AMD to nVidia: Put Up or Shut Up

[MorphingDragon]

How does it matter which one is faster? ATI/AMD still can't code drivers for shit, have no real support, use child labour in India and the cheapest gumball plastics they can get their filthy paws on.

This is different than any other company because...? At least they have the decency to go to India, where's there's some semblance of labour laws instead of China.

I also don't see how the plastic quality of the shroud is going to do anything. They're usually covered in stickers anyway.

AMD, get good, or shut up. There is more to graphics cards than performance. "The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long" - especially true for ATi's built-to-collapse hardware.

Really?

Last time I checked, latest nVidia architectures ran hotter than ATi's and weren't as stable or reliable. So I don't know who's candle is brighter, but nVidias seem to run out faster. At least AMD pushes non-proprietary solutions, which is already miles ahead of nVidia.

Lets see from the "tech press" what the latest issues are-
nVidia:
8600M GT (Still used in cheaper laptops) - Distorted video or no video issues for a shit ton of laptop companies, only recently was a replacement plan setup.
GF4XX/5XX - Heat stability issues.
Drivers - NVKDLM (still!) issues on Windows Vista/7.

AMD:
OpenGL - Inconsistent implementation and performance
Drivers - Non Existent *nix support (But wait, They have opensourced drivers therefore nobody cares) - Infrequent issue with some hardware combinations, appears to be fixed in Beta.

 

[DTWolfwood]

AMD bought out ATi a couple years ago.

Which is, complete coincidence (sarc), around the same time as ATI drivers stopped being such stinking piles of shit.

incidentally their drivers don't work on my radeon 5870 mobility card. Yeh im going to say they are still piles of shit. just shinier.

the man responsible for Omega Drivers need to come back >.<

 

[MorphingDragon]

AMD bought out ATi a couple years ago.

Which is, complete coincidence (sarc), around the same time as ATI drivers stopped being such stinking piles of shit.

incidentally their drivers don't work on my radeon 5870 mobility card. Yeh im going to say they are still piles of shit. just shinier.

the man responsible for Omega Drivers need to come back >.<

Its up to the Laptop manufacturer to provide customized drivers for your laptops. AMD (and to a certain extent nVidia) only provide generic drivers, not guaranteed to work if mixed with custom energy saving architecture etc. This is not uncommon.

 

[theultimateend]

Sums it up I guess.

Now to wait and see who runs home crying.

I always liked that the quickest way to lose a fight with Wobuffet was to start a fight with wobuffet.

AMD bought out ATi a couple years ago.

Which is, complete coincidence (sarc), around the same time as ATI drivers stopped being such stinking piles of shit.

I love this because of how true it is.

 

[DTWolfwood]

AMD bought out ATi a couple years ago.

Which is, complete coincidence (sarc), around the same time as ATI drivers stopped being such stinking piles of shit.

incidentally their drivers don't work on my radeon 5870 mobility card. Yeh im going to say they are still piles of shit. just shinier.

the man responsible for Omega Drivers need to come back >.<

Its up to the Laptop manufacturer to provide customized drivers for your laptops. AMD only provide generic drivers, not guaranteed to work if mixed with custom energy saving architecture etc. This is not uncommon.

all i know is i never had this problem with any of my previous nVidia laptops using their generic drivers. and i had 2 of them before making the mistake of getting an ati laptop

 

[EvolutionKills]

Better question- who is willing to pay £500 for some tech that only marginally performs better (in real terms) over it's apparently "outdated" predecessors?

Nvidia and AMD are getting nervous- graphics on the PC are plateauing, and people are moving over to consoles, depriving them of a big money milker. So they just treat every card as if it's revolutionary, despite no real person being able to notice or care about any difference.

PS: Who the fuck does SLI or that Crossfire thing, anyway? Why would you need 2 cards, unless your monitor was the size of a shed?

To use a car analogy, it's all about enthusiasts and diminishing returns.

For the majority of users, it's a matter of diminishing returns. Once you hit a certain point on the curve, the amount of money you have to spend to get extra performance really starts to slope. You have to spend more an more for smaller and smaller gains. But there are always the enthusiasts that have to push things to the (often absurd) extreme.

The 2012 Nissan GTR can go from 0-60 mph in 2.9 seconds, and has a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $89,950.00 USD. The 2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 has a 0-60 mph time of 2.6 seconds, and a MSRP of $1,705,769.00 USD. For the record, both cars are all wheel drive platforms.

So the GTR costs ~$31,017.24 USD per second in that 0-60mph time. The Veyron costs $656,065.00 USD per second. Or for a better example, subtract the difference. GTR's 2.9sec - Veyron's 2.6sec = .3 second difference. Veyron's $1,705,769.00 USD - GTR's $89,950.00 USD = $1,615,819.00 USD. Divide that by 3, and it costs you $538,806.33 USD.

So it costs $538,806.33 USD per tenth of a second in increased performance above the Nissan GTR's 2.9sec 0-60mph time and $89,950.00 price tag. Most of us would be happy with the GTR, but there are still some people crazy enough to buy the $2 million Veyron, and so it's exists.


Anybody short of a professionally trained race car driver (NASCAR doesn't count) probably wouldn't even notice the difference, let alone be able to handle the car in a way to optimize and utilize the extra performance. To the layman, they're both just damn fast. But you could still almost 19 GTR's for the price of one Veyron. An extreme example, but it makes a good point.

 

[EvolutionKills]

Better question- who is willing to pay £500 for some tech that only marginally performs better (in real terms) over it's apparently "outdated" predecessors?

Nvidia and AMD are getting nervous- graphics on the PC are plateauing, and people are moving over to consoles, depriving them of a big money milker. So they just treat every card as if it's revolutionary, despite no real person being able to notice or care about any difference.

PS: Who the fuck does SLI or that Crossfire thing, anyway? Why would you need 2 cards, unless your monitor was the size of a shed?

No. people are running AWAY from consoles now. Its getting too costly, and its holding back technological development. Consoles are like children, if they hold onto a pole and PC gaming can't pry them off then they wont go anywhere. So the oldest tech now outperforms consoles, and makes the 500$ cards USELESS because they never get used to their full potential.

Actually, game publishers use that as an excuse to release shoddy ports of their console games on PC hoping that the extra horsepower makes up for their slip-shod coding and porting.

I built my rig back in late 08', and it plays well ported games very well. Mass Effect 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, FarCry 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Just Cause 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Rainbow Six VEGAS 2, Fallout 3 & New Vegas, and Left 4 Dead 2 all run beautifully.

However it has trouble with stuff from Volition (Red Faction Gurellia and Saint's Row 2, both of which are notoriously terrible port jobs). GTA IV has trouble, but works. But the worst offender in the Call of Duty franchise. The most recent one, Black Ops, uses the same engine from Modern Warfare. MW runs like a dream, BO runs like absolute shit. Both games look and run beautifully on the 360. But the PC specs for the game have skyrocketed, and the amount of extra power that the PC requires does not match the extra visual fidelity. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure BO looked a little better, but it was hard to tell with the game's frame rate hiccuping every 20 seconds or so. Regardless, the increase in power is substantial, the increase in visuals is not.



Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

System Requirements

Required (minimum) Specs
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
Hard Drive: 8GB of free space
Video card: NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600
or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800 Pro or better

Recommended Specs
CPU: 2.4 GHz dual core or better
RAM: 1G for XP; 2G for Vista
Hard Drive: 8GB of free space
Video card: 3.0 Shader Support recommended. Nvidia Geforce 7800 or better or ATI Radeon X1800 or better

OR get an Xbox 360.


Call of Duty: Black Ops

MINIMUM System Requirements:
? OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7
? CPU: Dualcore Intel 3 GHZ or AMD 6500+
? RAM: 1GB
? HDD: 12GB of free space
? VIDEO: Shader 3.0 or better; 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT DirectX 9.0c or better / Ati x1900 or better
? SOUND: DirectX 9.0c-compatible
? DirectX: 9.0c

Recommended system requirements:
? Intel Processor - Quadcore Intel 2.6 ghz
? AMD Processor - Phenom II 955
? Nvidia Graphics Card - DirectX GeForce GTX 260
? ATI Graphics Card - ATI Radeon HD 5800 with 512 MB VRAM ? DirectX 10
? RAM Memory - 2 GB
? Hard Disk Space - 12 GB
? Direct X - 9

OR get an Xbox 360.



It's the same engine running on the same console, but the specs for the PC requirements really jump. And that's bullshit, I can understand a slight increase, but this is just terrible. The extra visual fidelity is lost because I have to turn down all of the options to get the game running somewhat decently. I can play MW with everything maxed (and Crysis with everything on High in DX9 mode, so it's still no slouch), so MW ends up looking a hell of a lot better. That's crap, and it's why I'm not buying anything else from Activision until they shape up their act, because their current treatment of the PC community can be summed up as 'willful neglect'.

 

[Roxor]

If only all opposing companies would just go and directly challenge each other like this...


"We've got the fastest hardware on the market!"

"Oh, no you don't! We do!"

"Oh really?"

[Independent benchmark results come in.]

"Yeah, really."

"Curses! We'll get you next year! Just you wait!"


Isn't that so much more satisfying than sneaking in insults all the time?

 

[cerebus23]

I think the fastest has always been a bit dodgy considering some games ran a hair better on nividia cards than they did ati cards even tho on paper and in benchmarks ati should have been faster, now some games are more tuned for one video card over the other, sometimes the drivers just are not up to snuff from one side or the other, lets face it both sides have spotty drivers nvidia have diaabled fans in one driver update and melted video cards oops, ati have regular spotty driver updates where games do not work at all, and both have issues with sli and xfire not having proper profiles for games releases, making sli and xfire an expensive proposition that may or may not be supported for x y z game any time soon.

physics is a gimmic, cup used to run physics stuff just fine, and physics should be able to be run of dual and quad and hex and octa core cps np with room to spare, but since nvidia snapped up physix now games have to use their cards if they want certain branding nvidia approved or whatever stamps nvidia wants to put on a game. arma2 is a game that does physics just fine using cpu course it is also a game that need a supercomputer to max it out.

really is there much point in having "the fastest" other than the 3p33n flogging? there are not many games that push the bounds of gfx anymore, even crysis 2 runs fine on a single modest gpu maxed out. unless your are pushing 3 monitors at crazy high resolutions there is probably not much of a difference you are going to see in your fps for many games and even if you get the fastest vs the 2nd fastest the difference might be a frame or two overall.

would be nice if these guys stopped sniping and just focused on making the best cards at the best value they can. who cares what is the abosolute fastest if for 600 bucks you are getitng a handful of frames more than a vastly cheaper card.

 

[MrTub]

Im sorry but Pci express at x8 is not bottlenecking anything. The difference from running two gtx 580 in sli with x8 x8 and x16 x16 is about 1-2% which I wouldnt call bottleneck.

Nope. Sometimes it's less prevalent, and at high res it's usually not so bad, however:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pcie-geforce-gtx-480-x16-x8-x4,2696-9.html

Just image a GPU that's twice as powerful being on 8x.

0.o everyone that I've ever talked to said there was really no difference in using cards in x8x8 compared to x16 x16, thanks for that link!

 

[Wolfram23]

0.o everyone that I've ever talked to said there was really no difference in using cards in x8x8 compared to x16 x16, thanks for that link!

Yeah, well it's not huge, and if you look at the benchmarks when you get up to 2560x1600 resolution the difference is only 1% or so, but at lower resolution when the FPS is higher you can see the bottlenecks simply because enough info can't get to the card, similar to a CPU bottleneck.

 

[vf501]

Heh, never ever buy the 1st generation of nVidia's latest. They always have heat and stability issues. The only two good cards they have right now is the GTX460 and the GTX580, both have acceptable heat and power usage.

I skipped on the 9800GT, waited for the revised version the GTS250. Skipped on the GTX470 and GTX480, went with the MSI N460GTX Cyclone. Barely hits 60celcius under full load in all games, idles at 34celcius, all in tropical weather and no air conditioning.

The GTX260m (G92b GPU) is also excellent for laptops along with its revised version the GTX360m and the fermi version the GTX460m.

AMD cards have better price to performance though, I've just had less issues with nVidia cards though compared to Raedeon architecture and their drivers.

 

[MrTub]

Yes the 590 is a month newer then the 6990 and I do think Amd "won" that match and it wasnt even surprising considering Fermi loves their watt. But before that 580 was top of the line so I wouldnt really say AMD have been on top for a while...

Until nVidia launched their 400 series chipset they'd been behind ATI/AMD since the 9000 series. Basically nVidia had no answer to the ATI/AMD 4000 series chipsets and to be frank, if it wasn't for the 8800GTX and the 8800 Ultra even the nVidia 8000 series would have run 2nd place to ATI/AMD's 3000 series. Even discounting that, that's several series of 'also ran' chipsets against the 4000 series chipsets.

The nVidia 400 series put them back to parity against ATI/AMD's 5000 series and now it seems that the 500 series had edged out the 6000 series in several places (especially as AMD are taking their sweet time about releasing mid-range chipsets for the series)... To be honest the 6000 series has been something of a disappointment and the changing of the model numbering has been a pain in the cock.

Im not so good with those old cards considering I was quite young and my brothers helped me whenever I had problems with my computer/wanted to buy a new one, but he said that AMD have had been on top for some time which isnt really true since 400/500vs5000/6000 nvidia have always had faster cards (Single gpu cards)

 

[Waaghpowa]

--.

This is exactly true, having that extra power wont necessarily make the game run better. I swear Crysis 1 and 2 run better than Black ops did. I as well, refuse to purchase Activision games not only because of the poor work they do on PC ports, but on principle.

OT: It's good to have this competition, maybe people will realize that AMD GPU's are just as good as nvidia.

As for the GTX590's catching fire, I know someone who has one and he's had no trouble. Isolated incidence?

 

[SinisterDeath]

would be nice if these guys stopped sniping and just focused on making the best cards at the best value they can. who cares what is the abosolute fastest if for 600 bucks you are getitng a handful of frames more than a vastly cheaper card.

they do, they've been doing it for years. They build the best of the best, than they downsize it so its cheaper and less powerful, but sometimes as powerful, or just behind the last generations best.

And they create $600+ video cards, becuase there is a Market for it.

IF there wasn't, They wouldn't make them for the average consumer.

Side note, I just bought an EVGA GTX 460, upgrade from the 9800GTX+.

EVGA 01G-P3-1380-KR GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) SSC+ 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Core Clock 850 MHz (v.s 720 MHz reference)
Shader Clock 1700 Mhz (v.s 1440 MHz reference)
Stream Processors 336 Processor Cores Memory
Effective Memory Clock 3900 MHz (v.s 3600 MHz reference)

I bought it, for 2 reasons.
When I bought the 9800, It was already a 'year old' by then.
I still play Age of Conan (best looking mmorpg still)
Playing Rift.

Going to buy Deus Ex: Human Revolution
And Elderscrolls V: Skyrim
Come late summer/august for PC.

Only bottleneck after GPU upgrade is going to be my Q6600 CPU.
Thankfully we have been getting more and more quad-core support in the last couple years, and as I predicted it has extended my pc's lifespan a bit.
I'd go the i7 or i5 route but that would require a new Mobo and Memory...

 

[MrTub]

I think the fastest has always been a bit dodgy considering some games ran a hair better on nividia cards than they did ati cards even tho on paper and in benchmarks ati should have been faster, now some games are more tuned for one video card over the other, sometimes the drivers just are not up to snuff from one side or the other, lets face it both sides have spotty drivers nvidia have diaabled fans in one driver update and melted video cards oops, ati have regular spotty driver updates where games do not work at all, and both have issues with sli and xfire not having proper profiles for games releases, making sli and xfire an expensive proposition that may or may not be supported for x y z game any time soon.

physics is a gimmic, cup used to run physics stuff just fine, and physics should be able to be run of dual and quad and hex and octa core cps np with room to spare, but since nvidia snapped up physix now games have to use their cards if they want certain branding nvidia approved or whatever stamps nvidia wants to put on a game. arma2 is a game that does physics just fine using cpu course it is also a game that need a supercomputer to max it out.

really is there much point in having "the fastest" other than the 3p33n flogging? there are not many games that push the bounds of gfx anymore, even crysis 2 runs fine on a single modest gpu maxed out. unless your are pushing 3 monitors at crazy high resolutions there is probably not much of a difference you are going to see in your fps for many games and even if you get the fastest vs the 2nd fastest the difference might be a frame or two overall.

would be nice if these guys stopped sniping and just focused on making the best cards at the best value they can. who cares what is the abosolute fastest if for 600 bucks you are getitng a handful of frames more than a vastly cheaper card.

In the short time I've been using Sli (Since january) all new games get a sli profile update on day one or even with crysis 2 you got a sli profile just for the demo so they are usually very fast with releasing sli profiles but then again I haven't been using it for so long so I reserve the right to be wrong on this

And 590/6990 is mostly for bragging but some actually need it for Nvidia 3d surround or Amds eyefinity

 

[MrTub]

--.

This is exactly true, having that extra power wont necessarily make the game run better. I swear Crysis 1 and 2 run better than Black ops did. I as well, refuse to purchase Activision games not only because of the poor work they do on PC ports, but on principle.

OT: It's good to have this competition, maybe people will realize that AMD GPU's are just as good as nvidia.

As for the GTX590's catching fire, I know someone who has one and he's had no trouble. Isolated incidence?

Old drivers that did not have surge protection(dunno if that is the right name) enabled so if you raise the volt for the card there was quite a good chance it will be fireworks.

 

[MrTub]

0.o everyone that I've ever talked to said there was really no difference in using cards in x8x8 compared to x16 x16, thanks for that link!

Yeah, well it's not huge, and if you look at the benchmarks when you get up to 2560x1600 resolution the difference is only 1% or so, but at lower resolution when the FPS is higher you can see the bottlenecks simply because enough info can't get to the card, similar to a CPU bottleneck.

ah, awesome! I use a higher resolution so I was starting to wounder if I should have bought a mobo with x16x16

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Im not so good with those old cards considering I was quite young and my brothers helped me whenever I had problems with my computer/wanted to buy a new one, but he said that AMD have had been on top for some time which isnt really true since 400/500vs5000/6000 nvidia have always had faster cards (Single gpu cards)

Hey! Those cards aren't that old... If I dug in my parts box I could dig out a GeForce 2 and a Blade 3D... and if that's not old enough, a Hercules monochrome display adaptor card.

One thing is, even when nVidia cards have been faster I've never considered them worth the typical price difference there is between them and similar AMD card. 25-100+% price increase for a 5-10% performance increase? That's pretty much dropping below my 'acceptable' threshold for diminishing returns.

 

[Sprinal]

I say that it does not matter.

And I also say that this was similar to when Porche tested a Nissan...