which card is better ! [Archive] - Coolercases UK

Alex Slane

29-05-2006, 09:31 PM

Right as per usual i get bored of components very quickly! , and as i have just sorted my cpu out and is working lovely (2950hgz lovely jubliee) i have been thinking of selling my current card and buying a new one. right at the mo i have a leadtek 7800gt, which dont get me wrong here is working great, but i have also fancied a A.ti x1800xtx, i have read alot of reveiws on that card and been thinking about getting one.
the question is this is the x1800xtx a better card than the 7800gt.
look forward to hearing you opinions
thanks
Alex

ghost

29-05-2006, 09:41 PM

Purely on a drivers thing i would say stick with the Nvidia card as ATI drivers are pants, i once bought an ATi card and had it a week before RMA because of driver issues and never again will i buy one. :eek:

Alex Slane

29-05-2006, 11:28 PM

Anbody else have any other veiws on these cards.
thanks
alex:)

Teebor

30-05-2006, 12:07 AM

Ati's drivers used to have problems but those have been corrected for many years now. I'm now a stern supporter of the Ati products so I would say go with that as nvidia cards just seem to be underpowered in comparison.

If you can stretch to it why not get the latest 1900? they are supposed to be great

f.sardis

30-05-2006, 12:14 AM

actually the 7800 generation of cards would beat the 1800 in benchmarks.
for the reasons mentioned by ghost i would say stick with nvidia. i had driver problems with my x850xt pe which renedered games unplayable. i cant be bothered finding my thread here but the main issues was overheating. i updated drivers and they caused the card to overheat which in turn made it throttle which in turn dropped my frames in games and resulted in hickups. its impossible for me to recommend ati because i have been the owner of their most expensive card at the time and i experienced anything but happy gaming hours. nvidia on the other hard was plug n play and the latest image quality tests also show nvidia to have better representation of games.

Leeum

30-05-2006, 12:26 AM

I used to be a big fan of ATi until they stopped offering the non-CCC drivers. Despise that control centre :(

DaveMac

30-05-2006, 12:45 AM

I used to be a big fan of ATi until they stopped offering the non-CCC drivers. Despise that control centre :(
If you choose 'FireMV' instead of 'Radeon' the Control Panel drivers are there, though currently on 6.3 & CCC are on the newly released 6.5

ghost

30-05-2006, 12:09 PM

Not so teebor as this article shows from page 20 of this months CPC magazine there drivers are pants.

http://3dnature.com/ati.html

sunnyg

30-05-2006, 12:21 PM

go for a bfg 7900gt or gtx. you'll know it'll b alive longer than you.

zoomee

30-05-2006, 12:54 PM

The X1900XTX is the current ruler of the gfx roost - not much point upgrading unless u go for one of them tbh mate.

|Slackster|

30-05-2006, 01:26 PM

sunnyg

30-05-2006, 01:48 PM

i forgot to mention is a good thing about already factory overclocked graphics cards like the bfg overclock better than non-factory overclocked. i read the review on another forum and you could really see the difference.

f.sardis

30-05-2006, 03:39 PM

I dont know why people are complaining about ATi's drivers, They have been sorted for a long time now.

Definatly get the x1800XT card, It's a lot faster than the 7800gt, Hell it blows it away when overclocked and Ati's image quality is fantastic:)

not true

image quality is lower on the 1800 compared to 7800 and on some games there are graphics glitches that dont display the bagrounds right even with the latest drivers. the 1800 is also much louder and runs alot hotter. it also consumer more power. i simply dont see the point in getting an ati over an nvidia right now. the crown clearly belongs to nvidia.

Highland3r

30-05-2006, 03:52 PM

Teebor

30-05-2006, 03:57 PM

Not so teebor as this article shows from page 20 of this months CPC magazine there drivers are pants.

http://3dnature.com/ati.html

yep but for that kind of application then you don't want either a nvidia or an ati card you want a decent high end Matrox or other workhorse designed for that kind of application.

We are talking gaming here

Rob_J

30-05-2006, 04:16 PM

Iv got a X1900XTX and its great, any game at full settings.

f.sardis

30-05-2006, 06:31 PM

IQ on the X1800 series IS better than the 7xxx. Had a play with an X1800XL the other week, MUCH better image quality that the 7900GT :) + theres the ability to run "full" HDR and AA at the same time...

yes it has the aa and hdr capability. no arguments there. however the AA quality is hands up better on the nvidia part according to anadtech IQ benchmarks. also i was reading a magazine on the topic and they too found that ati suffered from graphics glitches on various games. one of them was wrong background representation in quake 4. by baground i mean the mountains at the far back on the first stage of the game. they also found the lighing representation to be more accurate on nvidia but it looked more impressive on ati in terms of colour brightness. but thats something that can be fixed with some contrast and brightness tweaking.

TREE

30-05-2006, 10:16 PM

OK iv been an owner of a 6800 Ultra a 7800 GTX an X1800XT and look at the card i am using now. I hate to disagree sards but the ATI's have one this one, and i dont have a preference for any card as its performance for price with added features and future support that i look for in a graphics card and to tell the truth none of these things are offered on Nvidia's latest cards.

As for image quality i can say first hand, in every caes the X1800 and X1900 series of cards bring a much better level of AA and AF than the Nvidia cards, bump mapping also appears stronger on the ATI cards. Sure drivers can be a pest from time to time but its never as bad as people make out. I can honsetly say get the X1800, it overclocks wonderfully and its performance will NOT dissapoint, also with the option of HDR + AA theres no reason to get an Nvidia banger (which i can only say is old technology on a die shrink) unless you want to save about 20w of power and have a slighlty more peacefull cooler. Overall in my experience in using graphics cards, Nvidia tend to get a higher FPS on a close image with their "updated" 6800 architecture, however distant images (ie objects in the distance) results in a far lower FPS than that of a X1800 or X1900 card (check the benchys peeps its true), and overall you want a higher minimum than maximum.

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 06:37 AM

transparency AA was found better than ATI offering in IQ. search anandtech for the relevant article comparing image quality between 7800 and 1800. also the FPS in benchmarks is almost completely identical with only the 7800 512mb leading by a small margin. another thing to consider is that SLI is a more mature technology and much more refined compared to crossfire which still has the 16x12 cap and also the master cards are rare to say the least. thats the stuff i know from anandtech.

now, the stuff i know from personal experience.
the fan on the ati cards is alot louder than the one on the 7800. thats a fact. also, the fan on the 7800 never spins up. it keeps the same low hum noise no mater what you are doing. the ati changes the speed from low hum to jet plane when you open 3D apps.
the x850xt pe was the best card ati had for a while and it was also the worst card. make a google for x850xt pe overheating and you will see how many people who actually bought the best ati couldnt even play a game at fluent fps. also in ut2004 when you kill someone with a pulse gun you get that horrible glitch that draws green lines all over the screen for a second. nvidia doesnt have that.
things i learned from the magazine. ati doesnt have the true representation of colours. it also doesnt represent some textures as accurately as nvidia and it suffers from more obvious and disturbing bugs in games.

Highland3r

31-05-2006, 06:53 AM

*cough* fanboi *cough*

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?threadid=183523
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=40&type=expert&pid=3 (and page 4)

Fan on the 7900GT is damn loud, can hear it ALL over the house, it doesnt spin down either....
For multi GPU's Nvidia is waaaayyyyy ahead of ATI at the mo, single card can't beat the X1900XTX - awsome performance, high IQ, AA+HDR.....

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 07:57 AM

nah, no fanboy. i always go with the best deal. i think nvidia is the best deal right now.
dunno anything about the 7900. we were talking 7800 and i can assure you the fan is alot more quiet compared to the standard ati fan i had on my x850.
once again about image quality on 7800 and 1800 i have to point youtowards anandtech cause they are the ones who did the article and found nvidia better. if we are talking strictly the *800 series from both manufacturers [--edit(i mean the 7800 and 1800 and not previous models)], i think nvidia is the clear winner. for *900 series i dont know much as i havent done any reading yet with my exams and everything.
one more thing, its very well known that ati is using more contrast and brightness to give the games better looks but thats something that can be done with a little tweaking on nvidia. the fact they make the colours bright and increase the contrast doesnt mean anything. however the fact that they dont get the lighting right and that some textures dont show right means alot.
also the articles provided above are for the 6800 and x800 which is irrelevant since transparency AA didnt exist at the time as far as i know.

Highland3r

31-05-2006, 08:13 AM

Got any links from anad mate? just done a quick search and can't find a thing...

btw, i've run an X800 series, 7800 series, X1800 series and 7900 series cards, IMO (which is purely subjective) the ATI's have better IQ than the respective Nvidia card. This is the case at LOW AA/AF anyway, at higher levels (or when using NV's "QS" AA) the IQ difference is almost 0. Not saying you're wrong here, just from a personal stance (which seems to be somewhat widespread) ATI cards generally tend to have better IQ than Nvidia's... Probably wrong myself though, only have 1/4 the number of posts that you do.

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 09:08 AM

ill try to search for a link later today as i am now at work.

i dunno how you do your test but the best way to do it is take identical snapshots from a game at different settings with each card and then compare them next to eachother. 3dmark also has a similar utility. anyway from what i recall on from anands benchmarks is that transparency AA was far better than anything ati had to offer. truthfully though as you said, while playing the game with high AA settings with either card its impossible to tell the differences. the only thing i have noticed myself is the higher contrast and bright colours from ati which like i mentioned is something that can be done with nvidia either by tweaking the monitor or the card itself.
it does come down to personal preference at the end of the day since no card owns the other either in fps or image quality but on drives perspective and from personal experience i think nvidia knows how to make drivers and how to address problems unlike ati. to my knowledge ut2004 still has the graphics bug when you kill someone with the pulse gun and the x850xt series still overheats. to fix my x850 i bought myself a zalman cooler. the problem also seems to have disappeared when i installed the card on my small rig with the sis chipset. the x850 was running at 100+C which isnt what i call a cool card. with the zalman it has dropped to around 70C under gaming and the card never overheats in the small rig which has far less cooling capacity over my big rig. the card also never overheated with older ati drivers on my big rig.
having said all that, as an owner of their most expensive card at the time i was disappointed because i has a card the performed worse than cheaper models due to drivers.
if ati comes up with a considerably better card over nvidia i will consider buying again. if i find similar issues i wont even go near ati again unless the tables turn somehow.

Rob_J

31-05-2006, 09:32 AM

Iv never had a single problem with my ati cards my last card was a X800xl, i dont find the fans loud, even if they are my speakers tend to be on while im playing a game so it doesnt matter.

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 09:34 AM

ok boring day at work, everything is running fine so i took the time to find something relevant

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2679&p=15

this link proves mostly that the cards have the same image quality except maybe in black & white 2 where ati is doing much better imo.

however have a look at the power consumption of the 7800 512 sli compared to a sinlge 1900.

i know its not *800 series tests but its the closest i could find right now and i do believe its a good representative of whats going on between ati and nvidia.

Rob_J

31-05-2006, 09:38 AM

Think that is the wrong link. Why does it matter what the power consumption is? Maybe the GeForce 7950GX2 will put nvidia back on top.

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 09:39 AM

power consumption matters for 3 things

1]electricity bill
2]heat
3]PSU

link fixed.

also the 7950 is the single most stupid marketing stunt and misinformation spread i have ever seen. take a close look at the core speed and mem speed on the card and you will see its not actually two GTX card but two GT cards. with them being squeezed together, the chnaces for overclocking or even installing alternative cooling are slim if not nonexistent. also, notice the lack of sli bridges which means you wont be able to pull of a quad sli with that one. and although the power consumption has been tamed a bit with the slower clocks and lower volts, 4 of them will still require a psu near 900W to keep them going under heavy load.
and just to clarify the things i just said, two 7900GTX cards in SLI will do better than the 7950 but draw a bit more power but with more options for better cooling and overclocking potential.

Ichabod Crane

31-05-2006, 09:41 AM

ATI supports HDR and AA all at once Nvidia do not! end of discussion

Rob_J

31-05-2006, 09:41 AM

If people are worried about electricity bills and heat then dont get such a powerful card.

sunnyg

31-05-2006, 09:42 AM

you can cleary see the differences. nvidia all the way...

Rob_J

31-05-2006, 09:47 AM

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/graphics/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=300&model2=283&chart=97

Yes you can see the difference ATI at the top.

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 10:23 AM

ok 3 things to note about the last comments.

first of all, those who want a high end card doesnt mean they want a high end bill or a high end headache from the noise.
second, HDR and AA is nice but usually the performance hit renders games unplayable. especially the latest ones. and by the way, getting nvidia will give an option for SLI in the future which is more mature than corssfire and supports resolutions above 1600x1200 which crossfire doesnt. now, if you want HDR desperately instead of AA you can survive with a higher resolution. thats what AA does at the end of the day. It basically increases the resolution and then scales down the image.
tomshardware gives ati the top spot? and since when did tomshardware had any respect among the IT professionals? and excuse me if you havent noticed but they are comparing a 1900 to a 7800? is it a joke or what?

Highland3r

31-05-2006, 10:42 AM

The res issue was/is fixed (afaik) with the X1xxx series and above, allowing higher res's.
We seem to have moved from the initial image quality point to other faults with ATI's cards... While we're at it, shall we comment on G80/R600 too??
Both sides have their advantages/disavantages, people choose one way or another based on this.
If you plan on running single card only, X1800 or X1900's are the way to go, they outperform the nvidia equiv, and clock pretty nicely too.
If you want to run multi GPU, SLI is an easier option unless you're running Intel in which case ATI is the way to go.

Rob_J

31-05-2006, 12:07 PM

too many nvidia fanboys on here

zoomee

31-05-2006, 12:31 PM

Having owned nothing but nvidia cards (6800GT, 6800Ultra, 7800GTX, 7900GT) my last ATI card was the X800XT (9700Pro before that).

Doesnt matter what anyone here says - ATI wins for image quality - I've always noticed the degraded quality on nvidia cards - its more so noticeable when trying to play games like CSS.

I see it one way - image quality at the sacrifice for a tad bit of performance = ATI.

poor image quality at a sacrifice for performance=Nvidia.

Rob_J

31-05-2006, 01:01 PM

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 02:39 PM

a 1900 beats 7800SLI? what kind of joke is that? im not even gonna discuss this. i dunno what they did and how they did it but there is no way a single card can scale better than an SLI system under high resolutions with AA. unless of course we are talking benchmarks at 1024x768 where the CPU is the bottleneck. a single 7900 cant beat a 7800 SLI either.
Im not sure why you use tomshardware as a trusted source since they hardly got any respect in the professional IT community. They do have lots of reputation for doing lots of pointless benchmarks that follow no scientific guidelines and have lots of "wow" factor. in short, they try to impress kids.

Alex Slane

31-05-2006, 04:57 PM

Well Got to say thanks to all for the comments. and just to let you know i bought a connect3d x1800xt today for £179 inc rmds from a certain website. cant wait to be honest i am looking forward to comparing the 2 cards together i think that a x1800xt will be better than my current leadtek 7800gt. i am goin to reformat tommorrow and get rid of any messyness on my system including the old nvidia drivers.
thanks again for all the advice
and will keep ya posted on what i think
Alex:D

f.sardis

31-05-2006, 06:00 PM

a 7800gt and a 1800xt as far as i know are identical in terms of fps performance. again like i said image quality can be subjective unless you will go as far as running high res and AA and then start to zoom in at screenshots and look for details. i reckon you wont notice the difference between your two cards. i know i couldnt notice any difference between my X850 and the 7800GT.

Rob_J

31-05-2006, 06:05 PM

Highland3r

31-05-2006, 06:44 PM

Daffy4895

31-05-2006, 08:48 PM

"At the high end, there's no better solution than ATI's Radeon X1900 series. While NVIDIA can offer similar performance with the GeForce 7900 GTX, its minimum frame rates aren't anywhere near as high as what ATI can deliver, meaning that the X1900 series will give you a much better overall experience"

from amandtech

not 100% ture, in some games yes, but if you look at tests run on Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Serious Sam 2 and Quake 4, the 7900gtx out performs the X1900XTX by as much as 25fps in some of the tests run.

TREE

31-05-2006, 11:04 PM

nice to see you got the ATI X1800XT, dont forget to overclock it if your confident about the cooling in your case and such, even go for the 1.425 or wasa it 1.525V on the core and try reach the 800 MHz like i did, it gives for some real kick ass performance :D

But hot performance that is to.

Another thing, yea i forgot to say Nvidia cards just own ATI at the "current" moment with SLI compared with Crossfire. But that only applies to people who like that kind of setup, which im guessing why Sards is really happy with what he's got as its clear having 2 Nvidia cards is almost or in some cases is doubleing your performance and to think it only gets better as time goes on.

Teebor

31-05-2006, 11:08 PM

don't forget that crossfire also has untapped potential in that the gpu's can be utilised to do floating point calculations instead of just for graphics display. Of course no one uses it to do that sadly :(

TREE

31-05-2006, 11:23 PM

yea got me there, is not also that ATI said you could crossfire an X1900XT master card to an X1600XT running as a pysics card and the X1600 being that it is cheap will save you money compared to a new Physx card... also as a GPU or "their" GPUs even on the low end can compute physics better than that of a Physics dedicated card?? or am i dreaming this?

Another thing doesnt Nvidia have Havok so is that not pretty much the same as what ATI are coming up with, the only difference being that on the High end ATI cards compared to the high end Nvidia cards the ATI's should compute physics better due to the more shader units... IT really doesnt sound that convincing to me as it is true that most games today only use one core on a dual core CPU so any extra pysics could most likely easily run off that second core most of us are either going to get or already have.

Teebor

31-05-2006, 11:43 PM

If you talking about the Havoc game engine then its almost worth buying an nvidia card just for that selling point. The Havoc engine is great for games :D

f.sardis

01-06-2006, 05:51 AM

"At the high end, there's no better solution than ATI's Radeon X1900 series. While NVIDIA can offer similar performance with the GeForce 7900 GTX, its minimum frame rates aren't anywhere near as high as what ATI can deliver, meaning that the X1900 series will give you a much better overall experience"

from amandtech

i dunno if you have realised but we talk about the 800 series here. i dunno why you keep giving examples of the 900 series.

Teebor

01-06-2006, 09:02 AM

becuase the 1900 is a better card and if he can afford to buy one then he should ???

Alex Slane

01-06-2006, 09:41 PM

Got the card and installed and got to say absolutely loving it, did some benchmarks and boy does it shine. my old card dont come even near its mad , even with a overclocked 7800gt this x1800xt still whoops it ass.
another awesome buy i think going to have some fun with this cant wait to start overclocking it to see what its made of!.
happy days!
alex:smile:

Og01

20-06-2006, 01:00 PM

heh a Nvidia vs ATI flame war...

My understanding is that the X1800XT is currently the fastest single card on the market. Also capiable of doing HDR and AA, this card is a good buy.

Unfortunatly ATI isnt an option for me, I know this dosnt apply to most of you in here, but the ATI has put pretty much zero man hours into developing linux drivers, this is a sad loss for ATI cause I do like the performance of their cards, yet although its possible to run the Xwindows system with an ATI card, playing high end games is pretty much a no go.

This lack of interest from ATI in developing good linux drivers has ment that pretty much every linux fan will not go out and buy an ATI card, instead they go out and buy an NVIDIA card and install drivers which have had the same time and devotion put into them as their windows counterpart, and receive full support from NVIDIA. Infact i can usualy expect better performance while running under linux.

Also another thing, since NVIDIA has jumped onto the linux bandwagon; they have picked up some very nice traits and features from the Xwindows system and brought them into windows xp. Being a linux fan I cannot live without these features (my work machine is ATI, I cant stand it). What Nvidia has done is grab all the common interface features that you find in most linux GUIs and has put them into Nview, features like Multiple Desktops, Grid lines and Windows collapsing are what make windows actually usable to me, and ontop of that Nvidia does it well and in a non-tacky way.

These features make for a very usable programing (or any other work) enviroment, aswell as a strong gaming platform.

Another offshot of Nvidia being linux freindly, is that they have put alot of devotion into opengl (simply put opengl is linux's version of directx), more so than ATI as a result games that use opengl will run a hellofalot better on an Nvidia than on an ATI card, (see doom3, quake4, Chronicles of Riddick, Origional Halflife, err theres loads).

and finaly I just wanted to point out that the performance difference between 7800gtx and 7900gtx is minimal to say the least, the 7900 model is more of a proof of concept they've managed to reduce the number of transistors on their card by about 1/3, thus reducing heat, power consumption, cost and chances of manufacture error. They did up the clock speeds a little but, they had to do that, it wouldnt look good on them if they released a card that had the esact same performance as the previous card, plus nobody would buy it.

so yeah I like the package that is NVIDIA, but i wont argue that the latest ATI is faster. (heh plus i splashed out a bought 2 overclocked 7900gtx (BFG) so im happy)

f.sardis

20-06-2006, 01:45 PM

they didnt reduce the transistors. they reduced the manufacturing process size. transistor count is the same and so are the rest of the card's properties apart from clock and memory speeds.
as for the driver argument. i agree fully that nvidia knows how to make drivers and ati are total noobs when it comes to that. and yes the nview utilities are amazing and help alot to increase productivity as opposed to ati's non existant desktop enchancers. and lets not mention that the catalyst control center will take around 20 to 30 secs to open while the nvidia panel is almost instant. and who the hell told them i wanna install .NET to use the damn ontrol panel? i can keep going on and on about ati but it just comes down to two things. the drivers are horrible and they got graphics glitches.

jellybeard999

20-06-2006, 01:48 PM

you can just donwload the old style ATi drivers. which are much better, no control panel etc... just a nview style jobbie... less features, but most of em arent used anyway

Highland3r

20-06-2006, 02:08 PM

Other than linux support there's NO reason NOT to go ATI at the mo... Single card at anyrate. Crossfire isn't quite up to the standards of SLI, its a pita to get working... Having said that SLI isn't exactly a stroll in the park to get working either...
Crossfire is MUCH more flexible than SLI thats for sure...

BTW, the X1900XTX is the fastest single card, NOT the X1800.

7800-> 7900 wasnt just a die shrink, there are a few more tweaks etc made to the cores too. Clock for clock the 7900 series IS faster than the 7800.

Og01

20-06-2006, 03:51 PM

Sorry yeah the die area was reduced by about 1/3 however I was right in saying there is a transistor drop (from 302 million to 278 million), checkout the table in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7_Series

And i did say the 7900 is faster than the 7800 just that there isnt that much in it really....

But at anyrate either 7900gtx or (thankfully corrected) X1900XTX your gonna be good at the moment, and yeah your gonna be cranking out a few more fps with the X1900XTX.

For me however I am happy to loose a bit of performance in order to get the linux friendly drivers and the nView utilitys. (although you can probably ignore my point of view due to the fact that im also willing to loose £400 for a second 7900gtx)

on the SLI arguement; SLI for me was as easy as could be, it just worked, unless your exceptionaly thick i dont think theres much you can do wrong....
As expected SLI result vairy depending on the game your playing; some games showing nearly zero improovement (oblivion) and some games showing a massive improovement (doom3). So i recon in some situations (oblivion grrrr) a single X1900XTX will probably still outshine my 2 BFG 7900gtx OC

f.sardis

20-06-2006, 04:01 PM

yea, i didnt get the sli comment either. it just worked for me. just install drivers and thats it. the rest is done automatically. yes it was a strall in the park.

as for the 1900. i still wouldnt get it no matter what. the drivers are too bad and they have too many graphics glitches in games. and all that for what? 5% more frames? why do you need 5% more when you already got 150?
and crossfire is surely more flexible on paper. but where are the master cards? now ati decided to go with a bridge like SLI instead of that stupid cable and i still think the next gen of sli will be just as flexible as crossfire is on paper.

Highland3r

20-06-2006, 05:50 PM

Hey well I guess I know nothing at all then.. Must be a n00b having issues getting SLI sorted, since everyone else here has had no issues with it...

Don't have any issues with either driverset in all honesty, again though maybe I theres summit you guys know that I don't (which is probably quite likely)
Maybe it's going to be a bad idea running a crossfire setup in the Yoanh rig then if the drivers are that bad

f.sardis

20-06-2006, 06:38 PM

you cant get sli running or crossfire running?

sli will immediately pop up a message when you install the drivers or when it finds the second card. it asks you if you want to enable sli or not. it even tells you to install the bridge in case you forgot. on the other hand, according to an article i saw on anadtech, ati doesnt detect crossfire cards automatically and you have to look for it yourself to enable it. other than that both systems will run without problems after the multi gpu mode is enabled but only as long as there is a profile for the game in nvidias case. that of course is the only downside of sli along with the hdr and aa inability.
i learned from you that crossfire is not limited to 1600x1200 anymore and that along with the profile-less operation for all games gives a real advantage to crossfire. however, the lack of mastercards on the market has slaughtered crossfire.
i did have many problems with ati while i was using it on my big rig. once i got myself the two 7800gt cards all the problems were solved. on a side note, the x850xt has not given me any problems either since i installed the zalman cooler on it and put it on my lan rig. however graphics glitches still exist in games and i can confirm its not my hardware because my bro's x800 has exactly the same problems on an intel chipset asus board.

Alex Slane

20-06-2006, 10:19 PM

Bloody Hell did not mean to start a officail war of the gpu's
lol
Alex
P.s My x1800xt Still Kicks Ass:lol:

koola

20-06-2006, 10:36 PM

ATI FTW :cool:

TREE

20-06-2006, 11:17 PM

ATI FTW :cool:

lol cheap shot right there ! :lol:

I see what Highlander is saying, as SLI on older Nforce boards was a problem and in some cases for some boards and some operating systems is a pain in the ass. The same thing can be said for Crossfire and im not going to prefer either dual card setup as frankly i just dont think they are worth the money (although i do think they are okay on lower end cards or after the next card is released and the current card you have can be doubled up when needed).

If there is one thing however in the dual card market that gets credit it has to be Nvidia's all cards compatible approach whilst ATI insist on master cards and dongle cables (will disappear on R600 core).

Another quick note, i do, like Sards enjoy the low memory usage, easy to use, quick to load Nvidia control panal. But for me ATI is the current choice as its got to AA and HDR, its just unheard of when you see it, you wont want to go back. :smile:

f.sardis

21-06-2006, 12:18 AM

TREE

21-06-2006, 12:40 AM

but i consider a high resolution and hdr to be just as good as hdr and aa. besides AA wont increase the image quality as much as more pixels will. more pixels contain more information and therefore a more accurate representation of the information on screen. so why 1024x768 with 4AA and not 1600x1200 straight away? you still get the same performance hit either way. ok maybe 1600x1200 still has a bit of jaggies here and there but its not as noticlable as lower resolutions and it lacks the blurryness created by AA.

Thats almost true but in certain situations the 4x AA and 1024x768 has higher frame rates as particles and sprites that would otherwise not be affected by AA would with a higher res and some other little nitty bits... another thing would be that not everyone's LCD monitors are capable of such high resolutions.

Plus theres more, if you dont have a 512 card then higher res's have a big impact :o

f.sardis

21-06-2006, 12:50 AM

a 7800gt will have no problems playing a game at 1600x1200 without AA. if we are talking HDR and AA we are talking in essence about cards that cost around the 250 quid margin. any card at that price will run 1600x1200 on most games out now. those cards also tend to have 256mb of ram so thats plenty enough. thats due to hardware compression techniques that will compress and decompress textures on the fly without any delay or performance hit or lower quality.
now, about the particles in AA. in essence AA just increases the image quality and then scales it down. 1024x768 with 4AA in essence is a 1600x1200 scaled down. easy way to figure it out is to get the number of AA and count it as steps above the resolution you are using (standard resolutions only count). so one step above 1024 is 1152. thats 2AA. another step above 1024 is 1280 which is 3AA. and so on...
of course AA algorithms are getting optimised to increase performance but at the cost of image quality. my argument is that the card is drawing the particles at a higher resolution either way so the hit would be the same without optimisations if not even bigger than a 1600 res because the card has to draw the higher res and then scale it down too.
of course the real problem as you mentioned is with the LCD but i am a proud owner of a CRT :D

Og01

21-06-2006, 01:03 PM

my lcd does 1600x1200..... Looks better than any CRT i've ever seen IMO but then thats a different flame war altogether.

Im not sure your fully understanding anti-aliasing alot more goes on that what I think you beleive.... True supersampling does indeed involve taking the image at a higher resolution to use as a referance to fade out the edges, however this does not mean that 4x antialiasing is like running at 4 times (or even 4 steps) higher resolution. for a start ATI and NVIDIA use something called Adaptive supersampling which works out where the edges that are gonna need supersampling are and then doing the computational work for those areas only. AntiAliasing itself involves many different techniques to smooth out the edges in our games and also to working out how to draw distant objects and still make them pleasing to the eye. Antialiasing is not an esact science hence AA looks slightly different on ATI and NVIDIA cards, also because of this there is no way to estimate that 1024x768 with 4AA is = 1600x1200 its just not true.

The routines have become more efficent and the process itself dosnt involve simply mapping out.

A good site for getting a glimpse of what goes on in antialiasing is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling

but even still both ATI and NVIDIA are adapting and making improovement to the efficency and look of their AA all the time, and they sure as hell dont share all their techniques...

f.sardis

21-06-2006, 04:00 PM

sigh... this is what i get for simplifying things. yes its true my post was not full of accurate information about AA. adaptive AA is yet another optimisation technique that delivers lower quality than unoptimised AA or supersampling AA or transparency AA.
there are many ways to try and exaplain AA. a find the "dice" version more comprehensive. basically imagine each pixel as a side of a dice. now the dice has dots on the side to represent a number. without AA the dice side is 1. so it has one dot in the middle. if the diagonal line does not pass through the dot then the pixel will be given the background colour. thats how a step is created on a diagonal line. many steps result in jaggies. 2AA has two dots in the same place a dice has them. so if a line is between the two dots or depending from the distance it has from the dots the pixel will be given a colour that results from mixing the line colour with the backround colour.
same with 3 dots 4 dots and so on. so more samples, mean more dots on the dice side. more dots means the colour of the line with the colour of the background can be mixed more accurately in order to remove the jaggies. it also results to blurryness around the lines. not a very scientific explanation again and certainly not very well written but thats the best i can do from the office. we are getting a bit off topic too.
but in any case, you will find that 1024 with 4AA will give you around the same fps as 1600 without AA. it isnt exactly drawing more pixels when AA is enabled but it takes more time to calculate the colour of each pixel which in the end brings it to the same performance as drawing more pixels.