Need advice on nVidia graphics card...

[kylew]

It's a tough one, but I think I'm going to go for the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X GFX card - Looks to be the third best in the 5870 series, with the XFX and Powercolor in the lead...

I would seriously recommend you look at getting a 5850 over a 5870, 5870s just aren't worth the £100+ difference in monies.

You can overclock a 5850 to 5870 performance and beyond (yeah you can overclock the 5870 too but it's still not £100+ more performance).

 

[rolypolyman]

Well crossfire is crossfire, single cards are sometimes better. A handful of games don't benefit from CF too much, some others benefit nearly 100%. Also, not all boards support crossfire.

Additionally, 2*5850/70 is still more bang for the buck than 2*5970, and 4*5770 gets kinda ridiculous. That's why I listed that card as bang for the buck, since you can't really compare CF cards to single cards.

Besides, esp. at high settings / framerates the 5870 rapes the CF5770, for example the third graph shows CF5770's min framerate at 20 and 5870's at 40.

Sorry mate but I was comparing CF5770 to a 5850, the 5870 does beat the CF5770 but not always. At 2560 X 1600 Ultra 4XAA Dirt2 the CF5770 min Fps = 27. 5870 = 29. 5850 = 21 Pretty close given their prices and the 128bit memory on the 5770.

 

[stulid]

For once I agree with kylew.

For games get the 5850.

 

[T-800]

Out of interest, why are so many people against nVidia at the moment, and for ATI? Is it because nVidia's going under, or... ?

 

[Alex74]

Out of interest, why are so many people against nVidia at the moment, and for ATI? Is it because nVidia's going under, or... ?

I dont think it's people being against nVidia so much as the fact that they just dont have products that are competitive enough at the moment.
nVidia cards are only really competitive at a couple very specific price points, but In general, ATi cards dominate at the moment.
Most people here are hoping this will change once Fermi is out, so the prices of high end cards will be brought down some what, and we'll have some more options


(plus people dont like the fact that nVidia have rereleased the same card 4 times now )

 

[buttkinz]

they just dont have any competative cards available to buy, and the ones that are out they refuse to drop the prices to compete

edit: beat me to it haha!

 

[Strawberry]

Because the latest ATI cards easily dominate the market with their price/performance ratio.

 

[FoxEye]

Looking to buy a new nVidia graphics card for current and next-gen videogames, such as Bioshock 2, GTA IV, AvP, etc. Need it to last for a good 2-3 years.

Well the Xbox 720 won't be around until 2012 at the earliest, right? So we'll be mostly seeing bad ports of dx9 console games until then...

Spending £300 on a gfx card, when the result may not be much better than a £150 console, well it's a hard pill to swallow (for me at least).

If I was going to buy a new gfx card at this moment in time I'd be happy with a 5770 (nice low power beasty). £200 is quite a few pints down the local

 

[T-800]

A friend of mine was recently telling me that ATI cards don't process physics effects themselves, and instead, rely on the computer's CPU and other components to do all the work. He also said they "don't do 3D", whatever that means. Any truth / explanation to either of these statements?

 

[Rroff]

Some games can use PhysX to accelerate physics processing on nVidia GPUs, only about 2 games use this enough to worry about at this time.

By 3D he means 3D Vision (120Hz display and stereo glasses of one type or another) currently theres no proper way to do it on ATI if your into that.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Jeees guys...you are not answering his question to the point enough.

At the moment ATI got cards with dx 11 support, Nvidia does not (not until their damn Fermi is ready). That's making ATI cards more desirable as an upgrade and it's as plain and simple as that.

The current ATI HD 5000 series is pretty much around the same performance as previous gen ATI HD 4000 series, but uses less power and runs cooler and with dx 11 support. If people want to game in dx 11 mode now, they would have to buy a ATI HD 5000 series card...even when their ATI HD 4000 series and GT(X)200 series cards are still perfectly capable.

 

[titaniumx3]

The current ATI HD 5000 series is pretty much around the same performance as previous gen ATI HD 4000 series ...

Going from a 4870 to 5870 gives roughly 60% to 80% more performance; I wouldn't call that roughly the same.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Going from a 4870 to 5870 gives roughly 60% to 80% more performance; I wouldn't call that roughly the same.

Sorry, I meant in 'overall'. Imagine you got a GTX260 or HD4890 that can play almost all your games at 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 and 4AA, but you want dx 11, you would have spend at least £200 for a 5850 or £300 for the 5870. Paying £120 would only get you a 5770 would just be sidestepping (in fact it is even slower). And for people that own a 4870x2, they only got the choice of either paying £500 for 5970, or paying another £300 sidestepping to a 5870 for the sake of dx 11 (which is kind of ridiculous).

What I meant by the current 5000 series performance has barely improve over the 4000 series is this:

In my opinion, the 5xxx series (except 5770) is simply offering too little for products that are at such a high/ridculous price:

£100-105 5750=4850 sidestepping with added dx 11 support
£115-120 5770=4870 sidestepping with added dx 11 support
£200 5830=4890 sidestepping with added dx 11 support
£200-220 5850
£300-330 5870=4870x2 sidestepping with added dx 11 support
£500 5970

More reasonable price should be like this:
5750: £100
5770: £115-120
5830: £150-170
5850: £200-220
5870: £250-280
5890: £300-330
5970: £400-450

And we if were to agree that the price gap between 5770 and 5850 is too wide (simply because ATI overpricing the cards above 5770) and 5830 is pointless, it should look something like this in the first place:
5750: £100
5770: £110-£120
5850: £180-£200 (taking into the consideration of 2x 5770 xfire outperform 5850)
5870: £250-£280 (considering 2x 5770 xfire perform comparable to 5870, but not exceed it)
5890: £320-£340
5970: £400-450

While everyone is busy worshipping ATI as God for releasing dx 11 cards in time (if ignore the fact that they don't have enough GPU to meet demand), did they stop to think for a second that ATI is in fact relying too much on dx 11 as selling point, but performance wise it hasn't really improved much over the 4xxx series (besides running cooler and consume less power)?

It's not really a very tempting 'upgrade' for people what already got 4xxx series or GT200 series cards, unless they can sell their existing card for reasonable price on the bay (which means relying on poor souls that are not in the know to buy their GTX280/285 at £180-200 when they could have just gotten 5850 instead).

Realisticallly, 5970 is the only card that I would truely say is 'faster' than the overall 4000 series, but I'm betting the amount of people that would actually be able or willing to pay that much for it is probably no more than 5-10% of the people that are buying graphic cards.

 

[Strawberry]

By 3D he means 3D Vision (120Hz display and stereo glasses of one type or another) currently theres no proper way to do it on ATI if your into that.

I regularly game using 3D glasses with iZ3D. Works fine on ATI. Supports pretty much every single game I have on my PC.

There's like 10+ options to choose from, eg. dual projector, cross eyed, red/cyan, shutter glasses, etc.

 

[rhys216]

Sorry, I meant in 'overall'. Imagine you got a GTX260 or HD4890 that can play almost all your games at 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 and 4AA, but you want dx 11, you would have spend at least £200 for a 5850 or £300 for the 5870. Paying £120 would only get you a 5770 would just be sidestepping (in fact it is even slower). And for people that own a 4870x2, they only got the choice of either paying £500 for 5970, or paying another £300 sidestepping to a 5870 for the sake of dx 11 (which is kind of ridiculous).

What I meant by the current 5000 series performance has barely improve over the 4000 series is this:


Realisticallly, 5970 is the only card that I would truely say is 'faster' than the overall 4000 series, but I'm betting the amount of people that would actually be able or willing to pay that much for it is probably no more than 5-10% of the people that are buying graphic cards.

This is pretty much standard and a good improvement over last gen in terms of performance and not 'that' bad in terms of price which is beyond AMD's control unless they want to make a loss.
Maybe for some reason you were expecting a miracle performance boost, in which case your expectations are too high.

You'v basically just wasted our time making a non-point as it's not as if the competition offers anywhere near the same value for money as Ati, i.e. not even in the same ballpark.

 

[stiv121]

Maby wait till end of march? i would probery go for a 5770 or 5850 if i were you i was very happy moving from Nividia to ATI

 

[Randomface74]

Does the ATI control panel have a feature to force AA?

 

[titaniumx3]

Does the ATI control panel have a feature to force AA?

Yes.

 

[han_solo]

Does playing Dx11 games with Dx11 capable cards really give you that 'wow' factor?? I only ask as i don't really hear how amazing a game plays/looks with Dx11 in the mix?

I'm under the impression that Dx11 is still a bit 'premature' with only a handful of games and of those its implementation is still in its infancy.

Not dissing Dx11 in any way but because of the lack of games supporting this and also with Dx11.1 around the corner... I think it still makes a lot of sense to hang on to or get a good nvidia card.

 

[rounddodger]

Does playing Dx11 games with Dx11 capable cards really give you that 'wow' factor??

At the moment? No.