Ati or N-Vidia Graphic Card

[neo]

I am thinking of buying a graphic card. I am really confused which one to buy.

Ati's Radeon 9700 Pro 128Mb
OR
N-Vidia GeForce FX 128Mb.

 

[chastity]

Well based on the choices you posted the question is how soon do you want a new graphics/video card? That said at the moment the ATi card is the king of the hill but that could change in the blink of an eye but if you want the best at the present time go ATi if can wait then maybe go Nvidia.

 

[Zedric]

GeForce FX isn't out yet (is it?). But it seems it'll whoop some a$$ when it does come out.

 

[neo]

N-vidia will be out in 3rd week of feb '03 or 1st week of march '03
I am willing to wait for it, As much as I know about Ge-Force FX It's going to Kick A** of Ati radeon 9700 Pro. I like ati but I am having some problem with the drivers for radeon 8500le. And I was waiting for a new card for a long time. As for the price first n-vidia might sell for aroung $499 or so but it's going to drop to $369.

 

[FoSsiL]

if i were you i go for the cheaper one, the ati. the performance isnt that big but the price range is.

 

[Sazar]

all answered already really... when do you want the card/how much are you willing to spend/what are you going to do with the card...

GF FX won't be out for a while... its SPECS outperform everything else.. but at the moment it is all on paper...

the 9700pro is excellent and is present now... however may not meet the potential standards of the GF FX... there is a r300 refresh expected next quarter... that should compete well with the GF FX...

so as you see you have many choices... also give the Xabre 600.. the new card from SiS a decko.... seems decent enough...

if you need top of the line NOW... get the 9700pro... else wait for the new stuff from ATi and nvidia next year...

 

[Zedric]

Found a benchmark on Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/business/02q4/021120/comdex_day_2-01.html
No comparison with 9700pro but it's a pointer.

 

[JSC2k03]

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro rule

If I were you, I would buy ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and not buy Nvidia GeForce FX .... because it will probably go bad after a month or year so on. Everytime Nvidia comes out with new graphic card...ATI always answer back with a powerful one. By looking at the pics of Nvidia, its almost look the same as the Radeon, so to me I don't see any difference in the FX and the 9700 Pro..Beside if u have the 9700 Pro, your can trade it in for a cheaper price the the new ATI graphic card comes out.

 

[Jz1397-5]

if you want it right now, get the 9700 pro, you can get it for 320 on newegg. Nvidia will come out, but their prices will be high at the start to you will have to wait a little longer for them to come out. if you do not care on what company and you want something fast and powerful now, 9700 is the way to go

 

[Joe]

I depends on when you want it(just as everyone has said). From what I have heard is that they will be available in limited quantities in january. As of now the ATI 9700pro is the best. When the GeForce FX comes out it will the best. If I had the money to buy a card I would wait for the FX, or NV35(FX2?) depending on when it comes out in relation to the release date of DOOM 3. I am not sure about the next ATI card. If it's just a speed bump then no, if more features, etc. are added to make it more competitive then I would take a look at it.

Hope you will be happy with your choice.
Joe

 

[Sazar]

Posted by Zedric
Found a benchmark on Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/business/02q4/021120/comdex_day_2-01.html
No comparison with 9700pro but it's a pointer.

I disagree Zedric... those benches other than perhaps the 4600's scores is nothing but paper... no one has independently conducted any of the tests and verified them...

on the other hand it is very possible that the performance attributed to the GF FX by the article is accurate.. but untill the card debuts (in february mainstream) it is not prudent to say those figures are what we should go by...

if you want to quote figures released by nvidia.. here is their competitions take on the product just released

ATI’s take on GeForce FX

The focus of our conversation with ATI was dealing with the misconceptions brought about by NVIDIA during the GeForce FX launch. ATI essentially feels that the RADEON 9700 is a more balanced solution than GeForce FX, which doesn’t have the bandwidth to perform many of the operations it’s boasting at an acceptable frame rate.

For instance, NVIDIA is proud to claim that GeForce FX boasts pixel and vertex shaders that go beyond DirectX 9.0’s specs, yet a 400-500MHz chip with 8 pixel pipelines running very long shaders would spend all of its time in geometry, bringing frame rate to a crawl. ATI feels that with RADEON 9700’s multi-pass capability, having native support for thousands of shaders is useless, as the RADEON 9700 can loopback to perform those operations. ATI ran a demonstration of a space fighter that was rendered using this technique.

As far as NVIDIA’s bandwidth claims of GeForce FX’s 48GB/sec memory bandwidth, ATI states that the color compression in their HYPERZ III technology performs the same thing today, and with all of the techniques they use in RADEON 9700, they could claim bandwidth of nearly100GB/sec, but if they did so no one would believe them, hence they’ve stood with offering just shy of 20GB/sec of bandwidth.

One other clarification is in regards to DDR2 memory support. Late last week rumors were floating around that ATI’s DDR2 demonstration wasn’t actually running as DDR2 memory. ATI reiterated that the RADEON 9700 memory controller does indeed support DDR2 and that was the memory type used in the demonstration board.

source : FiringSquad

basically what I am saying is that nvidia and ati both have very decent competing products NOW and through february... and at varying price ranges... you can purchase those products now and newer products will be introduced this month (the xabre 600/ nvidia ti4600 with 8x agp supprt - called ti4800) and next month (with the 9500/9500pro/9700 radeon cards)... all in different price ranges..

its a good time to be a consumer..

now getting back to the GF FX.. the card is claiming a large perfromance delta over the 9700pro and looking at the hardware it is highly likely that the card should at LEAST be 15%-25% faster... based on nvidia documents... hoefully the hammer and the new gen pentium processors and the new nforce2/granite bay mobo's will reduce the bottlenecks that todays video cards suffer in current hardware... most of todays video cards (from the gf4 ti series and the older radeon cards, the 8500's series) are still somewhat bottlenecked by todays hardware...

I fully do recommend going future proof and getting products that support dx9 though..

 

[chastity]

Well as to which card is better only time will tell. Now since you said your having trouble with drivers for an ATi card then I might wait till the GeForce FX hits the market since everybody says Nvidia driver support is very good. The final choice is yours to make Neo but I would do as much research on both cards before I make a decision.

 

[Galidon]

My $.02.

ATI Radeon 9700 pro. List US$399, web price around US$350ish, available now, best numbers in tests.

nVidia GeForce FX 5800 ultra. Estimated List US$599, unknown web price, available approx Feb 2003(?), and boasts 30-40% better performance than the ATI.

I guess it boils down to if you want to shell out US$600 for a video card in a few months for the biggest card out there, or settle for the beat that ther is currently now. Seems every 6-9 months each company is one upping the other.

You can play favorite brand game or the latest tech game. All personal preference when you get right down to it. :shrug:

Either would be a good choice.

 

[Sazar]

if you have any problems with ati video cards.. a very good tech support site for it is www.rage3d.com most problems you face can be solved by the information provided there..

latest information on GF FX does not look good for those waiting..

Merrill Lynch believes that board integration will delay sales of NV30 products until April quarter. This could mean the April financial quarter which is Feb, March, April for NVIDIA. Whether this refers to retail or bundled system sales is not clear. NVIDIA is sticking to their Jan/Feb story. I am also curious to know what kind of 'performance compromises' were necessary.

From the article:

"As expected, NVDIA has chosen not to use low-k dielectric on the NV-30, a decision which involves some performance compromises but also lowers the risk of any manufacturing miscues. With the part now qualified, waiting on system integrators to finish boards is the issue – that clearly is not going to happen until the April quarter."

full artice here... Cnet.com news

now per nvidia there will be a few cards marked @ premium being offered over the christmas break... more info will come along as it is provided... other than that... everything else is speculation.. if you want a 2nd tier next-gen card... wait for a few months m8... your video card can play anything that is out there now... if there are driver problems... they can be solved...

check out the forums I listed above or else post your problems in another thread with a proper heading and you will get help..

 

[Burpster]

i wouldnt buy anything now...wait til after the Xmas rush

 

[neo]

I decided to wait for FX to come out and see the spec and bM and then buy. I will mostly go for ATI since I did't have any problems with the agp card I bought (Rage fury Pro, TVwonder VE).

 

[Winter]

Just get a GeForce 4Ti... as long as you have a fast processor, you won't need more than that for awhile... game companies aren't going to make games that 90% of the people can't play...

 

[Jz1397-5]

Originally posted by Winter
Just get a GeForce 4Ti... as long as you have a fast processor, you won't need more than that for awhile... game companies aren't going to make games that 90% of the people can't play...

but i think he wants the best out there. also with the fastest out there the detail settings can be turned up high in the most recent games, so it does have some payoff

 

[Sazar]

Originally posted by Jz1397-4
but i think he wants the best out there. also with the fastest out there the detail settings can be turned up high in the most recent games, so it does have some payoff

yup would make a lot better sense to get something with the advanced shader instruction sets the dx9 cards offer...

if you have no idea what I am talking about check out some of the ati demo's dx9

halo for the pc is supposed to incorporate some dx9 instructions as is dx2 from eidos...

doom III is strictly a dx8 game far as I know therefore I doubt people with cards now should have a problem running that particular product...

per the current release schedule :

for nvidia the nv30/31/34 components SHOULD be released over the upcoming month or two..

for ati the r350 and r400 components as well as rv versions will be released ... r350 will be released depending on the performance delta that the gf FX will have over the r300 core based 9700pro...

please do not take this as saying nv31 and nv34 are better than teh nv30... they are basically marketed for the lower end gaming market and for laptops (basically cheaper to produce than the 10 layer pcb of the gf FX)

I would also like to comment on what galidon stated... a 40-50% delta over and above that of the 9700pro...

per the design of the gf FX if you have seen the architecture and the technology they are using it seems extremely unlikely that the gf FX will actually be able to scale THAT high... gddr II has limitations (as does ddr) and it cannot scale much above 500mhz... as of now it should scale to around 550mhz tops... but technologies/yields do improve and the card may be able to go beyond...

a deta of around 15-25% should be what nvidia is aiming for but no hard info has come out on the web... with the clock speeds that nvidia is aiming for it is highly unlikely that their gf FX will do a parhelia though...

NOTE : (nvidia's gun metal demo is NOT dx9)

 

[zoey]

Re: ATI Radeon 9700 Pro rule

Originally posted by JSC2k03
If I were you, I would buy ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and not buy Nvidia GeForce FX .... because it will probably go bad after a month or year so on. Everytime Nvidia comes out with new graphic card...ATI always answer back with a powerful one. By looking at the pics of Nvidia, its almost look the same as the Radeon, so to me I don't see any difference in the FX and the 9700 Pro..Beside if u have the 9700 Pro, your can trade it in for a cheaper price the the new ATI graphic card comes out.

1. What do you mean go bad? Break, not true, I have been using them for about 6yrs no probs.

2. well, ATI will answer back with a better card, and then Nvidia will answer back with a better card, I't a cycle, just like CPU's. So you can wait forever for the best card. Just think in 3 years we will be saying all these cards are crap! these are just my thoughts.