The [[Offical]] ATI vs NVIDIA thread

[forest4]

I think you know me a little too well! Yes, a guy in a purple shirt sold it to me, I was at Best Buy.

 

[Hoodlum]

ATI have the most horrific linux support imaginable, while Nvidia's support is more or less flawless, given the constraints.

R800 (5xxx series) are now supported by ATI's open drivers upstream. All cards except the R800s are now 3d supported with open drivers. R800 still has caveats (displayport, most acceleration). http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzk0Ng

Should mean far and away the best support over the next few years. I agree fglrx support can be slow, however it has improved over the last year or two.

Nvidia's CUDA is an amazing technology that is really well supported and rapidly being taken up as the industry standard.

On a serious note I thought this was basically going to be replaced by OpenCL.

 

[reflux]

You have to admit that it is still a technical victory. I mean come on, a single GPU card VS a dual? rofl

Is it? Obviously you haven't heard of the 4870 vs. the 3870X2, the 9800GX2 vs. the GTX280 etc. etc. The basic benchmark for a new high performance single GPU card is to be around as fast as the previous generation dual GPU card.

 

[jigger]

Why do my posts keep getting removed ?

 

[Chris Beard]

rubish competitor site that no-one would every want to go to.com
I think you know me a little too well! Yes, a guy in a purple shirt sold it to me, I was at Best Buy.

Hehe. Best remove the competitor link though - they get kinda itchy about that sort of thing around here. I know it's Canada, but hey, no accounting for fascist dicatorships.

 

[krooton]

Hehe. Best remove the competitor link though - they get kinda itchy about that sort of thing around here. I know it's Canada, but hey, no accounting for fascist dicatorships.

BestBuy will be setting up shop in the UK in a few months actually, so you are right!

 

[forest4]

Hehe. Best remove the competitor link though - they get kinda itchy about that sort of thing

OK, thanks for the heads up.

Is it? Obviously you haven't heard of the 4870 vs. the 3870X2, the 9800GX2 vs. the GTX280 etc. etc. The basic benchmark for a new high performance single GPU card is to be around as fast as the previous generation dual GPU card.

Yes, you have a point.

 

[gjc10212]

Offical.

 

[arc@css]

I like offerings from either ATI or nvidia. To me they are pretty much the same in most respects. My thinking is based slightly on me being unlikely to make use of the extra features nvidia cards offer since I am really not that interested in those features. I tend to think of nvidia as 'the one that got their foot in the door way first'. They were already a major force on the scene before ATI became a big player....and I think it was a pretty big saving grace for ATI when AMD acquired them.

 

[D.P.]

I like offerings from either ATI or nvidia. To me they are pretty much the same in most respects. My thinking is based slightly on me being unlikely to make use of the extra features nvidia cards offer since I am really not that interested in those features. I tend to think of nvidia as 'the one that got their foot in the door way first'. They were already a major force on the scene before ATI became a big player....and I think it was a pretty big saving grace for ATI when AMD acquired them.

ATI were around for a long time before Nvidia entered the scene. Nvidia are the newcomers to the game., and were the small underdog company that rose up due to good product placement. ATI's problem was they spent decades releasing mediocre GPUs that were just good enough for boring low end dell boxes.

3DFX made awesome GPUs, but were ultimately not sustainable.

Nvidia produced highly competitive GPUs that were able to power desktops from low to high end, gaining them the market leader position and forcing ATI to buckle up.

 

[D.P.]

R800 (5xxx series) are now supported by ATI's open drivers upstream. All cards except the R800s are now 3d supported with open drivers. R800 still has caveats (displayport, most acceleration). http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzk0Ng

Should mean far and away the best support over the next few years. I agree fglrx support can be slow, however it has improved over the last year or two.

Not really, the open source dirvers are not and will not be competitive. At best, we can hope the linux community ensures that at least basic functionality exists stably between Linux revisions.

However, with 12 years of linux use I've experienced 12 years of ATI nightmares and will never, ever, ever touch 1 with a barge pole in a machine which will run linux. ever.

On a serious note I thought this was basically going to be replaced by OpenCL.

OpenCL what? No one has heard of OpenCL, it is dead in the water. CUDA is the de facto industry standard and the words in everyone mouths in the scientific community. Science is being done here and now, using the CUDA platfrom on Tesla hardware. just like Hoover is synonymous with vacum cleaner, CUDA is with GPGPU. Everyone tlaks about CUDA. OpenCL only appears on ATI publicity.

I would prefer an entirely open standard, and with time OpenCL may come to bear fruit. But its already too late, CUDA is now the standard.

 

[arc@css]

Yeah, they were around for a long while as you rightly say but I don't think they were at the fore front (at least in the gaming market) until the last eight years or slightly more.

I had a 3dfx dual gpu, the Voodoo 5 and it probably is the best card I have ever owned, considering what was around at the time.

 

[stulid]

3DFX main problem was that they produced their own chips inhouse, meaning any failures/issues/fabrication costs including the machines to do this, cost them directly.

 

[Uriel]

My GPU history has been ATI, 3DFX, ATI, ATI, nVIDIA, nVIDIA, ATI, nVIDIA, ATI.

Just get whatever is best for your money at the time. Competition is good and keeps prices down. nVIDIA need to get those DX11 cards coming then it will be lower prices for all.

 

[buttkinz]

i remeber when nvidia took off, my friend had just bought the voodoo 5 dual gpu card and another pal turned up grinning with his new geforce 256, wasted the voodoo due to the harware T&L on the card, the rest was history really.

where as poor student me at the time was trying to game on a ati rage IIc lol

 

[stulid]

Nvidia sued 3DFX, and won, acquiring all there patents and technologies.

 

[Mr Paul]

OpenCL what? No one has heard of OpenCL, it is dead in the water. CUDA is the de facto industry standard and the words in everyone mouths in the scientific community. Science is being done here and now, using the CUDA platfrom on Tesla hardware. just like Hoover is synonymous with vacum cleaner, CUDA is with GPGPU. Everyone tlaks about CUDA. OpenCL only appears on ATI publicity.

I would prefer an entirely open standard, and with time OpenCL may come to bear fruit. But its already too late, CUDA is now the standard.

Ah but Hoovers Vacuum cleaners are crap

 

[drunkenmaster]

I bet you 20% of those Nvidia crashes are me



ATI have 19.9% market share Nvidia have 24% intel have the rest according to the latest statistics. Keep in mind just because it shows the crash caused by a driver doesn't actually mean it is, though.

Thats the problem, its simply the driver that CRASHED not CAUSED the crash.

But that swings both ways, many AMD "crashes" won't be caused by AMD drivers, but by instability that happens to show itself in the AMD driver, or Nvidia driver.

But thats why gpu crashes show up so highly, because fundamentally they are some of the most complex drivers the system uses, with heavily changed hardware each generation. While chipsets realistically do very basic things that haven't really changed in years and are VERY simple in comparison. A more complex driver that gets more use, puts more load on the system is going to crash more in an unstable system, than the printer driver.

The problem most people refuse to acknowledge is the instability in systems, almost every single "driver has stopped responding" or more serious AMD crash has been resolved on my system by making my overclock more stable, or backing it off a little. Those crashes do not fix themselves if they were caused by the driver, by backing off an overclock.

Mostly I get them when changing hardware, which puts different loads and power draws on different rails at different times, just because your computer was stable with 16 295gtx's under load, doesn't mean it will be stable with a 5770 under load, or vice versa. Going from a 3870x2, with complete stability to a 4870x2, with driver problems, changed the overclock, completely stable again. Obviously it tends to happen more often when you get a more powerful card rather than a lower power card.

The thing is if people see a bluescreen with any driver mentioned they'll all but ignore other possible causes, then conclude either AMD/Nvidia suck and never use them again.

Cards do break or arrive DOA, some drivers really are pap, but most problems are caused by the user in one way or another.

 

[Soylent Red]

Um, WHAT? The single card 5870 is faster than the dual-GPU GTX 295, and the power consumtion is so much smaller.

I think that the ATI VS Nvidia all comes down to packaging. Nvidia has a slick Black and Green packaging scheme, VS ATI's Black and Red scheme.

When I heard that Quake 4 had been released, it was WAAY after the fact. I had not heard of its release until about 3/4 of a year after its release I think, because I was into my Playstation 2 until then. The Quake 4 packaging is, you gressed it: Black and Green! I even bought Quake 4 Ultamite Edition for PC before I even had a PC of my own to play it on. I installed it on my Dad's PC, but it ran at about 1 frame per second
I bought my PC for Quake 4 and for Quake 4 alone. I had no other game in mind. I had played every Quake up until then. Big ID Software fan.

I bought a refurbished PC: Intel CeleronD 3.33 GHz CPU and a 103 GB hard drive. Only onboard graphics, the idea was to buy a GPU after the fact. But long after I bought it, I was informed that my motherboard only supported Nvidia cards, not ATI. I was honestly quite disappointed.

I ended up buying a PNY 8500GT, since it supported DirectX 10. Sound familiar? Like today's DirectX 11 battle royale? And a 700W PSU. That is one thing about Nvidia GPUs, they suck up power like a black hole. But it was all good, I put the PNY 8500GT's box (Black and Green) next to the Quake 4 Ultamite Edition box (Black and Green). I helt all warm and fuzzy!

Quake 4 ran well at 800x600, no AA. I could play it on Ultra High settings in Singleplayer, but on Ultra High it was too choppy in multiplayer. So, in multiplayer I turned it down a notch to High Settings.

Finally, now, I am building a new PC:
Core i7 920
XFX ATI Radeon HD 5870 1 GB
6 GB Partiot RAM @ 1600 MHz
Lite-On Blu Ray Drive @ 4x speed
1 TB Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Drive
1200W ANTEC Power Supply
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 Motherboard: Supports both 3x SLI and 3x CrossfireX (16x, 16x, 8x slots)

Now, it is time for Radeon to deliver the knockout blow to Geforce!

And by the way, when I bought my copy of Quake 4 Ultamite Edition for PC, it was the last copy of the Ultamite edition the store had. And a month later, the store I had bought Quake 4 from went out of business. And when I bought Quake 4, they had already stopped making it! I was so lucky to get a copy! And the cashier even made a stupid remark at me that made me angry for buying Quake 4 Ultamite Ed. for $30 and made me want to swear at him. I remeber he said I was stupid or something to his coworker like I was not standing right in front of him, and he looked like he was drunk maybe, even though he was at work. Weird. Well, after that, he had to look for a different job in the cold cold rain, while I was cumfy cozy playing Quake 4!

Can i have whatever you've taken?

 

[Rezident]

I used to go with best price or performance: 9800 XT, 8800 GTX, 4890

but now I'm getting older I do take other things into consideration. I've never had too many problems with ATI's business practices etc. so far.

Nvidia on the other hand, I have nearly lost all respect for over the last couple of years. Yes they're the market leader, yes they make excellent hardware but things like the Batman AA fiasco and all Nvidia's other dodgy dealings mean that I no longer feel comfortable supporting such a corporation if their is any other choice. ATI seems to go with open-source initiatives, Nvidia is proprietary. ATI just seems to be more interested in the good of gaming in general, not just itself. It's still a corporation, but not as obviously negative as nvidia, so far anyway.

If nvidia and ATI have similar hardware I would go for ATI in future because I am not disgusted by their business practices (yet). Of course, you will be called an ATI fanboy, I am not a fan of any corporation on the planet - it's a corporation! However, because Nvidia did things like reduce my fun playing Batman AA*, I dislike Nvidia, so will support their competititors.

*I played Batman AA on an ATI card and although I thought it looked good I told myself that 'it would look better on an nvidia card' because of the PhysX and AA etc. so even though it looked good, I felt I was missing out on something.

So I actually installed an old nvidia card and played through it again so I could glory in all the life-changing new PhysX magic, especially in the Scarecrow levels . . . and it looked the same to me. Meh, nvidia's hype, lies adn exaggerations marred both my playthroughs of an otherwise-excellent game. Nvidia is a marketing company and as HG Wells said: 'Marketing is legalised lying'.

I'm still not a fan of ATI, I don't think I ever want to be a fan of a corporation, but the enemy of my enemy . . .