Hold on! ATI or Nvidia for my next upgrade?

[Chris.]

Pricing up cards for my upgrade, and I can get two 6950's far less than what i would deem the nVidia equivalent.

I know the stats dont work, and the SPU figures cant be compared at face value, but still, am i better off going ATI?

Will I miss physx, and will nVidia supported games like metro 2033/crysis1 and 2 run noticeably worse on ATI?

A Bit confused here, 6950's can be flashed as well can they not?

Also, and this is the last daft question, I read that using an ATI card with my Phenom X6 will work better than with my nVidia cards, this a noticeable optimisation or not worth mentioning?

Always been blind to ATI as I have had nVidia for years. Last ATI card i had was a rage 128 so thats how long.

 

[An Exception]

Hmm, it might be worth a small delay as your 460 should be plenty for most game.
Charlie says he thinks AMD's new gen is looking at a September release if all goes smoothly with TSMC.
If that's the case you would be better off with a single card solution for similar cost, so I'd leave the 6XXX series to the bitcoiners to crunch on personally...

 

[Rroff]

Unless your playing Mafia 2, pretty much no other reason really for PhysX support atm... tho Batman AC may be better off with support for it.

There are no noticeable differences between running an AMD card with an AMD CPU or an nVidia card with an AMD CPU.

A pair of 470s in SLI can be had pretty cheap now and are comparable when overclocked to an overclocked 6950 CF setup - tho the 6950s do benefit from the extra VRAM if your playing at higher resolutions or more demanding games - even a pair of heavily overclocked 460s in SLI won't be hideously behind (tho they will be moderatly beind) - not sure if your board supports that or not tho.

 

[Chris.]

Im on single 460 atm btw. And im an utter graphics whore, it annoys me that people can play my games slightly better than me lol.

Im selling my Xbox just because i cant play any of the games anymore! lol

 

[Chris.]

Unless your playing Mafia 2, pretty much no other reason really for PhysX support atm... tho Batman AC may be better off with support for it.

There are no noticeable differences between running an AMD card with an AMD CPU or an nVidia card with an AMD CPU.

A pair of 470s in SLI can be had pretty cheap now and are comparable when overclocked to an overclocked 6950 CF setup - tho the 6950s do benefit from the extra VRAM if your playing at higher resolutions or more demanding games.

I just worry that Physx is going to just get bigger and bigger, and unless they play nice (which they wont) Im going to be missing out on a lot by not going nVidia....:/

Thanks for clearing up the whole AMD optimisation thing, never had problems with my GTX460 and 1055t so i gathered there may be nothing to it.

EDIT: its the high demanding games like Metro, Crysis with that EQ, Photoreal 4 and EQM that looks stunning but i cant run it at all....that make me want to do it.

 

[Sho]

Im selling my Xbox just because i cant play any of the games anymore! lol

LOL

 

[Rroff]

PhysX isn't going to become any more mainstream than it is atm until developers can push out a product that makes heavy use of it without resulting in only half their market being able to run it which I don't see happening any time soon.

 

[liquidex]

If you can get them far cheaper I would say go for it. The 2gb ram helps and the 69xx series scale really well in xfire from reviews, probably better than sli.

 

[Chris.]

LOL

Im being serious, Ive played a few multi platforms and they dont compare, and online play on PC is no where as laggy....Plus i have hardly played it since getting my new rig last year.

PhysX isn't going to become any more mainstream than it is atm until developers can push out a product that makes heavy use of it without resulting in only half their market being able to run it which I don't see happening any time soon.

If they allowed ATI to use it, not only would they have more devs buying into the tech, they would actually probably make more money!

Fair enough about needing an nV card to run it properly, but disabling it when ATI is present alongside nV is just a bit gash really, and not good business practice.

ATI really pushed DX11, and now they are trailing a fair bit!

 

[An Exception]

^^^
Considering AMD is rumoured to be in all of the next gen consoles, I don't see Physx lasting much longer tbh, same with CUDA being replaced by OpenCL.
As for trailing in DX11, yeh sure they don't have the tessellation grunt, but it only occurs in games like crysis 2, and we all (well most of us) know why that is.

 

[Rroff]

If they allowed ATI to use it, not only would they have more devs buying into the tech, they would actually probably make more money!

Fair enough about needing an nV card to run it properly, but disabling it when ATI is present alongside nV is just a bit gash really, and not good business practice.

ATI really pushed DX11, and now they are trailing a fair bit!

Yeah never could figure that one out... especially when the sales of the kind of cards people would be buying for stand alone PhysX are exactly the kind of cards nVidia can make a good profit from and where the bulk of their profit comes from. I can't see any harm at all atleast enabling it in beta drivers even tho I can see the case for it being disabled in WHQL releases due to the somewhat tenuous link between some visual effects i.e. fluids and physics... something even nVidia didn't get right for awhile (if you used early versions of their PhysX screensaver on a lot of cards the liquids didn't render correctly so they don't really have a leg to stand on when they couldn't get it right themselves).

 

[Rroff]

^^^
Considering AMD is rumoured to be in all of the next gen consoles, I don't see Physx lasting much longer tbh, same with CUDA being replaced by OpenCL.

I don't see PhysX going anywhere any time soon - neither in becoming more common or fading away... its one of the most convenient off the shelf solutions for "duct taping" physics into your product even just using the CPU part and comes with hands on support from nVidia so a lot of developers are going to turn to it due to reduced amount of effort required on their part - without being able to use GPU features ad lib tho I don't see it becoming a killer technology either tho. AMD having the hardware in consoles has little relevance as they won't have hardware physics so any solution will be CPU physics which comes back to PhysX as its still light years ahead of the competition in terms of support, features and robustness and can be run on the consoles on the CPU. If AMD really really pushed bullet on the consoles we might see a swing on the PC but I don't see anything in the past to suggest AMD will put the level of effort in there required for that to happen.

Like wise I don't see CUDA going away any time soon - infact it seems to be growing significantly tho I might be somewhat bias in perspective here as I'm tied into the developer feed and see new projects coming up on a daily basis so from my perspective it appears to be getting bigger every day... heres one of the latest: http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/08/gpu...-kilometer-sized-radio-telescope/?sf2003174=1

Open CL is a long long way from taking over in both gaming and industrial useage and infact shrinking in industrial useage - if anything DX Compute might make more grounds in gaming possibly.

 

[An Exception]

If they allowed ATI to use it, not only would they have more devs buying into the tech, they would actually probably make more money!

Seems they would rather pull stunts like below...

Uploaded by MrJohn02 on 18 Mar 2010

New Physx Software 9.10.0222 (debuted with Metro 2033) broke Hybrid ATI+NV Physx hack.

Fluidmark starts ok, but at middle of test GPU Physx dies and CPU starts processing physx effects.

The same happens in games (Mirror's Edge, Batman AA, Metro 2033)

=´(

http://www.geeks3d.com/20100422/hybrid-physx-patch-1-03-with-reverse-mavity-timebomb-fix/

 

[Chris.]

My CPU still seems to get 200 ish fps on the MSI extreme tests, so maybe its not too bad eh? lol

Maybe not lol

I think im just going to go ATI, still a lot i will gain with the extra Vram and more importantly second card and higher clocks. Tesselation and FLR etc etc make a bigger difference for me anyway.

 

[An Exception]

Open CL is a long long way from taking over in both gaming and industrial useage and infact shrinking in industrial useage - if anything DX Compute might make more grounds in gaming possibly.

Well it doesn't look good for CUDA imo, the major consumer and professional software companies just can't invest in CUDA any more since apple dumped them out of all their idevices.
OpenCL is the only solution that will work for both GPU's, so adobe (with it's HUGE market shares), will likely switch to openCL for GPU acceleration, which will also likely be implemented more extensively in future adobe apps, this will quickly allow it to become an industry standard.

I can't see the HPC's market wanting to tie it's self down to a smaller coder base that's limited to the offerings of one vendor, it just wouldn't make sense for them to do so.

 

[An Exception]

My CPU still seems to get 200 ish fps on the MSI extreme tests, so maybe its not too bad eh? lol

Maybe not lol

I think im just going to go ATI, still a lot i will gain with the extra Vram and more importantly second card and higher clocks. Tesselation and FLR etc etc make a bigger difference for me anyway.

As you got a 460, tbh I would have thought you could get by for another month or so, as 28nm is supposed to be a rather large difference...