Geforce or ATI ?

[Sunshine1709Str]

hi community,

momentary i´ve a geforce 7800gt (MSI), and i going to buy a geforce again, but i dont know, which videocard is better. Actual i like the geforce 8800GT (512MB VRAM), but i figured out, that this card support PCIe 2.0.
So my question is, now i have to buy a new motherboard which support PCIe 2.0 or can i use my board topical( Gigabyte GA-81915P DUO)?
please help me!

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http://utforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=601602

[[FfFC]_-(MAD)-_]

Nvidia. ATI isnt a good choice now.

[Knazzer]

I use to be an ATI fan for many years, but after getting my 8800 i'm pretty impressed

[Pser]

ATi is both more cost effective and more powerful. 8800gt is the only thing that comes close.

[Cenotaph]

pcie 2.0 is not really worth it, at least atm, dont worry about getting a new mobo, you can use a pcie 2.0 card in a pcie1 mobo, and u won't lose a single fps, tbh.

between nvidia and ati it depends how much money you are willing to spend. Both the 8800GT and the HD3870 are excellent cards and are cheap, the ati being cheaper but losing a bit to the 8800GT. The HD3870 X2 is probably the best card in the market at the moment thou, but buying two 8800GT and put them in SLI mode is better on DX10 applications and only a lil more expensive.

[radziuinblack]

ATi cards are cheaper and more powerfull. nVidia just pay and get game codes/engine to optimize to GF cards. (Meant to be played logo).
Buy 8800GT (Palit best, cheap price, cheap equipment, powerful card) or search for R3870.

Edit:
Cenotaph - 3850X2 is best chose. U can get two 3850X2 for price of 1 and 1/3 of GF8800Ultra

[HeXadecimal]

Price/Performance wise the 8800GT and 3870XT are pretty much on parr with each other.

The 8800GT is a faster card one on one, but is also more expensive.

Personally if I were buying a card in that kind of budget right now i'd go with the 8800GT.


As mentioned above, don't worry about PCI-E 2.0, it is unneeded at the minute and it is backwards compatible with 1.1/1.0a anyway.

[haslo]

Indeed, to make this very clear: A PCIe 2 card will work in a PCIe 1 mainboard, and a PCIe 1 card will work in a PCIe 2 mainboard - both those combinations will gracefully fall back to using PCIe 1, which is easily fast enough for UT3.

[XEDR]

Err...

You're still using a Pentium 4. That will limit performance MORE than a Radeon vs a Geforce will. (I'm totally serious.)


For $200, you can get a much newer, better dual-core CPU + motherboard + 2GB of RAM, and spend the rest on a cheaper midrange card (3850 512MB or 9600GT in March)

[Eugen]

Ati X3870X2 board is higly recommended by me, here are the specs

ATI Radeon HD3870X2 (Dual GPU) 1GB

General GPU SPECS (Each)

 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
 PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface5
 256-bit GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
 Ring Bus Memory Controller
• Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
• Shader Model 4.1
• 32-bit floating point texture filtering
• Indexed cube map arrays
• Independent blend modes per render target
• Pixel coverage sample masking
• Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
• Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
• 320 stream processing units
o Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
o Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
o Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
• 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
• Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
• Shader instruction and constant caches
• Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
• Up to 128 textures per pixel
• Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
• DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
• High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
• Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
• Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
• Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
• Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
• Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
• 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
• Physics processing support
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
• High performance vertex cache
• Programmable tessellation unit
• Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
• Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
• Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
• Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
• Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
• Temporal anti-aliasing
• Gamma correct
• Super AA (ATI Crossfire™ configurations only)
• All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
• 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
• 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
• Bicubic filtering
• sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
• Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
• Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
• Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
• Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
o High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
• Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
o Motion compensation and IDCT
• ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
o Color space conversion
o Chroma subsampling format conversion
o Horizontal and vertical scaling
o Gamma correction
o Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
o Detail enhancement
o Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
o Bad edit correction
• Two independent display controllers
o Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
o Full 30-bit display processing
o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
o Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
o Fast, glitch-free mode switching
o Hardware cursor
• Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
o Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
o Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
• Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
o Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15362
• DisplayPort output support4
o Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
• HDMI output support
o Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10802
o Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
• Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
o Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
o Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
o Underscan and overscan compensation
• MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™
• Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
• Performance-on-Demand
o Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
o Clock and memory speed throttling
o Voltage switching
o Dynamic clock gating
• Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
• Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
• Integrated compositing engine
• High performance dual channel bridge interconnect1

Graphics Memory

• Memory Clock 1800 MHz
• Core Clock 825Mhz
• Shader Clock 1500MHz
• Memory Space 1024MB DDR3
• Memory Interface 512-bits
• 96GB/s Peak Memory Bandwidth

This is the leading card in image quality, technology and performance atm... its very new and it costs 420€

[HeXadecimal]

Seriously, didn't need to post the entire data sheet lol

3870X2 is good (I have one), be warned tho that i'm having trouble with the card being kicked out of Crossfire mode, or dropping to 2d clocks (or something! not quite figured it out yet) after viewing portals.

Hoping the 8.2 drivers fix it next week.


But as XEDR says, if you are on a P4 it really isn't a good option for you as you will be massivly bottlenecked.

On a P4 you'd be fine with a 3850Pro 512MB.

[Làámßø]

lol, yeah, little carried away there. lol

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html

Good Luck!

[XEDR]

Seriously, didn't need to post the entire data sheet lol

3870X2 is good (I have one), be warned tho that i'm having trouble with the card being kicked out of Crossfire mode, or dropping to 2d clocks (or something! not quite figured it out yet) after viewing portals.

Hoping the 8.2 drivers fix it next week.


But as XEDR says, if you are on a P4 it really isn't a good option for you as you will be massivly bottlenecked.

On a P4 you'd be fine with a 3850Pro 512MB.

I still recommend a system upgrade.

AGP/PCIe dual boards normally have the PCIe x16 bus run at x4, which WILL bottleneck the 3850/8800.

Core 2 Duo E2160- $74
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116036

Abit IP35-E- $60 after rebate
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813127031

OCZ Vista Upgrade 2GB DDR2-800- $33 after rebate
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227189

Diamond Viper 3850 Ruby 512MB- $175 after rebate
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814103051

For $340 you get almost a near-high-end PC (not just graphics card) instead!

Compare that with a 8800GT, which should cost you about $240 already.

Hint: In UT III, 3850 vs 8800GT performance is not far. 10% difference in speed, but 35% difference in price

[Sincreator]

Seriously, didn't need to post the entire data sheet lol

3870X2 is good (I have one), be warned tho that i'm having trouble with the card being kicked out of Crossfire mode, or dropping to 2d clocks (or something! not quite figured it out yet) after viewing portals.

Hoping the 8.2 drivers fix it next week.


But as XEDR says, if you are on a P4 it really isn't a good option for you as you will be massivly bottlenecked.

On a P4 you'd be fine with a 3850Pro 512MB.

The very next driver update from ati has alot of crossfire enhancements.(I cant wait) I read in a few reviews that the 8.1 driver will run the card but the 8.2 should release the cards full potential. Im on 2 3870's.(almost exactly like the X2 performance wise.)

[Sincreator]

Heres a little more UP-to-DATE chart to look at. (the chart is on the last page)
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/...february_2008/