Quote:
Originally Posted by backup287  well bro company of heros and fear are like a 1 fps increase, i admit some games have a fair bit of performance increas but when you take into account the other games like fear and company of heros the increase isnt too much, seeing as their pitting it against the gts which isnt nvideas best, why not make a card that beats the gtx altogether?the r600 hopefully will or they are screwed, why bring out lower end stuff with a high end price tag |
Like I already posted, this is the XT, not the XTX, the XT IS supposed to get pitted against the GTS. It is said to have the same retail price as the 640MB 8800GTS, but I will bet you prices will fall pretty fast.
FEAR a somewhat older game. DX10 cards are made for newer games, just look at this:
AnandTech: 8600 GT/GTS Follow-up Performance
The 7950GT and the 7900GS have shown to be faster in FEAR.
AnandTech: DX10 for the Masses: NVIDIA 8600 and 8500 Series Launch
In a game like Oblivion the 8600GTS runs faster than the 7950GT. Why? Because games run different than other games, just like how video cards run different than other video cards. You can't look at game 1's fps and then predict game 2's fps. So to make my point, AMD might handle DX9 games that use less complex shaders different than how Nvidia does. Comparing them is not apples to apples, yes they are both GPUs but they are designed totally different. To get a good look you need to look at advanced software and games (like 3Dmark06, Oblivion, Unreal Engine 3, etc.), and so far it is looking better. Example, anybody who has been PC gaming back when Doom 3 came out knew Nvidia cards ran better than ATI cards, and ATI cards ran Half-Life 2 better (not so much anymore). Nvidia might run older games the same as or faster than AMD's new GPUs. The 8800 and R600 are designed for games that are being released in the years 2007+. Nvidia's design and ATI's design might run older games the same, or one could be faster. The XT runs faster in all the workbench benchmarks.
I'm not saying the R600 is the GPU to end all gpu's, I'm saying if anybody blows this off and says "just wait till Nvidia does something" is a fool. ATI has been more impressive than Nvidia in the past. My point, what is Nvidia's 7900GTX? It is a 7800 GTX with higher clocks, they both have 24 pixel pipelines, just faster memory and GPU clock. What is ATI's X1900 cards? A massive redesign of the X1800 by taking it's previous 16 pixel pipelines and putting 3 pixel shaders to each to make a total of 48 pixel shaders. To me that is a lot more impressive. Nvidia is a great company and I think they are going to do just fine, that is why for an school stock project I invested a lot in Nvidia. But I hope that they wake up and instead of flooding the market with a billion different GPU models and take a note from ATI and make certain specialized advancements like the X1900 was. Nvidia loves to rush their products out the door and try to give it brute strength while ATI takes a slower more complex, and overall more rewarding, path.
You can only do so much with a GPU architecture before you have to make a whole new one, you can't just take the G80 design and change it so that it will run faster than a competitor. It was a great feat what ATI did with the X1800 architecture to make the X1900 version. It's just going to be like it was in the past, ATI takes the lead, Nvidia takes the lead, ATI takes the lead, nvidia... etc.
For Nvidia to make a faster G80, they are going to have to reduce the size from 90nm to 65nm to get high enough clocks, and their memory is going to have to catch up with the XTX's 1GB GDDR4 which also carries a 512-bit memory bus. GDDR3 is being pushed to the limit once it hits 1GHz - 1.1GHz; on the other hand GDDR4 can handle 1.2GHz without breaking a sweat and still has enough headroom to get to 1.4+ GHz easily, and even still the 8800 GTX only has a 384-bit memory bus. If Nvidia takes the lead, than great, fine by me, it just means more power to me. I don't play favorites, nvidia can drop the ball just as much as they did the the FX series, and just like ATI did the the Xxxx series (X800 etc.). Don't assume anything, don't assume the R600 will be a beast, and don't assume the "8900 GTX" is going to be an even faster beast.
AnandTech: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 (G80): GPUs Re-architected for DirectX 10
Take a look at the chart near the bottom, at 1280x1024 the 8800GTX runs as 48.8 fps, the 2900XT runs just under that, and the XT is designed to compete against the GTS, that is why I'm impressed. Now these aren't the same tests I know, but it gives a good idea just how powerful the XT is, and it's probably not running on finalized drivers for it. (or it may be, who knows?)
Re: ATI/AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT benchmarks 
Linear Mode
