ATI's DirectX 10 card benched, bests NVIDIA's 8800

Threw, not Through.

/shoots face off.

Thanks, Crono. Fixed.

Don't buy any of these cards, its not worth it. Just buy a console.

Ah, that's the ATI I miss. Looks like I'll be picking this card up (in the future of course, waste of money right now).

I've always been a big fan of ATI over NVIDIA. I don't know why.

(Had a 7900GT have overheating problems, swapped it out for a X1950GT Pro... and the X1950 runs amazing!)

/me highfives Crono

Why would they bench it against a GTS and not a GTX OC? that makes no sense. it's skewing the results towards ATI.

Looks like the AMD acquisition wasn't such a bad thing for ATI (or us) after all.

Newer computer tech beats older tech? Who would have thought

They may be better than the Nvidia cards, but there is one glaring flaw on the ATI cards... They are ATI.

I have more information and detail about the ATI R600 secret weapon revealed for you guys;


R600 HAS A secret weapon, an internal sound card. This is the one thing that Nvidia's G8x can't match, other than HDCP on dual-link HDMI.
The ATI sound implementation is not GPGPU code. It is dedicated silicon, probably brought on by the Vista DRM infection and MS twisting arms to force it on people.

In any case, R600 will be compliant with the Vista requirements and can send sound directly over a HDCP/HDMI link. We are told this is a full HD sound setup, not a cheesy 2.1 channel thing.

In contrast, NV G8x parts can't do this. They have to run an external cable from the sound chip to the GPU. This may not sound like much but it blows out several kinds of auto configuration and worse yet violates Vista logo requirements. One has to wonder if this is why NV can't seem to make a functional Vista driver six months in.

The problem with Vista is that the DRM infection mandates that you do not share S/PDIF output over unencrypted links. R600 does this by combining audio and video streams, then pumping them out over HDCP infected links. This is user antagonistic DRM, but it complies with MS logo requirements, and they don't care about user experiences any more than the content mafiaa.

Add in that the R600 can do dual-link HDCP and you are going to be swimming in bandwidth, more than enough to pipe sound down.

Nvidia's G8x on the other hand can't do dual link HDCP at all, so if you have a 30-inch monitor, you will get a black screen. At that point, sound is the least of your problems.

Basically it looks like the sound card in R600 is going to be the killer app for home theatre type apps. G8x simply can not do what is needed here, buggy drivers or not. While the DRM infection stinks, at least R600 will be able to comply.

"Why would they bench it against a GTS and not a GTX OC? that makes no sense. it's skewing the results towards ATI."

This isn't the higher end ATI card. This one is supposed to be the equivalent of the GTS for Nvidia. The one more closely associated to the GTX would be the XTX.

@6

XT is not ATI's flagship card. The XTX is. So the equal comparison would be XTX to GTX and XT to GTS.

Do these cards work with XFire. Supposedly most of the budget NVidia cards can be put in an SLI system. Which makes the idea of a budget SLI setup...tasty.

ofcourse until nvG9xxx comes out.. D:

#4 High Price : no problem, but can you just tell me which console gets Crysis and Spore?

Wouldn't the comparison be from XT to GT?

But it still puts money on AMDs table so I refuse to buy one. One day they will finally die and go away. For the money vs. performance MSI nx8800gts OC is the better deal 620MB @ $399.99. Getting a pair of those come Monday.

speaking of crisis,I think even a 6800gt(which I have) and have a another cheap 90$ msi nv6800gt OTW for a SLI setup is still on par with most direct x9 games out now.

By the time crysis hits, I think your going to need 2 8800gtx in sli to run the game properly like it was meant to be shown.

so don't waste money getting these highend cards now so you can play your same directx9 games you DL 'd from torrent.


wait for crysis..and all the benchmarks thrown at it.

Yeah...ATI's cards might perform better than nvidia's stuff, but ATI can't write drivers or make a stable card for shit. I have personally owned two defective ATI cards and two of my friends have had their cards literally melt. My nVidia cards, on the other hand, have never had a problem, and I've owned more of them than ATI cards.

Seriously, if ATI/AMD would stop trying to one-up nVidia for a second, just long enough to fix their buggy, unstable drivers and clean up their chipsets, they might have a chance at beating the competition.

Graphic war has begun......

ati tested the 640mb 8800 gts against the 2900 hd-xt(weak)not the much larger 760mb gtx-oc or gtx-xxt radeon is wack,late releases and always one step behind. when they finally get a chance to relase their card nvidia will have a levithion on the shelves. c'mon joystiq if yer gonna report on graphics harware do it right! beat the gts gimme a break. all your reader who see this story should go to EVGA's site or BFG's to seee for them selves.

"you bitches make me sick"

"Yeah...ATI's cards might perform better than nvidia's stuff, but ATI can't write drivers or make a stable card for shit. I have personally owned two defective ATI cards and two of my friends have had their cards literally melt. My nVidia cards, on the other hand, have never had a problem, and I've owned more of them than ATI cards.

Seriously, if ATI/AMD would stop trying to one-up nVidia for a second, just long enough to fix their buggy, unstable drivers and clean up their chipsets, they might have a chance at beating the competition."


Have you not been awake these past few months?

Vista? Nvidia drivers? Has all this passed you by?

@big z

Riiight, go to an NVIDIA website for "un-biased" opinion of their graphics cards? Okay sure.

I go to www.hardocp.com for all my video card information. They usually lean towards ATI, but they're about as unbiased as you can get nowadays.

i diddent say got to an nvidia site, i said to go to a second or third party manufacture's site. dipshit.and i have a gts and 2 gtx-oc's ive done my homework before purchasing nvidia is simply the best right now, tits, the shit, and a no brainer if you know how to read.

big z 3d devoloper, artist, and hardware wizard
"sic"

@ 23 big z
HD 2900XT is not the top of the line video card if you want to compare 8800 GTX then ATI HD 2900XTX is the one you need to put together in a figth.....

Wow, the war has officially started. Especially when the NVIDIA fans start coming out of the woodwork. Good for ATI, and more importantly, us consumers.

@24 big z take it easy dont get mad because Nvidia has a very hard competitor with DX10 video cards now......

"Wow, the war has officially started."

I wasn't aware it had ever stopped.

AMD/ATI R600 SIMPLY can't be called a GPU anymore. GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit, while R600 can be shortly described as GSPPU - Graphics, Sound and Physics Processing Unit.
It seems now that the System-on-a-Chip concept implemented in R600 was far beyond anything Graphzilla's rider Jen-Hsun ever talked about, and the roar of angry beast will be heard in city of Satan Clara.

We hear that Sound Physics has been buzzed for quite some time, and we are massaging our contacts to bring you as much detail as possible. It seems that R600 GPU will be less CPU-bound than it has been in the past, since a lot more parts of the scene will be calculated and rendered on the GPU itself.

R600 combines graphics with audio and physics process in a whole another way, and those 64 vect5D shader pipelines yield in 320 scalar units total, directly comparable to Nvidia's 128 scalar ones. Now, 128 scalar units at 1.35 GHz is still a tad more efficient that ATi's own 320 at 740 MHz, but ATi's pipeline is more complex than it was previously thought.

Who'd have thought that ATI would overtake Nvidia in a race to multi-purpose GPU and make consoles of today with their PowerPC CPUs look so 1990s? Perhaps R600 was really worth the wait after all.

@Dan

2 Months of Driver Trobule > Lifetime of Driver Trouble

ATI loses 1,000,000 points for driver software.

not completely linked to this article but 7600gt or x1650 pro these cards in particular http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=564716
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=530761

and does anyone know what psu i would need for the x1650?

thanks

Its a freaking arms race. I wonder when AMD will be firing on all cilinders and get a competative CPU out as well.

"ATI loses 1,000,000 points for driver software."

QFT lawl seriously learn to make drivers.

I like how ATI rolled their numbers way back with this new generation of cards. Weren't they up to like Radeon 9999 XTFKA++ or something before?

Now they've got a nice window of almost 7000 to work with.


I've usually preferred Nvidia to ATI, they were just more stable for me. I've owned two Nvidia cards (Geforce 4 Ti4400, current Geforce 7900 GT OC) and one ATI (9700 Pro All-In-Wonder)

And I thought it was ostentatious when Advanced Gravis used red solder mask for the UltraSound's printed circuit board instead of the standard green.

What the hell is up with that plastic-encased, flame-painted monster???

I'm an ATI fan myself, but i got an nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX for xmas. Still though, GTS

@big z

So does BFG or EVGA make ATI cards? No?

They only make Nvidia cards... meaning they'd be a little biased against their competition.

Ah. I see. Your logical thinking may have JUST kicked in after reading that statement. Welcome to the real world... dipshit.

@15:

Sure. It's called the XBox 360.

Oh boy AMD needs this sort of success REALLY badly. They're having a bit of a rough time lately.

Geo sounds like a paid amd/ati employee.

ATI HD 2900XTX + Crysis = best gaming experience ever

@ 39 Buckshot HA,ha,ha,ha.......

ATi AVIVO also makes a return in a form of Universal Video Decoder (UVD), scoring 128 on HQV test, and HD2900XT will of course, support high-resolution HDMI (1.2 spec), featuring AC3 5.1 output. When it comes to regular resolutions, Radeon HD2900XT supports both 2560x1560 and 2560x2048.

The board communicates with the computer using a PCIe x16 slot and processing data through internal ring bus and 512-bit external controller (8-channel memory interface). Clocks are set at 742 MHz for the GPU and 1.65 GHz for 512MB of GDDR-3 memory.

AMD promised extremely competitive pricing, and in many cases the HD2900XT will beat the 8800GTX, yet alone the 8800GTS. To boot, the company decided to team up with Valve and offer a free bundle featuring a couple of upcoming hit titles. It is up to the partners to decide how the game will be bundled, but this will be marked as Return of The Coupon, if you remember the Radeon 9800XT launch and the alleged code-leak in Half Life 2 development, which was marked by a year delay.

As Henri Richard said during the last quarterly conference call, AMD will not do a soft launch and HD2900XT boards will be massively available.

This is exactly why I stopped gaming on my PC. $500 for a video card? Give me my Powerbook and a 360, I'm happy.

@40

You're just talking out your ass here. It might be end up being the temporary king of graphics, but games go much deeper than that. Everytime I see talk about Crysis you come off as nothing more than a graphics whore. What gives? Are you, as others have suggested, an ATI employee?

shut the fuck up geo. i don't care about you sharing your opinion but the problem is you were paid to write it AND it was written by the PR people who work a floor above you asshat.

@Geo: your posts do read like press releases. At least you've got a clear career path open to you, if your not already working in PR or marketing.

I've never had a problem with my ATI card, and this old X800 Pro has run undisturbed for a couple years. I use Omega drivers, though, so everyone's bad times could be a result of sticking with the stock drivers.

Man... the graphics card war is the strangest thing to see. With the console war, one sees dramatic shifts thanks to killer apps and disparate feature sets, but until this GPSP development it seemed to be a lot of hooting and hollering over a few frames per second. I'm so impressed by how far things have come since VooDoo cards, however, so I don't care who's going to give me a extra frame or two each second.

I'm rolling with the Nvidia 8800GTX ATM...it cranked out 150 FPS easily on the CoH stress test the other day. Couple that with my Physx card and I'll be too busy actually PLAYING fucking games instead of arguing over vidya cards. Seriously, brand loyalty is for suckers. I bought the the 8800 for the reason that is is the best on the market, RIGHT NOW, not 6-mos down the road.

"42. This is exactly why I stopped gaming on my PC. $500 for a video card? Give me my Powerbook and a 360, I'm happy."
You get what you pay for.
Unlike my PC I built for $1200 a year ago, no console can pull C&C3 at 1080p at near max detail.

On topic: I am interested in what will the benchmarks for the highest-end model of Radeon 2900 be. Have to get ready for Crysis on max you know. :)