do you think there's a lot more to come from the 2900?

Dead Dog · 30 May 2007 at 10:10

as title, i'm going to order today, do i get the leadtek 8800gts 640 or pay that little bit more and go for a 2900 and maybe hope it'll improve with new drivers.

Darkwave · 30 May 2007 at 10:15

People have been saying it'll improve with drivers for a while now, where is this magic driver?

I ask because if the 2900XT ever reaches consistent 8800GTX levels of performance without all these image quality and fan problems then I'll be buying one. I'm not going to hold my breath though.

Just get the GTS 640MB mate, less hassle overall and a great price. Beats sitting on the fence for weeks too.

Dead Dog · 30 May 2007 at 10:37

one of my issues with it are the fan noise and power / heat levels, we all do our best to keep things as cool as possible in our cases so sticking in a hot brick goes against the law of overclocking a bit

sidefxv1 · 30 May 2007 at 10:58

I'm positive things will improve with the 2900, it'd be a real pity if they didn't. The marketplace needs the competition. But for now I'd still go with an 8800.

B@Th*nG · 30 May 2007 at 11:01

i don't often come in the graphics forum, i haven't got much interest particularry. but i notice people are saying a lot of maybe's about this 2900. why not just get a 8800 when you know it works best, as opposed to something which MIGHT?

B@Th*nG

Dead Dog · 30 May 2007 at 11:32

yes, not a lot of room for argument there

Tute · 30 May 2007 at 11:37

Well the trouble is, it's all about the lesser of two evils, especially if you own Vista.

You can take an HD2900XT, take your chances that the drivers will improve to give it more speed, and fix the AA rendering issues.

But the drivers for the 8800s are far from perfect either. If you run XP they're fair, but I certainly wouldn't want to be using Vista with one, as there are various issues with all sorts.

I wish either company would realise that one magical driver set would grab a huge portion of the market for them.

jrodga2k5 · 30 May 2007 at 11:42

Well the 8800's are super quiet anyways

Which is great!

We know their great in XP, the ahve the best image quality on the market and the performance is give or take! Id go for the 8800 based on the fact you are gonna be getting it cheaper and you dont need to mess around with your PSU or anything if you want to overclock properly

Darkwave · 30 May 2007 at 11:55

Tute said:
But the drivers for the 8800s are far from perfect either. If you run XP they're fair, but I certainly wouldn't want to be using Vista with one, as there are various issues with all sorts.

I've found Vista drivers to be better than XP ones to be honest, but I still use XP on principle.

XP drivers are slowly getting there, but as you said both have room for improvement.

LoadsaMoney · 30 May 2007 at 12:02

Id either get the GTS or id wait for the refresh of the R600 in about August/September according to rumours, will be on a 65nm process and will be redesigned, supposedly will be what the R600 should have been, the GTX killer, i think they just flung the 2900 out as they needed to get a card out now, waiting till August/September before releasing anything would have been way to long, if the 65mn R650's were ready now i think the 2900's would have never been released as they were supposed to have been released last year, they would have just scrapped em by now and released the R650's instead, but seen as they aint ready yet, and they needed to get something out, they just released the 2900's still till they are ready.

Uriel · 30 May 2007 at 12:29

I don't get all this waiting. Just get best bang for buck you can afford when you need an upgrade. There's always something better on the horizon.

FreeStream · 30 May 2007 at 12:43

If they coded the drivers to suit shader based games or whatever it was then they can't magically reverse it to work better on normal games.

If they can fix it, give them a few months to do it.. not gonna happen overnight, thats if they can actually sort it through drivers...

chaparral · 30 May 2007 at 12:44

Uriel said:
I don't get all this waiting. Just get best bang for buck you can afford when you need an upgrade. There's always something better on the horizon.

Same here...I don't understand how people can wait around for weeks/months....

For me,if my games are running to slow for me on whatever GPU am using then i just order a faster GPU...I wouldn't be able to wait around playing games at low FPS for weeks/months....

titaniumx3 · 30 May 2007 at 12:51

LoadsaMoney said:
Id either get the GTS or id wait for the refresh of the R600 in about August/September according to rumours, will be on a 65nm process and will be redesigned, supposedly will be what the R600 should have been, the GTX killer, i think they just flung the 2900 out as they needed to get a card out now, waiting till August/September before releasing anything would have been way to long, if the 65mn R650's were ready now i think the 2900's would have never been released as they were supposed to have been released last year, they would have just scrapped em by now and released the R650's instead, but seen as they aint ready yet, and they needed to get something out, they just released the 2900's still till they are ready.

Aren't the G90 teraflop beasts out by then?

Dead Dog · 30 May 2007 at 13:38

well i had sorted out a cheapie until i really needed a good card, but was let down, so now i need a card again ASAP, so that kinda threw me back into the 'which one' dilema again, which going by these answers here are sending me towards a X1950 as vista certainly isn't great (+ i don't have it!) DX10 isn't needed yet and we don't really know DX10 game performance of either card.
that way waiting till later this year won't be an issue and by then hopefully Nv & ATi have a good pair of cards out with no major issues.

Dead Dog · 30 May 2007 at 14:28

just paid for a x1950pro of the MM, that will keep me going till it's worth having DX10

paradigm · 30 May 2007 at 15:08

I certainly hope there is more to come from it. The drivers are nowhere near mature, and looking back on ATI's history, even back as far as the 9500/9700 cards, the amount of optimisations with subsequent releases brought around a fair performance increase.

I hope the trend continues, as at the moment my performance isn't "that" much better than my 7800GT SLi setup was.

Could be worse though, at least my HD2900XT was free.

eracer2006 · 30 May 2007 at 15:32

gtx or gts 640 gets my vote. some of us waited 3 months for the disappointment that is the 2900, why wait another x months for what might be a disappoitment.

Tom|Nbk · 30 May 2007 at 15:46

paradigm said:
I certainly hope there is more to come from it. The drivers are nowhere near mature, and looking back on ATI's history, even back as far as the 9500/9700 cards, the amount of optimisations with subsequent releases brought around a fair performance increase.

I hope the trend continues, as at the moment my performance isn't "that" much better than my 7800GT SLi setup was.

Could be worse though, at least my HD2900XT was free.

Free?, O'rly?

, also its not like you paradigm to step into this neck of the woods :eek:

paradigm · 30 May 2007 at 15:58

Tom|Nbk said:
Free?, O'rly? , also its not like you paradigm to step into this neck of the woods

Not like me in the last year or so. I used to be very active in Graphics Cards a few years back... search for the 9800PRO > XT Modification

And yes... 100% Free