greater potential of getting major design-wins from OEMs.

3Dc, while cool, is not enough of a breakthrough technology to get us ultra-excited about the X800. It’s the sheer, unadulterated power of these cards that fuels our lust for faster graphics, which amounts to more fluid games that turns our crank. Keep all the fancy, unused features if it means giving up horsepower. If ATI can prove it can build a high run-rate of X800XT cards, then the high-end will surely be clinched by them. The part that gets tricky for ATI is the mid-range; it’s where a lot more money is made and also where NVIDIA can be a extremely aggressive with cards like the 6800GT.

Only time will tell if leaving out SM3.0 was a poor choice by ATI in favor or raw power. Even though we’ve heard mixed reviews, You can be assured that if NVIDIA can sell enough NV40’s, publishers will start being more forceful in making sure games support it – after all, both developers and publishers want their respective games looking and playing the best of a wide variety of PCs.

If you want a hotter card that requires more power and doesn&#39;t perform as well under most benchmarks, just for the sake of SM3.0 then go ahead and snag a 6800 Ultra - If, however, you want the most insanely powerful graphics solution for games of today, runs cooler, works with "normal" power supplies then ATI has your mealticket.

[adamp2p]

http://www.bjorn3d.com/_preview.php?...457&pageID=725

Performance Conclusion

If you were a bit dissapointed in the leap from Radeon 9700 pro to Radeon 9800 Pro or Radeon 9800 Pro to Radeon 9800XT then you will be extremely happy with the performance leap of the x800 XT. The 8 extra rendering pipelines as well as increased VPU and memory speed really helps the x800 XT to simply crush the Radeon 9800XT. If you could play at 4x AA and 8xAF on the Radeon 9800XT and get good framerates you now can play at 6xAA and 16xAF and still get higher performance. Impressive? Definitely. Since I couldn&#39;t test the 12 pipeline x800 Pro in time for this preview I cannot say to much about its performance more than that in theory it will still perform really good compared to the Radeon 9800XT.

IQ at a minimal cost

Pixel and Texel fillrate of up to 8.4 Gigapixels/sec, up to 37 GB/sec of raw bandwidth and 12 or 16 pipeline architecture are the key features when it comes to X800 performance. Due to its sophisticated 0.13-micron Low-K dielectric process, very efficient GDDR3 memory interface and superior pixel shader architecture (12 or 16 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex units), RADEON X800 easily doubles (x800 XT Platinum Edition) the performance of its high-end predecessor – RADEON 9800XT.

There is no doubt in our minds that the new RADEON X800 from ATI has just raised the image quality bar. By introducing Temporal Antialiasing, this technique brings in huge quality enhancements while keeping performance cost at zero. This is truly a step forward when it comes to programmable Antialiasing architecture. As with R3xx design, X800 offers full trilinear texture filtering by default along with up to 16x Anisotropic Filtering. When combined, the video output is phenomenal keeping the performance hit at minimal -- in some situations none-existent because of X800’s superior fillrate.

Conclusion

With the x800 Pro and XT Platinum Edition ATI has brought up a pair of impressive products. If there is something one could complain about is that the cards really do not have any new exciting features and that they basically still are R300 on crack. I don&#39;t necessarily think that the lack of PS3.0 will affect this generation though and the performance increase itself is enough to have any serious gamer wanting it. Any price-concious gamers should take a closer look at the Radeon x800 Pro which should perform excellent while be a lot more affordable.

The x800 pro should be out as you read this at a suggested retail price of &#036;399 and the x800 XT Platinum Edition will be out on the 21st of May at a suggested retail price of &#036;499.