Upgrade! ATI or nvidia, DX 11 tessellation???

[Carlos_will]

All depends on what you want to spend and what resolution you use.

Because it is quite simple really, performance more or less follows cost.

5850 - 470 - 5870 - 480.

Or if you want to pay a little less, have a look at the 460's

Or wait a couple of months for the 6 series from ATI(Maybe worth doing this now as we are not to far away)

Probably around £200 max. Do you know what the 6 series will offer to compete with nvidia's dominance on tessellation (which I have come to the conclusion that it is pretty much NOT a big deal, reading through this forum)

I mean yeah, waiting a couple of months might be the better way to go, I can survive I think hehe.

 

[Carlos_will]

Very few games use tesselation effectively and it's my belief it won't be an important feature due to most games being console ports and the dominace of console gaming.

This is most probably true, thinking about it developers will always make games which are available and perform similar in most cases, to both nvidia and ati consumers! Otherwise they'd be stupid not to...They'd lose money. Hmm.

 

[Carlos_will]

And I would just like to say, wow I've never started off a thread that is as active as this? haha. Crazy stuff! There really must not be another thread based on this topic then! I feel privaleged.

 

[opethdisciple]

What. It is a dx11 game though. You can't just decide if it is or not.

Yes, it's hotter. It's also faster too. I love how people judge things they don't own though.

A load of crock.

Ati put a tessellation engine in the 2000 series and marketed it quite heavily at the time. They called it truform however it was a total disaster as nobody adopted it.

They subsequently removed it for the 3000 series. That was with all intents designing for the future and it failed miserably. So this 'now not tommorrow' biz is rubbish.

nvidia are no exceptions, they attempted to predict the direction of the changing graphics world with the FX (5) series, way back. Again, disaster. The direction the world took was totally different for what they had optimised their arch for.

I dont consider BFBC2 DX11 becuase it doesnt implement dx11 fully, only a small subset... its essentially dx10.1 with a few dx11 features tacked on..

Also, it looks absolutly no difference in dx11 as it does in dx10. Thats as I observed it going from my dx10 3870x2 to my 5870.

Also the whole tesselation thing... is not a load of old crock. The reason why I choose a 5870 over the 470, was becuase the one thing the 470 does better than the 5870, is a feature, which isnt that heavely utilised at the moment, ie tesselation. Look at it another way, we have dx10 and dx11, but yet, games are still being made using dx9.

Its going to take years before tesselation is the defacto, and normal to appear in games. So investeing in tomorrows tech now, is buying in to the marketing, unless you buy your cards for benchmarking only rather than real world games.

I needed a quiet card, so I went for the most powerful, yet quiet card I could afford, and the 5870 is absolutly whisper quiet. My case fans easily engulf its noise. My 3870x2 was 3 times as loud!

I am not being a fan boi, I was seriously considering buying a 470, but FOR ME it made sense to by the quiter 5870. The noise levels was probably the key factor..... tesseltation, wasnt important too me, becuase there arent many gameson the market, or even in the near future that will need this.....

As far as im concerned a gaming card, has a two year life span. It will run games tip top for about two years, but then it will start to suffer, thats when its upgrade time...

In two years, tesselation will be (may not be) a more important feature... by that time, both companies will have products with vastly improved tesselation engines.

Also are you telling me that if AMD didnt want to, they coudnt have built better tesselation performance in to the 5000 series? Of course they could, but they made the desicion to still markert share from Nvidia, beat them to the punch and release a series of cards, more relevenat to todays (last years) games market.

 

[Carlos_will]

For a direct comparison showing the cards working tessellation see here:

creed, very interesting video. I do think it is safe to say that IMO real world games/applications are highly unlikely to use tessellation at this kind of level (or does anyone disagree?), probably not for another 3-4 years or so (I'm guessing) especially at 8xaa, thats kind of crazy, but saying that, the 480gtx does do very well!

 

[Gerard]

What. It is a dx11 game though. You can't just decide if it is or not.

The only thing DX11 does in BC2 is make shadow edges slightly smoother, thats it. It was asked on the offical forum and thats the only visual difference Dice could point to. Its just a tacked on "feature" that you'd only spot if you were walking along looking at shadows on walls.

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/12544310-post11.html

Ooh slightly softer shadows, talk about scraping the barrel just so they could shout "zomg dx11 support!!111".

 

[lay-z-boy]

I dont consider BFBC2 DX11 becuase it doesnt implement dx11 fully, only a small subset... its essentially dx10.1 with a few dx11 features tacked on..

Also, it looks absolutly no difference in dx11 as it does in dx10. Thats as I observed it going from my dx10 3870x2 to my 5870.

Well as you put it, it has dx11 features tacked on. Like it or lump it, they are dx11 features. It's not the best example out there for dx11 but it is one.

Also the whole tesselation thing... is not a load of old crock. The reason why I choose a 5870 over the 470, was becuase the one thing the 470 does better than the 5870, is a feature, which isnt that heavely utilised at the moment, ie tesselation. Look at it another way, we have dx10 and dx11, but yet, games are still being made using dx9.

I'm not criticizing your choice of gpu, the 5870 is an absolute powerhouse and dominated for a good number of months without challenge, the 470 is simply an alternative to it but has a few tricks (tesalation, cuda) up its sleeve that the 5870 potentially makes up for with power consumption.

However the uptake of dx11 seems to have been far better than dx10 and I hope this continues.

Its going to take years before tesselation is the defacto, and normal to appear in games. So investeing in tomorrows tech now, is buying in to the marketing, unless you buy your cards for benchmarking only rather than real world games.

We will have to wait and see for the outcome of that. However buying a 400 series based on purely tessellation performance would be rather odd in my eyes.

I needed a quiet card, so I went for the most powerful, yet quiet card I could afford, and the 5870 is absolutly whisper quiet. My case fans easily engulf its noise. My 3870x2 was 3 times as loud!

I couldn't stand the stock 5870 cooler (put vf3000's on mine), crossfire was seriously noisy due the backplate of the second gpu blocking air to the first. 480 sli is hotter but not as harsh on my ears as the 5870 coolers were.

I am not being a fan boi, I was seriously considering buying a 470, but FOR ME it made sense to by the quiter 5870. The noise levels was probably the key factor..... tesseltation, wasnt important too me, becuase there arent many gameson the market, or even in the near future that will need this.....

As per earlier, whatever floats you're boat. I don't take sides, you don't have to justify anything.

As far as im concerned a gaming card, has a two year life span. It will run games tip top for about two years, but then it will start to suffer, thats when its upgrade time...

In two years, tesselation will be (may not be) a more important feature... by that time, both companies will have products with vastly improved tesselation engines.

Again, we are faced with the problem of the two gamer consoles, the ps3 and the 360 having epicly inferior graphics to what pc's can have even on a budget.
Most console games don't even render at 720p, they have to upscale to that and then to 1080p. We will have to wait for the ps4/720 to allow things to push forward. Untill then, unless the developer has money and time to develop the pc side of a game properly we will be stuck with console ports.

My last few graphics cards have lasted far longer than I anticipated. Had I stuck to a single display, I'd still be using my 4870x2 and probably would until it stops working.

Also are you telling me that if AMD didnt want to, they coudnt have built better tesselation performance in to the 5000 series? Of course they could, but they made the desicion to still markert share from Nvidia, beat them to the punch and release a series of cards, more relevenat to todays (last years) games market.

This bit is probably for Nath, however it is true. Time is money and market share. I don't' give 2 monkeys about uniengine but it does demo a feature nvidia clearly perform better than ati
Not that it matters, it's still a benchmark and only that.

creed, very interesting video. I do think it is safe to say that IMO real world games/applications are highly unlikely to use tessellation at this kind of level (or does anyone disagree?), probably not for another 3-4 years or so (I'm guessing) especially at 8xaa, thats kind of crazy, but saying that, the 480gtx does do very well!

Yeah, it seems to be a tech demo app more than anything. Metro 2033 makes reasonably good use of tessellation but that game is seriously heavy.

 

[JeffyB]

I'd wait it out, 6 series is not that far away. Gibbo said 4-6 weeks and that ties in with other info redily available on the net. If you intend on using your pc for any hd playback/home cinema be aware gf100 (470 and 480) based cards cannot do lossless compressed audio formats such as DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD, the ati cards can.

 

[trentlad]

One word... DRIVERS.

ATI sucks when it comes to them, where as NVidia rule when it comes to them. I have one NVidia card and one ATI, the ATI card crashes on a regular basis and the NVidia card never crashes.

However, even though the ATI card crashes (by crash I mean the game freezes and I get a lovely Windows 7 message stating that my display driver had stopped... never had a crash in XP mind) it's not so frequent that I would pay the extra cost of an NVidia card.

So if depends on whats important to you.

Don't believe me about the card.... check out this thread... funny how only ATI cards are the ones crashing the browser, freezing computers or giving the blue screen of death.

 

[Broken Hope]

Funny how I have an ATI card and just watched the video fine then..

 

[trentlad]

DID YOU REALLY!! OMGBBQASAP!!!111oneoneone

Saying that, it's strange that Rob-RX7 has the exact same card as mine and he had no issues at all.

 

[TaKeN]

Sounds to me like your rig is rather unstable somewhere trentlad OMGWTFBBQ!¬1onetwothreefourfive

Oh and Lay-Z-Boy.. check your for sale thread!!!

 

[opethdisciple]

I cant really comment on drivers per se.....

The one thing I will say is that Nvidia seem to delever more performance drivers than ATI, then again, this may only seem evident becuase ATI do monthly updates where as Nvidia take a few months, so it seems they deliver more, per driver...

As for crashing.... I dont overclcok my graphics card, so possibly that is your issue?

 

[realscot]

Well I moved from a 8800GTX to a 4870x2 a while back and I used to get display driver crash to desktop quite frequently playing my favourite game dispite trying different drivers etc. Since moving to ati i've not had a single problem.

 

[Baboonanza]

One word... DRIVERS.

ATI sucks when it comes to them, where as NVidia rule when it comes to them. I have one NVidia card and one ATI, the ATI card crashes on a regular basis and the NVidia card never crashes.

However, even though the ATI card crashes (by crash I mean the game freezes and I get a lovely Windows 7 message stating that my display driver had stopped... never had a crash in XP mind) it's not so frequent that I would pay the extra cost of an NVidia card.

So if depends on whats important to you.

Don't believe me about the card.... check out this thread... funny how only ATI cards are the ones crashing the browser, freezing computers or giving the blue screen of death.

Funny that, since I never have games crash on my 5850, or the X800 before it (with the exception of Stalker, but well, that's Stalker ).

On the other hand the last Nvidia card* I had never worked at all. Ever. Listen to my annecdotal evidence! Nvidia sucks!

*A Geforce 256. Yeah, it was a while ago

 

[Jay85]

Never had a problem with an ATi card or its drivers tbh, been working great for me!

 

[MoRT489]

creed, very interesting video. I do think it is safe to say that IMO real world games/applications are highly unlikely to use tessellation at this kind of level (or does anyone disagree?), probably not for another 3-4 years or so (I'm guessing) especially at 8xaa, thats kind of crazy, but saying that, the 480gtx does do very well!

Probably tre but try Metro 2033 with a 5870 and u'll wish you had a 480. ATI also seems to be pants at keeping FPS high with AA applied.

 

[opethdisciple]

Probably tre but try Metro 2033 with a 5870 and u'll wish you had a 480. ATI also seems to be pants at keeping FPS high with AA applied.

I havent played the game yet, but from what I hear thats true. But, Metro is an Nvidia developed game, so ofcourse its gona run great on Nvidia hardware.

Alternatively as crysis one was it could just be poorly coded.

There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in the gpu market, makes it very hard to see truth from fabrication.

Yea the 400 series does tesselation better than ATI. But what good is great tesselation performance when vast number of games dont have any tesselated textures at all?

Tesselation undoublty is great!! But its gona take time for it to be an importat component of games. Its already been with us for years, and its only now its been ratified in to the Dx11 specification.

Does that mean, that the future of gaming is tesselation? Maybe not at all. Considering its already been with us, for so long. Its marketing. Nvidia, say buy our gpu's becuase we do tesselation better than ATI. (As I mentioned before, some game developers still code in dx9!)

Great, you out perform me on benchmarks! Real world gaming performance is FAR more important.

Same aplies to physx.... another great but totally irrelavent feature, which could so easily be ported to ATI gpu's but Nvidia want (need) allthe help they can get to try to claw back some market share.

Do you know that Nvidia are in trouble as a company? Their shares are down, most probalby becuase ATI controled the DX11 market in the earliy stages, and rub Nvidia noses in it buy announcing 'we have sold 5 million 5000 series gpus.....'

The majority of gamers on steam use ATI gpu's according to Valve...

Bah, I sound like a Nvidia hater im not. I was going to try the Green side this time around rather than go red again, but it made more sense for my personal needs to go red again.

Im sure the 6000 series will address some tesseltation performance issues in the 5000 series..... then again, if ATI think its not important enough feature yet, there may be no tesselation improvements what so ever...

As I said before its all about the here and the now, rather than tomorrow. GPU's only have a 2 ~ year life span, by which time you upgrade.....

Oh and Nvidia doesnt suck, both teams are good, it comes down to the small things, which is a personal preference, heat, noise, price, performance individual games you like to play etc etc etc...

 

[Razor Time]

Bah, I sound like a Nvidia hater im not. I was going to try the Green side this time around rather than go red again, but it made more sense for my personal needs to go red again.

It is coming across like that.

As I said before its all about the here and the now, rather than tomorrow. GPU's only have a 2 ~ year life span, by which time you upgrade.....

Allot of people do not change their gpu's every generation and who knows what the future may hold in terms of games. Future games could be released which use heavy Tessellation and this is where fermi will shine over the 5800 series. Its as simple as that.

 

[RavenXXX2]

The majority of gamers on steam use ATI gpu's according to Valve...

That majority is the small percentage of DX11 GPU's used, not surprising seeing ATI were out a good six months before Nvidia and nearly a year with the more popular lower end DX11 cards that make up the majority of sales.