Last message on previous page:
Handbags down kids. the x2 is the top card for now. Basta!
It will be a short lived victory though (sigh)
Ryan

I've convinced myself that Nvidia has cut corners in the past to get incremental improvements in frames per second in FPS. They caught up in the 8000 generation. It's a clear win of equivalent performance in image quality and a few extra fps.

Yet, I don't trust them to continue keeping up when the chips are down. It's because they paid for games to be optimized for their cards in the 7000 and earlier generation, and thus have had advantages for years that ATI did not have. Yet, ATI either surpassed or kept pace with Nvidia in image quality, while being close in fps.

I'm convinced that AMD has confused leadership and has lost their innovative lead to Intel. I'm not convinced that ATI has ever lost anything to Nvidia since the Radeon 9700 days soundly defeated Geforce FX.

The only thing Nvidia's doing correctly that I can think of right now is that they will enable power saving on their next gen motherboards by enabling the IGP in every chipset. ATI won't have power saving initially on the 780G, and doesn't enable an IGP for power saving on their higher end spider platform boards, but they should.

So Nvidia's putting out a stopgap double GPU/double PCB monstrosity that might just beat the 3870x2 across the line by less than 10%, but it's tech at the end of it's life and simply won't benefit from driver optimizations like the 3870x2. Plus, all the Nvidia fans are saying "wait for the 9800gtx" when that card's not announced and we don't know if a card designated it will be new or old technology. Note the hint of desperation in Nvidia's e-mail to investors -- if that is genuine. I fully admit, it's from the Inquirer and might not be genuine; but it sure is amusing! In case you missed it, here it is again.

Nvidia Tries to Snow Financial Analysts: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inqu [...] -financial

Whatever mess AMD's made of their CPU vs. Conroe and Wolfdale (and Xbit Labs says they're competitive against Allendale and Pentium C2D at the low end), ATI has made a strong comeback since the much too early launch of the 2900XT. The 3000 series is what the 2000 series should have been.

Besides, I didn't just swap cards. We have two PC's in the living room right next to each other. One has a Viewsonic A70f+ and the other a Viewsonic A71f+. One has an ASUS 690G board and the other had an MSI Nvidia 405 chipset K9N board. One had an X1650 Pro and the other a 7600gs. One had an X2 3800+ and the other an X2 4600+.

It was a side by side comparison of image quality in Morrowind, Oblivion and Heroes of Might and Magic V, including with mods added for each game, mods that she did and mods that other modders did. It was as close to an apples to apples comparison as we could get. I still have that MSI system, but my son is using it now. It will get a 9600 when Nvidia gets their problems worked out (grain of salt time: the Inquirer says February 21).

I've since moved to another X2 690G system and am using onboard video, and play games on my kids PC until the 3870x2 or 3870 is ordered tomorrow (still can't make up my mind. How close is R700?). When the 780G arrives with power saving features, then I'll switch out boards, but my wife and I will both have ATI because in our experience with prior generation cards, plus an entirely artistic opinion, ATI is the way games are meant to be viewed.

This doesn't make you any less in preferring Nvidia, but you could at least not phrase it as ATI catching up, when the article that gave Nvidia the win compared the X1000 series (and not even the X1900) to the 8000 series. It was Nvidia that caught up and then ATI kept pace, as The Great Ape pointed out.

If tht MSI board didn't have x8 1.1 PCIe, I might have kept it and gotten the 8800gt or gts that I was originally considering. The reason I didn't get an 8800gts 320 back in spring 2007 is the same reason my wife didn't get a 2900XT. Neither card from either company did well in DX10 under Vista, so we stuck with what worked before and held off on DX10 titles.

Now, both companies have good cards, but we prefer ATI because we don't play FPS. I'd rather pick a hundred alchemy components while occasionally fighting off monsters than to play a twitch game that's all about shooting everything in sight without the time to enjoy the scenary. Well I will get World in Conflict, and RTS's are usually about shooting whatever comes into sight, as are turn based strategies like the HOMM series). The RTS I really want is Spore, maybe it will make it's May 2008 release after all.

So, I don't take what you say personally, and ignore what you say about my wife because she's not in the minority when other artists and graphics professionals review the situation over the past five to seven years. Let's hope Nvidia keeps up the good work. They just need to get off their complacency based on their bribery marketing campaign and actually concentrate on other aspects of graphics than just a few percentage points increase in fps in a select few genres.

Anyone who quotes Michael Jackson is someone who's personal opinion of me I can ignore. Perhaps it's that "secret" knowledge not available to the general public that you are privy to that the rest of us are not. Well, if it works for you, then run with it. Just avoid cliffs when you're running blindly in any direction.

This is terrible. Micheal Jackson rocks! come on..
everybody knows that he's
next thing to sliced bread!

Put your ignorance away
and think about
getting one of
either of these fan cards
sucker!

Ahem (-;
Ryan
still
ere

nearly!

In Australia you would be looking at a 3870X2 for either $570 or $653, so which of the two options you pick (SLI or the X2) depends on where you intend to buy the X2 from, as it can either be $30 cheaper or $50 more than SLI.

The UK is no different. The 3870X2 is about $600. 2x 8800gt is about $640. A single 3870 is $300.

here here, a sensible well written post

Wow... So much uproar over this. You'd (almost?) think of it like an extenasion of the Intel/AMD wars on the main page.

Pretty simple to me, though: The new ATi card definitely has the stuff needed to show an 8800GTX it's taillights here and there. And does so on very immature drivers, when the nVidia ones are essentially just tweaking what's already been done. So IMHO, there definitely is headroom to make the Red one even better than it is.

From a practical POV, though - If you already have an 8800 in your case, then you aren't likely to be a customer for this new card. As already pointed out, the performance advantage isn't likely to be noticable to the end user. Hence my earlier comment on waiting a couple months to see how it all shakes out - I'm not currently in the market, you see...

ATI vs. Nvidia actually precedes the AMD vs. Intel conflict by a few years. I made up my mind this morning and ordered the 3870x2. I've never paid more than $250 for a GPU prior to this, and the last two cards were closer to $135 each when I bought them.

I might be CPU limited at 1280 x 1024 on this 17" Viewsonic, but I'll survive. I picked up The Witcher today and I'll check the performance under FRAPS and then in two weeks once I get a 20" LCD. If I get close to what's being reported, then I'll be happy. I'll just make sure the driver versions are the latest used for the test and not the one's off the CD.

All I need now is a 780G board with power saving, a B3 Phenom and faster RAM. AMD sure is slow, but then again, at the price this card cost, I'd have to wait a month anyways.

Well said.

This card has me excited for RV770.

Good point, ATI has never done anything like that.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/ [...] d_drivers/
http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/20 [...] nglish.php
http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/1

LOL... are you serious?? Where have you been the last year and a half? You just blatantly ignore the fact that both camps have recognized nVidia beating the peepee out of ATI for over a year and a half.... and someone called this a "a sensible well written post ?"

The two processors are pretty different, and have a pretty big effect on FPS... to the point that you'd probably notice a difference just from the processing ability alone... Not to mention the different chipsets... Check the CPU charts. Did you calibrate both monitors after installing the cards and their latest/most stable drivers?

EDIT:... here's your page 10... not sure why that's so important, but here you go.

"a sensible well written post" sorr i said that to nudge up to 10 pages. Never seen a thread get this far before. It dazzles and excites me.

I only count the AF article as optimization for some more framerates because it affects games. I do not count either ATI or Nvidia's oft mentioned optimization for time demos and for 3D Mark as optimization. That's cheating by both companies. It's marketing. It's mishegoss. When it comes to games, the 8500's AF simplifications is on par with the 7000 series blurriness.

So, who's done what lately? Nvidia has done it far more often. Be that as it may, I've never felt that it's kosher for a game developer to take money from either ATI or Nvidia and provide source code to allow optimizations for drivers that the other company has no access to until the game is out.

It's different if a particular game does things that work best with ATI or Nvidia, it's another when there's a campaign of how it's meant to be played. So, I'll demote ATI for AF tinkering how many generations ago? I'll castigate Nvidia for paying developers to optimize for Nvidia and not ATI (that is the GPU equivalent of Intel's OEM
rebate program).

The 2900XT did pretty well against the 8800gts 320, and that was it's market segment. I do not care if Nvidia has the most expensive card on the planet. I don't care if ATI has the most expensive card on the planet. If a card competes well at it's price point, then they're even. Both the 8800gts 320 and the X2900XT competed well.

The HD 3000 series blew away the competiton overall, at least the 3850 did in it's bracket. The 3870 isn't far behind the more expensive 8800gt. I guess you didn't read the Inquirer article about that Nvidia e-mail. They are worried over there, worried that the Taiwanese partners won't accept a hostile takeover of AMD, and worried what they're going to do now that ATI went them one better with 2 GPU's on one PCB. Perhaps Nvidia's thinking that they need a chip company for the future multicore GPU's.

It seems to me that both AMD and Intel are leaving Nvidia out in the cold as far as fusion in 2009 is concerned. Will Nvidia go the way of Voodoo and be gobbled up by Intel or by AMD if AMD gets back on their feet? I'm not a fanboy, so I hope not. I like competition. You just seem to like to argue against the card company you don't like over cards you'll never buy. Me, I've owned both, but ATI has been the best in my personal experience.

In the end, they aren't all that different where business is concerned, they've both gotten caught cheating in demos, but the company that did the worst to a game's image quality to tweak out a few extra fps is Nvidia, not ATI. Sad that you can't see the difference.

I stand by my comments that Nvidia is mostly for FPS and ATI for CRPG's and both seem to do well in RTS. Though for some obscure reason, LOTR Online went to Nvidia. I guess the hobbit burglers couldn't resist some extra cash. I'll try that game out later on my 3870x2, but I'll play The Witcher first.

Fry's is in California, Arizona and two Texas locations. I look at the Fry's ad in every Friday paper and get a ride out when I have the money to buy, as it's off the bus route. If I see a similar ad, I'll scan it and post. Fry's often matches ECS boards with Intel CPU's and MSI Nvidia boards with AMD CPU's. The one lone ASUS 690G was with a Phenom and it wasn't much of a deal over Newegg's price for both added up. I've seldom seen similar "one per customer" offers at www.outpost.com , which is Fry's online site.

Yeah you missed this one, it's one of the longest sofar (although the buyers guide is close);

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/76612-33-read-first