Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
If anyone actually made it this far without skipping around, please let me express my sincere appreciation to your dedication. This article has definitely been an entity with a mind of its own, and it continued to grow regardless how much we hacked at it. There are benchmarks we had to leave out, and there is still so much more I want to do with these cards and games.
The 5950 hasn't been shown to perform much better than the 5900, but it definitely has an acceptable performance increase for a Fall refresh product. So far, we like what we have seen from the 9800XT, and we are anxious to test out ATIs OverDriver feature.
The new 52.14 drivers are much better than either the 51.xx or the 45.xx series. The image quality issues are corrected from 51.xx, and a lot of speed has been inked out over the 45.xx drivers. We have actually been very impressed with the speed, image quality, and playability enhancements we have seen. As long as NVIDIA doesn't take a step backwards before the official 50 series drivers are released, we think everyone who owns a GeForce FX card will be very pleased with what they get. NVIDIA should have never pushed the press to benchmark with the 51 series as no one used it for Half Life 2 and in the end the bugs in the drivers did nothing more than tarnish NVIDIA's name. Regaining the credibility they have lost will definitely take NVIDIA some time.
If you made it all the way through the section on TRAOD, you'll remember the miniboss named compilers. The very large performance gains we saw in Halo, Aquamark3, X2 and Tomb Raider can be attributed to the enhancements of NVIDIAs compiler technology in the 52.xx series of drivers. Whether a developer writes code in HLSL or Cg, NVIDIAs goal is to be able to take that code and find the optimum way to achieve the desired result on their hardware. Eliminating the need for developers to spend extra time hand optimizing code specifically for NVIDIA hardware is in everyone's best interest. If NVIDIA can continue to extract the kinds of performance gains from unoptimized DX9 code as they have done with the 52.14 drivers (without sacrificing image quality), they will be well on their way to taking the performance crown back from ATI by the time NV40 and R400 drop. NVIDIAs GPU architecture is a solid one, but it just needs to be treated the right way. From our angle, at this point, compiler technology is NVIDIAs wildcard. Depending on what they are able to do with it, things could go either way.
Right now NVIDIA is at a disadvantage; ATI's hardware is much easier to code for and the performance on Microsoft's HLSL compiler clearly favors the R3x0 over the NV3x. NVIDIA has a long road ahead of them in order to improve their compilers to the point where game developers won't have to hand-code special NV3x codepaths, but for now ATI seems to have won the battle. Next year will be the year of DX9 titles, and it will be under the next generation of games that we will finally be able to crown a true DX9 winner. Until then, anyone's guess is fair game.
ATI is still the recommendation, but NVIDIA is not a bad card to have by any stretch of the imagination. We still urge our readers not to buy a card until the game they want to play shows up on the street. For those of you who need a card now, we'll be doing a value card round up as part of this series as well.
Keep in mind that ATI's Catalyst 3.8 drivers are coming out this week, and rest assured that we will be doing a follow up as quickly as possible to fill in the gaps. To say this has been a very interesting month in the graphics world would be a definite understatement. If this hasn't been an overload of information, stay tuned, because there is so much more to come.
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#41 "[...] who butters your bread???"Thats an interesting question, I suspect he does though my question is "who wants to know?" ; )
In regard to your other question. "Why can't we have a true winner now?". As for myself, I'm going to give Dereck and Anand the benefit of the doubt.
It seems to me that they realize that NVIDIA attempted to do somthing unique with it's 5000 series being that it does not exactly hold to the Direct X 9.1 spec. For instance it has a 16 bit and 32 bit rendering mode while DX 9.1 requires 24 bit - which ATI does (refer to Halflife 2 and DOOM III reviews). In the sharder area NVIDIA holds FAR more code (micro ops) than ATI - also if you check back to Anand's original post on the ATI and NVIDIA shootout(s) where there is a comparison between AA and AF NVIDIA was a CLEAR winner. I seem to recall a while ago that NVIDIA claimed ATI didn't do TRUE AF so they were therefore CHEATING. Boy did that one come back around with teeth, huh?
What I'm saying is NVIDIA tried to one up ATI by tring to do more, unfortunately it seems they tried to do TOO much and ended up doing SHADY maneuvers like the whole Future Mark mess. They should of instead focused on the spec. DX 9.1 and the Microsoft shader/pixel code path and not tried to pull a GLIDE like 3DFX (excuse the parsed english).
So, hopefully NVIDIA learns from it's mistakes modifies it's silicon to the spec. and gives us all BETTER cards to choose from come March/April.
As far as the authors are concerned, Anand and Derick seem to be attempting JUSTICE (helping the party who needs the most help, and treating all parties equally) - which in this case seems to be NVIDIA. The authors are helping NVIDIA by dropping HEAVY hints like what you stated
" Next year will be the year of DX9 titles, and it will be under the next generation of games that we will finally be able to crown a true DX9 winner. Until then, anyone's guess is fair game." and
" If NVIDIA can continue to extract the kinds of performance gains from unoptimized DX9 code as they have done with the 52.14 drivers (without sacrificing image quality), they will be well on their way to taking the performance crown back from ATI by the time NV40 and R400 drop.".
If NVIDIA takes head of these CONSTRUCTIVE statements then the entire gaming community could benifit - in better prices, higher quality to which the customer usually benifits (AMD vs INTEL sound familiar?).
So, let us be easy and enjoy the night. Time will tell.
Cheers,
aka #37
PS: Dereck please excuse me for leaving out your name before. The article was well written.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Regarding my previous post #44, I wanted to write:...the difference **between AA/AF and noAA/AF** is very noticeable in the game...
Jeff7181 - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Can you say "highly programmable GPU?" I can =)Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Why didn't you guys wait for Catalyst 3.8? It's out tomorrow and is reported to fix many IQ problems in games like NWN. What would a couple of days have hurt, especially since this article is going to be irrelevant after the Cat drivers are released tomorrow?Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Note: the AA/AF and noAA/AF images of Warcraft3 have been mixed up for the NV52.14.It tells a lot about the value of the screenshots that it takes careful inspection to find this error. I have played a lot of War3 recently and the difference is very noticeable in game, even with this GF4.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#18 Its not a problem figuring out the graphs its just weird that he would choose that type of graph excluding FPS.BTW I own a 5900U and a 9700pro.
I don't like people avoiding ps2.0 tests. My 5900 sucks at it. I paid too much for what I got in the 5900. I try to get a good bang for the buck. The 5900 is not.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
...DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
First off... Thanks Pete ;-) ...Secondly, Anand and I both put a great deal of work into this article, and I am very glad to see the responses it has generated.
Many of the image quality issues from part 1 were due to rendering problems that couldn't be captured in a screen shot (like jerkiness in X2 and F1), or a lack of AA. For some of the tests, we just didn't do AA performance benchmarks if one driver or the other didn't do what it was supposed to. There were no apples to anything other than apples tests in this review. The largest stretch was X2 where the screen was jerky and the AA was subpar. But we definitly noted that.
TRAOD isn't a very high quality game, and certainly isn't the only DX9 (with PS2.0) test on the list. Yes, ATI beat NV in that bench. But its also true that ATI won most of the other benchmarks as well.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, sorry BF1942 couldn't make it in, and we'll be bring back a flight sim game as soon as we tweak it out.
J Derek Wilson
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Didn't Gabe Newell complain about screen capture "issues" with the Nvidia 50.xx drivers that show better image quality in screenshots than actually shows up in game?Anand spoke about image quality problems in almost every test in part 1, but i see almost nothing wrong with the screencaps in part 2.
Can you verify this Anand?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
No difference in IQ, huh? Am I the only person to notice an IQ difference between the AA+8xAF pics of Aquamark3?http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
It's funny how Anand and Derek did not comment on this. Maybe they missed it because they based their comparison off of those tiny images. Ah, so that's what the need of full-sized images are for?!