VeeshanVault

AnandTech.com gave an edge to ATI, particularly citing the smaller size and power requirements of cards using its chips, but in the end also saw things roughly even.


"I don't think anyone thought the race would be this close after what has been going on over the past couple years with ATI and Nvidia," the site's Derek Wilson said in a review.


HardOCP.com gave both versions of the X800 its "Must Have Hardware" award and said its testing showed Markham, Ontario-based ATI with a clear performance advantage.


"When it comes right down to it the X800Pro matches or beats the GeForce 6800Ultra in game performance and (image quality)," said Brent Justice in his review. "The Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition goes even further and burns through these games like a hot knife through butter, besting Nvidia's 6800Ultra by an easily noticeable real-world margin."

Kguku wrote:Christ i thought we had seen the last of the Winnow ATi fanboyism, I guess not.

Kelshara wrote:Eh it is only ver recent history that ATi has had a better product. Their previous products were crap, and their drivers even worse. And yes, you are a fanboi Was not aware that they came this fanatical except in the "Blizzard" flavour.

Until last year Nvidia was the overwhelming leader in making the chips that are used to improve the ability of personal computers to portray complex three-dimensional and fast-moving graphics images, a quality particularly prized by video game players. Moreover, it had an exclusive deal with Microsoft for the graphics processing chips used in the Xbox game machine.

That all came undone last year when Nvidia placed an ill-timed bet on a new generation of chip-making technology that ended up reaching the market too late. At the same time, Nvidia lost its Xbox contract to rival ATI when it refused to meet Microsoft's stringent pricing demands.

As a result, after growing at about 100 percent annually for four years, Nvidia's revenue fell from $1.91 billion in 2002 to $1.82 billion in 2003.

"ATI not only outperformed Nvidia, they had a cheaper chip," said David Wu, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities who follows the graphics chip market.

Shares of Nvidia fell from a high of $71.71 in January 2002 to as low as $7.37 in October 2002.

The Radeon X800 series cards perform best in some of our most intensive benchmarks based on newer games or requiring lots of pixel shading power, including Far Cry, Painkiller, UT2004, and 3DMark03's Mother Nature scene—especially at high resolutions with edge and texture antialiasing enabled. The X800s also have superior edge antialiasing. Their 6X multisampling mode reduces edge jaggies better than NVIDIA's 8xS mode, and the presence of temporal antialiasing only underscores ATI's leadership here. With a single-slot cooler, one power connector, and fairly reasonable power requirements, the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition offers all its capability with less inconvenience than NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra. What's more, ATI's X800 series will be in stores first, with a more mature driver than NVIDIA currently has for the GeForce 6800 line.

How many more years will you be saying "next gen cards will be different!" If they are, great. I'm buying the best out there when I need a card.

Dregor Thule wrote:
Oh, and the funny thing about that pose, if you look at it from any other angle she's falling over backwards, hehe.

Drolgin Steingrinder wrote: that model needs camel toe.

Forthe wrote:Seems ATI may have been cheating some.

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040603/index.html

Winnow wrote:

Forthe wrote:Seems ATI may have been cheating some.

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040603/index.html

old news! ATI already responded to those accusations! There's nothing to see here!

I'll find the link later.

ATI's algorithms appear to fit into the legitimate category with professional hardware Web sites hard-pressed to find any image-quality degradations caused by the filtering optimizations. According to Tech Report's Scott Wasson, "ATI's adaptive trilinear appears to be damn near impossible to catch with the naked eye."

While ATI has been cleared of cheating charges in the technical arena, the company still has to overcome the damage caused by its failure to disclose the existence of the optimizations to the editors of major hardware publications.

Forthe wrote:I have no problem with optimizations that improve speed with little cost.

I do have a problem when a company advertises it does anisotropic trilinear filtering when in fact the product will never do anisotropic trilinear filtering (minus IQ tests).

The right solution is to put the option in there to disable it and then have the marketing department praise up your optimization. Much better than lying about it.

PS. I have no doubt Nvidia x-ray'd ATI's chips. Damn yanks

Winnow wrote:The difference here is ATI made optimizations that were like a placebo and didn't do anything to help performance while nVidia's optimizations were the equivalent of a football player shooting himself up with steroids.

Winnow wrote:Both companies have to hype their products but all you need to do is check any of the geek websites to know which card performs better.

As we will see repeatedly throughout our benchmark section, anisotropic filtering is the greatest strength of the new Radeon X800 cards.

GeForce 6800 Only Has 8 Pipelines?

Posted by Newsfactory on Monday, June 07 @ 01:10:04 CEST
Thanks to Digitalwanderer for pointing me to this post over at Beyond3D's Forum posted by Ufon.

If you check out his benchies that were run on a Inno3D GeForce 6800 Ultra 400/1100 MHz and a Leadtek A400 TDH (GeForce 6800) 335/700 MHz! It seems that these Cards are runing with 8 pipes and not the 12 Nvidia claimed.

No HDTV in Geforce 6800

Posted by El_Coyote on Saturday, June 05 @ 14:55:03 CEST
Quote:
"If you’re counting on HDTV working on your spanky new 6800, you’re out of luck: it has been confirmed this morning by Derek Perez of NVIDIA that the both the core and the existing reference board have no capacity to support an HDTV signal – though it is planned for the future NV43 & NV41 cores. If you are hoping a third party vendor is going to slap a discrete chip on there, you are likely to be disappointed because as far as we know no vendors are straying from the reference design."

Kelshara wrote:I love how everything Nvidia does is BAD and whenever ATi lies they are just doing what is best for the customer.. fanboi!

And WTF would I run HDTV on a computer anyway?