Radeon 5870 is a monster

[Neddie]

You can have the mightiest of monsters, but without eyes or simple motor control all the power it has flowing through twisted sinews and appreciably proportioned limbs cannot be applied.

When ATI hires some coders and starts providing good non-Windows, non-Direct X support, I'll consider them again. Until then, their raw power and superior naive price point are valueless to me.

[Caydr]

And 0.02% of the market share is valueless to them too.

[rest of post removed]

You have been warned for felony 1.

[Neddie]

You are posting on a forum focused on an engine which uses OpenGL, the majority of whose developers use some form of Linux. As for market share, do a little research. It is true that in terms of personal computers and the average consumer, DirectX and Windows are where it is at. Look at power, read lead, consumers. Look at dedicated computers, like consoles and embedded systems, with their UNIX based and/or custom operating systems. Not to say none of these worthwhile applications use ATI, but those who do end up investing inordinate amounts of time and money into making drivers which work. Wouldn't it be more profitable to simply handle the software side correctly in-house to begin with? Wouldn't this permit the expansion of the personal computer marketshare?

[Jazcash]

My 4870 hasn't let me down yet.

[Pxtl]

It's not just Linux drivers - in general, ATIs software is nightmarishly bad. The 9600 AIW told me everything I needed to know about that company.

[momfreeek]

My rule of thumb is If I can remember posting in the morning, the post contains correctly formed english.

You left out a colon.

you used dubious grammar while criticizing the grammar of another.

a correction:
I corrected, you critisised.

Besides, my rules don't preclude creative grammar.

[AF]

ATI implements what it needs t get by and support the current latest and greatest. It will work on it but then move on when new stuff comes in vogue, letting it coderot unfinished.

Nvidia on the other hand could not do that because they have their tentacles in lots of places, and doing so would result in losses of contracts, aswell as ground to ATI. If ti were ATI ontop not nvidia, then we'd all be talking about how shite ATI gpus are, and ti doesnt matter if the engines 10 million horse power if its in a robin reliant.

[CarRepairer]

I also bought a couple of all-in-wonders back in the day, and that too was my last run-in with ATi.

With ATI I find I more often have to find a workaround for minor glitches, but I'm a geek so it's not an issue.

This doesn't make you a geek at all. That's like saying you're a car buff because you buy a high-end status symbol car where they give great service to work out the glitches. Drive up to the guy restoring classic muscle cars in your latest Cadillac SUV and tell him you're a car buff too.

[Peet]

We interrupt this program to bring you this urgent message:



And now back to your regularly scheduled flamewar.

[Gota]

We interrupt this program to bring you this urgent message:



And now back to your regularly scheduled flamewar.

Do you submerge it in liquid helium?

[Caydr]

I found a tremendously informative article about PCI Express bus speeds and their effect on the graphics card's performance here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/ ... s_Scaling/

It appears that PCI-E v2 x16 is virtually untapped by even the Radeon 5870. There is no *major* decrease in performance until you drop down to 1x speed from 4x speed.

Especially interesting for me is the difference between PCI-E v2 x16 and x8, which roughly equates to the difference between PCI-E v1 and v2. My motherboard, an Asus P5B-E only has PCI-E v1 so I'm happy to see that in most games the performance loss is only 2-3%, which could surely be recouped through a small overclock.

I, of course, would do a LARGE overclock.

[Caydr]

Hmm... My Radeon 4890 OC'd to 930 (850 stock) / 1040 (975 stock) plays Crysis with all settings on Very High @ 35-50 FPS. No anti-aliasing of course, but at 1680x1050. I've played from the beginning all the way to the mission "Relic" and it's been steady at that speed except for a physics glitch that killed my FPS for about 3 seconds during the first tank fight after the hostage rescue. Alternatively I can have roughly the same or better framerate by setting everything to High and then forcing every quality setting in CCC to maximum, including transparent anti-aliasing and 6x box anti-aliasing.

I'm now wondering very seriously, why did I very nearly run out and buy a 5870 a couple days ago? If I can handle Crysis, there's literally no greater challenge that I can think of, so until I can save up enough to buy 3 monitors I don't actually see a reason to upgrade. Aside from Dirt 2 which isn't even out yet, there aren't any significant DX11 games to play either.

I hadn't played Crysis since I overclocked my GPU as stated above and bumped my CPU to 3.6 ghz (up from 3 ghz), also boosted my RAM to DDR2-1000 speed with everything running at a FSB of 1600. (P5B-E pwns) I also get 30+ FPS in all Vantage benchmarks and run 3DMark06 like it's a tech demo for a 1997 game, getting 15664 on all default settings.

So now I'm wondering, are there any games that you guys know of that are released now or which are coming by year's end which even approach Crysis-level graphics? Quick 'n dirty console ports have completely wrecked the steady increase in graphics quality you used to get on PC...

In other Caydr's Opinion-related news, Eyefinity (ATI's new native multiple-monitor support) might have finally given us REAL MEN (pc gamers) something to shove in console tards' faces. Besides all the obvious stuff, I mean.

[Argh]

@Gota: see the ridiculously-large fan on top. Probably not ideal in terms of heat, but whatever, that's a lot of sheer airflow. Gotta be noisy, though, those big nVidia cards are screamers when they kick cooling on.

Why no water, Peet?

[==Troy==]

I have one big reason not to buy ATI. It is stereo vision (nvidia 3D).

I have my 120Ghz LCD screen and dual GTX 8800. I run most of the games that I play (not really a gamer) at highest quality and reasonable fps. ALL of those which involve 3D, use the nvidia 3D vision.

For those who doesnt know - nvidia 3D is the same as IMAX 3D movies where you have those non red-blue glasses on. (quality is MUCH better than anaglyph.)


ATI has NOTHING comparable to that. and I strongly doubt it ever will.

[Peet]

@Gota: see the ridiculously-large fan on top. Probably not ideal in terms of heat, but whatever, that's a lot of sheer airflow. Gotta be noisy, though, those big nVidia cards are screamers when they kick cooling on.

Why no water, Peet?

No water because blocks for 280s are expeennsssiive and it cools just fine on air. And it's a pretty quiet pc; the loudest part is the northbridge fan. The video cards don't put out much noise but they SURE do crank out the heat.

[CarRepairer]

stereo vision (nvidia 3D).

Shutter glasses suck. But nvidia does support other passive methods of 3D so yes, nvidia still rocks. Here's a quote from another page:

If nvidia have a similarly priced card, and was only rated at half the performance, I'd still buy the nvidia.

+1

[rattle]

same, for proper drivers and shit

[jK]

Quality > Quantity

[Master-Athmos]

I have my 120Ghz LCD screen and dual GTX 8800. I run most of the games that I play (not really a gamer) at highest quality and reasonable fps. ALL of those which involve 3D, use the nvidia 3D vision.

Well you're a lucky one then I guess. Most people get headaches from those shutter glasses (some sooner some later). I tried them with my GeForce 256 back then and got nasty headaches after 10-15 minutes. Good thing I didn't have to buy a special monitor for that (and even today I wouldn't buy a sucky TN-LCD just for the 3D effect)...

[==Troy==]

I have my 120Ghz LCD screen and dual GTX 8800. I run most of the games that I play (not really a gamer) at highest quality and reasonable fps. ALL of those which involve 3D, use the nvidia 3D vision.

Well you're a lucky one then I guess. Most people get headaches from those shutter glasses (some sooner some later). I tried them with my GeForce 256 back then and got nasty headaches after 10-15 minutes. Good thing I didn't have to buy a special monitor for that (and even today I wouldn't buy a sucky TN-LCD just for the 3D effect)...

CRT screens always gave me headache on the shutter glasses, and the LCD displays were just too slow. The current 120Ghz LCD + shutters suit me well enough to play for 2-3 hours at least (I just dont play longer) without a sign of a headache.