Reccomand a video card.

[Caydr]

I just posted hoping people here have some inside knowledge or tried some of the newer cards/seen good comparisons on the web.

Hello weary traveler, you've come to the right place.

Used 4890s should be available on the cheap pretty soon as people upgrade to 5xxx and Fermi. The only people who bought 4890s were hardcore enthusiasts, since it only offered a fairly small bump over the 4870, which itself wasn't that much better than a 4850. So those people will be upgrading (as I did) and probably putting their old cards onto Craigslist/Kijiji/eBay, etc.

In a few weeks ATI will be releasing the 5830 - a further budget-oriented high-end chip which will probably be able to achieve pretty decent speeds when overclocked, comparable to a 5850 I'd guess. It should run nice and quiet if my own 5850 is any indicator.

At the top end, NV will be releasing Fermi cards for $700 and $500. Yes, those are the official pre-order prices. The $700 card will run on average about 5% faster than ATI's $300 5870 and will herald the beginning of a new age of prosperity for all mankind... or something. Extremely low quantities will be available for some reason, possibly to do with the 2% yield rate and the fact that NV will be taking a loss on every card, selling them only to help offset the otherwise catastrophic losses that attempting to adapt these ultra-high-end computing-oriented GPGPU cards to gaming tasks has brought.

Second-generation Fermi cards probably won't be such losers, but the pooch has officially been sodomized Japan-style the first time around. 8 months late and still likely to only be a PR launch, 280 watts peak power per card, fan duty cycle harkening back to the Geforce FX line's vacuum cleaner sound level, and a price:performance ratio that is literally less than half that of the competition's. Nasty.

Almost simultaneously, ATI will be releasing their 6-display version of the 5870, probably with some added VRAM. After this, you can expect things to quiet down since ATI will be facing absolutely no market opposition in the next 6-8 months or so.

In summary, I'd wait for the end of March before making any purchasing decisions, since you will likely find better prices and wider range of products.

But as long as you're running at 1680x1050 or below, your 4850 TBH can probably comfortably last you until the next cycle (Q4 2010/Q1 2011) - which will likely put ATI and NV in opposite market positions, since ATI is now focusing heavily on bringing themselves up to GPGPU par in their own next chip from what I've heard, while NV is going to be focusing on cleaning up this mess.

In the interim there will probably be a 5870 refresh from ATI, a 5890 sort of thing as you'd expect, which they can pretty much release at their leisure as they've had lots of time to let a stock of high-binned parts to build up. I was originally planning to wait and get one of these, but various factors compelled me to buy a new card sooner.

[Gota]

Hmz yeah ill prob wait till nv launch their new series.
I hope the outcome will not be as grim as you are foretelling for NV though,for low price's sake.

[Caydr]

$700 and $500 are the announced prices... let's say everything's peaches and rainbows and they're magically 2x faster than their 5xxx series counterparts, they still cost more than twice the price and could literally be used as a space heater.

I'm not a fan of ATI or anything, my last two cards were from them, but only because the price:performance was much better than NV. Previous to this, I had a 8800 GTS, a 7800 GS, some other NV card I forget, and a GF4 MX. More like, I've grown to dislike Nvidia.

Recall what NV had the 280 priced at before ATI released the 4xxx series - it makes me feel like they're very unscrupulous about how much they charge, so get butterflies inside a little every time I hear about them getting their shit handed to them like this. I don't want to see them fail, but I want them to be brutally humbled, that's for sure.

[Gota]

well if u can have a duopoly that actually competes,kudos to the US.
Need more players in the gfx card market.

[Spawn_Retard]

Perhaps,but personally i have had 0 problems with drivers in all games but Spring..

you play spring a whole lot so why make a dumb comment like that?

ATI RULES UNLESS YOU PLAY SPRING WITH THEM.

why post in a spring forum and not expect everyone to tell you to go nvidia

I don't actually play Spring that much anymore..
I just posted hoping people here have some inside knowledge or tried some of the newer cards/seen good comparisons on the web.

funny, i thought i saw you playing a few games of DSD today (and thats honest)


Also, trib your dad pays me in graphics cards to keep your mother sexualy pleased.

[Gota]

ATI or Nvidia?

[rattle]

dictionary

[Master-Athmos]

As Caydr mentioned the HD5830 - it got released recently but don't buy it because it sucks. It should range between the 5770 and 5850 but sort of fails at that. Fillrates are too low to be good at AA (even the 5770 has slightly higher fillrates) and the general performance improvement is bought by higher clocks which needed higher voltages too though. So you have something that has the power consumption of a 5870 (under load) and the AA capabilities of a 5770 and apart from that like 20% more performance than the 5770 for an unattractive price...

Well ok prices are pretty high anyway due to the high demand and no competitor so it might be worth a buy later when prices drop. Currently you have a huge bang for buck decrease when going from the 5770 to the 5830 so either buy the 5850 or the 5770...

In the interim there will probably be a 5870 refresh

Actually that probably won't happen. Instead ATI will present their new 6000 series which unlike the 4000 and 5000 series will have a new architecture. That most certainly is another one of NVIDIA's problems - as it seems to crystallize that even when Fermi hits the ground it will only be delivered in tiny quantities. So when in summer it's reasonably available (not mentioning how good or bad it may perform) it will be just a couple of months until ATI releases their next series. At least currently it doesn't seem like they won't be ready until Q3 or Q4 2010...

That will give NVIDIA a hard time especially when their power hungry and hot Fermi won't deliver an outstanding performance which currently seems to be the best guess...

At least it's safe to say that things will get interesting for the GPU market...

[Gota]

Well at least if Nvidia fails completely We can trust US citizens to bail it out

[Machete234]

Your 4850 will probably be just fine for 1 more year why spend money now?
What exactly is the problem with spring and ATI?
I dont get any crashes anymore with the right driver.

[Gota]

I ma not upgrading my own system...
I am upgrading my fathers comp.

[Caydr]

When I said in the interim a 5890, I'm talking about sometime in the next 6 months, during which time there is nothing new at all on the GPU front.

Regarding the 6xxx series, while I'm not saying it's impossible for ATI to do a quick follow-up, I just don't think they will. They've just finished rolling out the 5xxx series completely and they have a very strong lineup with no competition. Nvidia is literally unable to provide anything right now that can compete unless they or their board partners sell at a loss. I'm talking from top to bottom: at the moment there's nothing there whatsoever that can compete on speed, price, or features.

It's just not reasonable in any sense for them to release a whole new line so soon in this environment. When your product is hot and your competitor hasn't even got one, you direct funding towards R&D so you'll be ready for the future.

In particular what crystallizes the fact that ATI will hold off on a new complete series is that they have a whole new architecture coming down the pipe simultaneously with their partner GlobalFoundries upgrading their manufacturing process to 28nm. Since they are almost partner companies they are certainly working together to make sure that they'll be ready to start production on the next big project at the same time.

A possible scenario like the one you suggest would be if they made a 6xxx series to compete with Fermi 2, including some low-end 28nm parts to clear up any bugs in the technology, but this would be in the late fall or sometime this winter. But certainly not anytime in the immediate future, it would make no economic sense, would hurt consumer confidence, and there aren't even any games that demand high-end 5xxx performance let alone anything beyond this.

[Caydr]

Looking at this from another perspective, ATI/AMD seems to have realized exactly where they sit in the marketplace:

They make x86 processors, but they're a generation or more behind Intel. They make up for this somewhat through pricing.

They make GPUs, but they have reached the point at which additional processing power is needed or even practical in many situations.

They make mobile processors, but they aren't very good. Nvidia has the Tegra and Tegra 2, Intel has Atom, VIA has Nano, various other ARM-based chips, etc.

They make mobile GPUs, but have poor market penetration. Nvidia meanwhile has the Ion and Ion 2 chipsets, which are low-cost and greatly improve a netbook.

They've fallen behind in high performance computing as well. NVidia GPUs running CUDA are one much better option, or you could just go with a bunch of networked PS3s.

In short: They are in second place at best everywhere but the GPU, which is a shrinking market. But the value of having good GPU designs is threatened by the declining number of PC gamers, and the next console generation is at least another year off (probably two or three), so lucrative high-volume contracts are probably out of range as well.

There is only one thing they can do to help themselves while hurt all their opponents simultaneously: reduce the cost of building a good gaming PC. I think this is the reason for their increased emphasis on crossfire lately - their next generation of cards will, in my mind, be built with keeping costs to a minimum. If you're a gamer, you can just buy more cards rather than faster ones. Imagine a $100 card that performs like a 5850, plus some added high performance computing muscle to back it up. Suddenly you can actually buy or build a gaming PC for the same price as a console, except that it's capable of doing all the regular PC tasks as well.

Nvidia's longtime strategy of selling parts for the highest possible profit, I think, bears a tremendous amount of the responsibility for the continual downfall of PC gaming. There are other things of course - Microsoft's often-unique take on how an OS should function, high general hardware costs, the DRM hassle, piracy, inconvenient software management, and so on... but the fact remains: without ATI's intervention in things, you'd be paying as much for a high-end single-GPU card as you would for two or three entire game consoles. Only here's the thing: Nvidia wouldn't really care too much if this happened, since PC gaming only makes up a tiny amount of their overall profits, and any losses would probably turn into gains due to console sales.

The closed nature of Cuda and Physx and unethical pricing are the reason I don't like them anymore. ATI's weakness in drivers and ease of use is just a drop in the bucket. To me, it seems rather like hypocrisy when ATI/AMD users are treated like pariahs as far as the developers here are concerned, when Nvidia stands for the opposite of what the Linux movement does. ATI's drivers are still a work in progress, boo hoo, at least they aren't making a new proprietary standard every other month and forcing developers to disable features that give ATI users better performance. Sounds like that other company you dislike so much.

[forest_devil]

this is getting painful to read.

What is your fathers current computer spec?

What(if anything)have you upgraded/plan to upgrade so far?

What does he NEED to do with this computer?

What would he LIKE to do(if budget was unlimited)?

What is your budget for system in total and the budget for just the graphics card?

[Gota]

It's ok,I got all the help I Needed.thx.

[rattle]

get a fucking 9800 GT or GTX, it's pretty cheap and good enough to last you for quite a while

[Hobo Joe]

The terribleness of ATI drivers is not overstated at all.


They're bloated, slow, buggy, full of memory leaks, and have HORRIBLE OpenGL support, especially if you are so inclined to run Linux.


Maybe some people don't use OpenGL much, but if you do, steer clear of ATI, that's all I have to say. Last time I tried an ATI card (4870), I couldn't even run Blender or Maya properly, they both ran slow and got horrible flickering, and would crash on complex scenes, Linux wouldn't even run past 800x600, and I could barely get 10FPS on spring at medium settings. And even in DX apps, it got bad performance. When I tried TF2, it ran SLOWER than my old 8800GTS had ran it.

Needless to say, I returned it and got a 9800GTX+, and I've had zero problems in almost 2 years. Great drivers, great price/performance.


tl;dr, ati drivers suck balls, never buy ATI if you use OpenGL, and even if you don't use OpenGL you should avoid them.


Also, for the record, this isn't just one bad ATI experience, my last three ATI cards have been similar stories. SHITTY.

[Yuri]

If u have Linux dont even think at ATi. ATis Lin drivers are getting better now but its still not comparable with nV ones.

At the Win platform I would recommend ATi HD5000 series. HD5850 is the performance killer. ATis Win drivers are NOT THAT bad. When they mess with OGL driver part there might some troubles. But this always gets fixed with the next ver or just revert to the previous ver.

//btw somebody has suggested the GTX 295. Its a dual-GPU card based on the past hiend parts so a singlechip is better then it. The same applies at the HD3/4870 X2 and GF9800 GX2.

[Tribulex]

gtx 265 is cool imo.

[Yuri]

Yea, a GTX 265, 275 or HD4870/90 are cool if you get a chance to get em for a reasonable price.