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eta on 3870 x2?

Vogon said:
But the thing is software AA in every game that implements it to date, is very poor quality compared to hardware AA.
IMO it was a bad move on AMD/ATI to rely on that, especially since ATI's previous products had the edge on AA over nvidia in AA IQ and performance with AA.
Devs may want it, I certainly don't .... I took one game back for a refund recently when I couldn't force AA on, in future I will check game reviews/user experience and if no hardware aa support I won't buy it :)
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ATi only really went this way because they couldn't get hardware AA working on the 2900XT anyway and couldn't afford for it to keep going back for respins.

I'm surprised it wasn't at least fixed in the 3870XT though, they had to respin it for 55nm so why not add hardware AA support?

I don't agree with ditching AA support for older titles in favour of this new 'software' AA anyway - I mean it's not like people with new cards aren't going to want to play old games is it? They've just gone and broken the ability to add good levels of AA in these particular games.
 
Tute said:
ATi only really went this way because they couldn't get hardware AA working on the 2900XT anyway and couldn't afford for it to keep going back for respins.

I'm surprised it wasn't at least fixed in the 3870XT though, they had to respin it for 55nm so why not add hardware AA support?
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That was long rumoured but afaik never proven, suppose the proof will show in what way the r700 handles fsaa.
 
Why would they want hardware AA, surely they would just be emulating it, hence why it is normally slower as most dev's don't use software AA.

I mean come on, ATI not being able to implement a tech they had been excelling at for years? I don't think so. They took a design approach that was a documented standard and then got shafted when that doc changed. Imagine is Microsoft had said no to Nvidia about it, the situation would have been VERY different today. I don't think the 8 series would support dx10 today if this was the case of at least no dx10 with aa!

Matthew
 
to be fair ATi claim that if indeed dx10.1 comes out their AA solution comes straight to the forefront. Was that not in one of the their slides on the choice of DX10.1 for the 3*** series?
 
drunkenmaster said:
bull, absolute bull, 4xaa was **** NO SWEARING poor when first release, it did get loads, absolutely loads better. but again its design for DEV'S, not for DEV'S paid off by nvidia to do things nvidia's way.

Dev's in general wanted to go away from hardware AA, because as hardware AA is it doesn't work fantastically with HDR, it does work, i'm saying, because of the way it works quality isn't as good as they want. custom engine done AA was the way a lot of developers wanted, and still want to move forwards, we've had lots of games, dozens already where AA isn't easy to enable, some you can't use it at all as they are design to do some level of engine based AA. it isn't perfect at all but it shoudl be in the future, but the idea is that you need programable hardware to do it, which AA hardware isn't. so ATi built a programable core with massive power, then nvidia paid dozens of companies to not use it very well. such is life.

well, i tried two sites, xbit and anand, not the best anymore, http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3151&p=6

ridiculous graphs/tables at the end tbh, but the performance gap here closed from oblivion non AA to oblivion with AA, the performance hit with AA was HIGHER on the 8800gt than the 3870.

AA performance was poor at best when the 2900xt first came out, in several games only, and of all those reviews lots showed almost identical numbers with 4xaa as 8xaa :o, which if you recall nvidia looked awful in vista with hl2 because the game defaulted to higher AA when you went with 4xaa in the menu. games made years ago simply don't know there will be 4 new AA options in the future and you can't gaurentee they'll all work off the bat.
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Are you trying to make out a 2900XT/3870 is faster than the competition?
 
Basically its better because you can put 2 3870's in crossfire against 2 8800gt's in sli and the crossfire solution is quicker or around the same speed. As we all know the 8800 gt is a faster card than the 3870xt so this tells you that crossfire is a better solution than sli at this moment.
 
Vogon said:
But the thing is software AA in every game that implements it to date, is very poor quality compared to hardware AA.
IMO it was a bad move on AMD/ATI to rely on that, especially since ATI's previous products had the edge on AA over nvidia in AA IQ and performance with AA.
Devs may want it, I certainly don't .... I took one game back for a refund recently when I couldn't force AA on, in future I will check game reviews/user experience and if no hardware aa support I won't buy it :)
Click to expand...

It depends what AA filter you use with the card, Box filter is on par if not better than NVIDIA's offerings, this was proven in numerous reviews on the 2900's launch. Some of the other filters use a bluring method (Wide Tent, Narrow Tent) and thus don't offer very nice IQ.

Box is the traditional AA filter which has always been used on ATi cards before it, X1900XT used box etc. It is the traditional method.

Anisotropic filtering on the other hand IS worse than NVIDIA's offerings :o
 
Crossfire and sli are at best a mixed bag. Sometimes they work well, other times they tank.

I'll never forget my 2 2900 1 gigs in crossfire, of all games dod source could bring them to their knees due to some weird bug. I could be plodding along in a map then for no reason my framerate would plummet. This would be resolved by looking in another direction then my framerate would go back up. And this could even happen on totally empty servers. Was a really strange glitch and i dunno if it was ever fixed, when the framerate dropped though im talking tanked totally into single digits. I look away it goes back up i look back again and it again divebombed. Tried several drivers and none seemed to fix this either. :confused:
 
Driver team does need a kick up the arse IMO.

NVIDIA has decimated their what used to be "awesome driver support" ethos

We now get at least 2 driver sets from NVIDIA a month and get a WHQL normally every month. NVIDIA also provide us with the ability to force AA in such titles as UT3, Bioshock and many other UE3 games.

ATI became world famous with the "chuck patch" for Oblivion but they have yet to offer support for UE3 AA forcing months down the line, where as NVIDIA supported it within days of the game releases :rolleyes:.
 
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Gerard said:
Was near sure ati had already done a force aa on ue3 games update in their drivers?
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I don't believe so?

Not totally kept up with the ATi scene as of late, but if they have finally put it into the drivers, great, but I'll still be asking myself "Why has it taken so long?"

They used to pride themselves on offering quick solutions for unforceable IQ controls
 
willhub said:
Are you trying to make out a 2900XT/3870 is faster than the competition?
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really wish you and loadsa would shut up tbh. at no point in there did i say the 3870 was faster than a 8800gt, at NO point. as per usual you and loadsa purposefully mis interpret everything everyone says and have a go at ati. theres fanboy-ism, and then theres just being those irritating people in life that insist on arguing in that style. mis quoting, misinterpreting, saying something then saying you never said it, its boring.

only numbers i showed were the 8800gt taking a bigger performance hit from AA than the 3870 did, in oblivion at least. because, during the last year or two several of the bigger internet review sites have all gone massively advertising heavy, all have massively changed their benchmarking and few of them do normal accurate nice tables of performance figures. there is overall very very little AA performance analysis on the 8800gt/gts reviews. why they'd choose oblivion to show AA performance, and nothing else baffles the best of us. anandtech went from one of the top and most accurate sites on the net, to one of the most horrific ad laden word ad click driven crap sites out there.

nvidia's previous releases all showed everything in aa, non aa, low mid and high res. now we get a very limited game set, a very limited resolution set and next to no AA performance viewing.

i'm a little fed up by the 3870's AA performance being questioned in comparison to nvidia's of late, because, theres just no real benchmarking to show that.

also to try to compare a pair of 3870's to a pair of 8800gtx's is rather silly, £50 more? if you went and bought the cheapest in or out of stock cards in the uk today you could get a pair of 3870's cheaper than the cheapest 8800gtx single as of today. £264 vs over £500, yeah, £50 more.

I would go nvidia right now if they could manage, well over a year after release to get a 64bit driver working stably. i'd take a 5% performance hit for stability in all games, i simply can't bank on that with vista +nvidia. ati i might get lower performance, for a proportionally cheaper card, and i can bank on stability with vista 64bit, its as simple as that.

i can buy 4 3870's cheaper than 2 x 8800gtx aswell, would really like to see some reviews done on 4 way crossfire, performance and stability.
 
Tom|Nbk said:
Driver team does need a kick up the arse IMO.

NVIDIA has decimated their what used to be "awesome driver support" ethos

We now get at least 2 driver sets from NVIDIA a month and get a WHQL normally every month. NVIDIA also provide us with the ability to force AA in such titles as UT3, Bioshock and many other UE3 games.

ATI became world famous with the "chuck patch" for Oblivion but they have yet to offer support for UE3 AA forcing months down the line, where as NVIDIA supported it within days of the game releases :rolleyes:.
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seriously tom, as with will and loadsa, you've all of a sudden dropped out of the ATi driver program where you said the COMPLETE opposite of what you just said, for the ENTIRE last year.

ATI still offer once a month drivers thats what they've always done.

nvidia DON'T offer two sets a month, they offered about 42 sets during crysis month, because they couldn't get it right, in the previous year before that, there were 4/5 main sets of drivers of which about 1 offered remote stability on most games on vista 64.
 
Not to mention nVidia drivers don't support UT3 engine games with AA at all, i've yet to get them to force AA in any UT3 engine game (GoW, UT3, Bioshock, Vegas etc etc.)

You have to use a 3rd party app to get it to work (nhancer).
 
HeX said:
Not to mention nVidia drivers don't support UT3 engine games with AA at all, i've yet to get them to force AA in any UT3 engine game (GoW, UT3, Bioshock, Vegas etc etc.)

You have to use a 3rd party app to get it to work (nhancer).
Click to expand...

Im able to force it on in games like airborne and gears and unreal 3 with no problems with no nhancer.
 
Tom|Nbk said:
It depends what AA filter you use with the card, Box filter is on par if not better than NVIDIA's offerings, this was proven in numerous reviews on the 2900's launch. Some of the other filters use a bluring method (Wide Tent, Narrow Tent) and thus don't offer very nice IQ.

Box is the traditional AA filter which has always been used on ATi cards before it, X1900XT used box etc. It is the traditional method.

Anisotropic filtering on the other hand IS worse than NVIDIA's offerings :o
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I think we are at crossed purposes, I didn't mean the AA quality from the control panel, I meant the like of the so called AA used in games like stalker etc.

I had a 2900 and the AA quality on it was fine, its performance hit was the kicker though. The excuse/explanation from ATi at the time was the card is built to perform in DX10 AA modes .... ie software, thats fine but I think they should still keep hardware AA with decent performance.

@Gerad, unless the newer nvidia drivers have sorted it, you were unable to force AA on in UT3 ... well you could but it wasn't applied ...
 
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