X-bit labs

Started by: I | Date 04/15/04

Comments: 3 | Last Comment:  04/16/04

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1. A certain win for NVIDIA.
The power requirements are set too high, but in such high price cards, i think it's no problem to pay more for a good PSU or to pay the electricity bill at the end of each month.

If ATI chip requires less power and have similar performance ATI wins again.
The Geforce fx5xxx was a complete failure, while NVIDIA have those nice "paper specs" or marketing specs like I like to call it (30Gb/s, 475/500Mhz clock), the chip never made good use of the bandwidth available.
I am starting to think that this is all about memory bandwidth and the use you give to it and the tech behind to save it. ATI proved that with their mediocre 300Mhz chips vs NVIDIA 500Mhz, and ATI win. AMD and Intel have the same issue, who can make better use of the memory bandwidth available? We all know that this isn’t about MHz. Intel must stop fooling us and they will with the model number think at least I hope that. I'm starting to think that chips aren’t making good use of the memory available, specially the dual channel ones.

ATI should start thinking now what to do, since their position is good, but could be better if weren’t HL2. I think they should process these guys since they have lost a lot of market, this was the "game" that was going to show the huge difference between one architecture and the other, or you could say the game that could have killed NVIDIA Geforce fx5xxx chips. But now NVIDIA is now superior so if the game comes out now NVIDIA already have a chip that plays with it good to.

FSAA was a bit disappointing since I was expecting better image quality than ATI and it’s not the case, games that doesn’t work with FSAA like HALO, Splitter cell I was also expecting that they could have some way of made it possible, but no, and it’s still only 4X FSAA since a card with that speed I was think 6X and 8X was already possible. ATI have already 6X and ATI 4X is superior to NVIDIA 4X I don’t know what FSAA ATI will have but if maintain the 6X and add the 8X even with a “nice” performance hit ATI should always have this advantage and if it bring new image quality levels then we certainly will have a race at least at new levels because NVIDIA FX5xxx was far from being a competitor to ATI in all segments.

2. This test is inconclusive.

If NV40 did NOT beat the Radeon9800XT, then this would have been truely pathetic.

At least now we know that this card is NOT a dud.

However, it's too early to draw any conclusions. Wait until the RV420 comes out before you decide what to get.

Well it's not a dud, but i bet there are still the same optimizations that have pushed the 5xxx series scores up or if you want the scores are high (double)because besides the double all (vertex/tmu/etc...) there are other optimizations.

ATI should have put otimizations when nvidia started to put them to in their drivers, instead of forget them (removed), and used some kind of enable/disable option.

Some one said that ATI is going down because the R420 is based on the R3xx and that's bad? So what if they double all like nvidia did i bet that we will have at least a 2x performance increase to.

Where is the 128bit image quality in here?
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-46.html
I never see a proff in any game that nvidia 128bit shader quality is better then the Ati 96bits.

I think Nvidia is still using 12 and 16 bit precision, dont forged to add that to the performance numbers.

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