I just bought a GTX 280. Feel free to comment on how stupid I am.

kilroy0097 wrote:

I will say however that ATI's Radeon HD4850 costs $199 retail and in Crossfire setup it out performs the GTX 280 in many tests.

So far those are mostly synthetic tests and in real game environments the 280 usually ekes out ahead of the crossfire arrangement.... but then if you look at the tests it's quite clear that the crossfire drivers aren't very well implemented yet - with some results giving no advantage over the single 4850:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/147...

Either way, they're close performance-wise but i wouldn't say that the crossfire 4850 beats the GTX280 in most tests.

$400 vs $650.

Yep... that's a big difference. I wonder on the price of the 4870.... and it's performance in crossfire. Another thing to note is the 4850's high operating temperatures which could be a limiting factor in the initial overclocking of the reference design cards that are out at the moment. Better to wait until the third parties get their acts together and apply better cooling solutions and factory OC as standard.

The 9800 GTX+ is also pretty good - just beating out the 4870 in tests and running around the same temperatures as the GTX280. It's a pretty nice card and the word is that it's going to be around the same price as the 4850.

I love it when the competition heats up... it's good for business and the consumer.

kilroy0097 wrote:

Do I think the performance increase is worth the exorbitant price tag? That is a matter of personal opinion and amount of expendable income.

Oh, I'm more than willing to acknowledge that this purchase was more of an e-penis thing than something that's ever going to get a good price/performance ratio for me. Hence the title of this thread. That said, I'm running exclusively in Vista now, and I prefer setting it and forgetting it with my games, and while it's still mostly just eye candy, I want to just choose the DX10 option in games, put everything on Very High, and not spend half an hour trying to ensure I get a playable framerate. This is especially true with newer highly detailed games like Crysis, Asassin's Creed, etc., where AA gets a big performance hit.

I'm not interested in SLI (or Crossfire), I've had too many friends who had bad experiences with it including the power usage, heat, noise, poor scaling on many titles that aren't AAA, microstuttering, etc. Combine that with the fact that one 280 is probably going to waste on my 1900 X 1200, and SLI is probably being wasted more. And if you go to the EVGA forums, almost everyone in the thread for getting a 280 are 9800GX2 card owners, saying they're glad to be rid of them, even if performance might actually go down for them in the time being.

So yes, $650 is too much to spend, no doubt about it. But even if the 4870 proves to be a good competitor, I won't regret my purchase much (unless of course Nvidia knocks down the price in three weeks because of it, I'll feel a bit of pain then). I've always been a fan of Nvidia over ATI for personal reasons, and with the PhysX support and that astounding video transfering solution coming soon, I have little doubt I won't get enough out of the card to be satisfied.

Duoae wrote:

The 9800 GTX+ is also pretty good - just beating out the 4870 in tests and running around the same temperatures as the GTX280. It's a pretty nice card and the word is that it's going to be around the same price as the 4850.

I love it when the competition heats up... it's good for business and the consumer.

I believe the word on the streets is 229 for the 9800+. It should overclock better as well with its layout and current heat output stock.

boogle wrote:
Duoae wrote:

The 9800 GTX+ is also pretty good - just beating out the 4870 in tests and running around the same temperatures as the GTX280. It's a pretty nice card and the word is that it's going to be around the same price as the 4850.

I love it when the competition heats up... it's good for business and the consumer.

I believe the word on the streets is 229 for the 9800+. It should overclock better as well with its layout and current heat output stock.

I guess the only downside is intel's preference for ATI... what with their on-going bust-up with Nvidia. :/

Duoae wrote:
boogle wrote:
Duoae wrote:

The 9800 GTX+ is also pretty good - just beating out the 4870 in tests and running around the same temperatures as the GTX280. It's a pretty nice card and the word is that it's going to be around the same price as the 4850.

I love it when the competition heats up... it's good for business and the consumer.

I believe the word on the streets is 229 for the 9800+. It should overclock better as well with its layout and current heat output stock.

I guess the only downside is intel's preference for ATI... what with their on-going bust-up with Nvidia. :/

Soon enough the gigantic gorilla will be forced to turn back to the jolly green giant, just wait and see. I don't need sli anyways.

kuddles wrote:

And if you go to the EVGA forums, almost everyone in the thread for getting a 280 are 9800GX2 card owners, saying they're glad to be rid of them, even if performance might actually go down for them in the time being.

Why are they glad to be rid of them?

Fedaykin98 wrote:
kuddles wrote:

And if you go to the EVGA forums, almost everyone in the thread for getting a 280 are 9800GX2 card owners, saying they're glad to be rid of them, even if performance might actually go down for them in the time being.

Why are they glad to be rid of them?

Don't know if all of these apply to the 9800GX2 cards but certainly the heat and noise are a factor:

Kuddles wrote:

I'm not interested in SLI (or Crossfire), I've had too many friends who had bad experiences with it including the power usage, heat, noise, poor scaling on many titles that aren't AAA, microstuttering,

Fedaykin98 wrote:

Why are they glad to be rid of them?

For the reasons mentioned, although a lot of people on tech forums I frequent are saying things like that without much explanation. Regardless, some people may find them good, but I don't care for it.

nsmike wrote:

I just upgraded from a 7900GT to an 8800GT and I'm semi-regretting it. Good luck to you with your purchase, I don't know what you play or how you play it (i.e. DX10 or not) but I found that I probably didn't need to upgrade yet.

I went from a 7600GT to an 8800GT and I LOVE it.

Ok.. so I'd been considering a switch from the 8800GTX anyway since the new Nvidia stuff hit. CoD4 does hit me with a bit of slowdown on occasion in multiplayer at the settings I like because I play at 1920x1080, and I know the newer stuff fixes this.

As it turns out I'll eat a wee bit of crow and say the new ATI 4000 series really is impressive from a price/performance standpoint. The fact that the 4870 outperforms the GTX260 for $100 less is the best part. I'll wait at least long enough to see what Nvidia's response is and then pick my path from there.

If I were going to do it right now though.. I admit I'd go for the 4870 as soon as it releases.

i think they are too much money , you could get 2 9800 gtx's and run them in SLI for the same price pretty much.

Yeah, that 4870 is looking pretty damn sexy. It looks like ATI really hit a home run with the 4000 series.

mordacity wrote:

i think they are too much money , you could get 2 9800 gtx's and run them in SLI for the same price pretty much.

And make yourself a nice space heater for winter all in one!

Podunk wrote:

Yeah, that 4870 is looking pretty damn sexy. It looks like ATI really hit a home run with the 4000 series.

Its possible. The fact is the 98+ preforms in the same range, and I trust Nvidia more.

I had a 1950XT briefly -- it had an Accelero X2 cooler, which was entirely inadequate, and I had to return it -- and I gotta say, those were great drivers. You have to install .NET for the control panel to work (which is weird and annoying), but they run really well. OpenGL's gotten pretty reliable, too, although the Second Life rendering was still a little odd.

I also noticed that the image quality was nicer on the ATI than on the NVidia. I had an unusual setup where I was running both NVidia and ATI, side by side in the same computer at the same time (the Mac Pro, running Server2K3), and the ATI image was noticeably better. It was definitely sharper, and had improved color. I fiddled with adjustments for a long time on the NVidia card, and was never able to get it to look quite as nice. It wasn't just saturation, either, because I fooled with that a lot... the ATI color just looked nicer, and I never did figure out why. The 8800GTS, though, had so much more muscle that I kept that instead of getting a replacement for the 1950.

I didn't realize you could have real image quality differences over DVI, but it was definitely better on ATI. Go figure.

I'm interested in the 4870... I'd be particularly intrigued if they have a Mac firmware version. They've just shipped a 3870 for the Mac, but I want the newest and bestest.

boogle wrote:
Podunk wrote:

Yeah, that 4870 is looking pretty damn sexy. It looks like ATI really hit a home run with the 4000 series.

Its possible. The fact is the 98+ preforms in the same range, and I trust Nvidia more.

I'm really finding it difficult to understand the 4870's performance. In some games it's beating out GTX280s and in others its performance is close to the 9800 GTX+. I'm guessing that drivers are going to improve the performance of the 4870. However, it's unlikely that the 9800+ will be improved by drivers because it's a 'known quantity' already improved by drivers since release of the 9800.

Duoae wrote:
boogle wrote:
Podunk wrote:

Yeah, that 4870 is looking pretty damn sexy. It looks like ATI really hit a home run with the 4000 series.

Its possible. The fact is the 98+ preforms in the same range, and I trust Nvidia more.

I'm really finding it difficult to understand the 4870's performance. In some games it's beating out GTX280s and in others its performance is close to the 9800 GTX+. I'm guessing that drivers are going to improve the performance of the 4870. However, it's unlikely that the 9800+ will be improved by drivers because it's a 'known quantity' already improved by drivers since release of the 9800.

Same could be said about the 280s thought. Really this is a great example of a wait and see situation. I personally hate ATI after having driver issues with them with every ATI card I have ever touched.

I've had a lot more trouble with recent NVidia drivers than with ATI stuff. They've really improved in that area.

My biggest concern is how ATI and Nvidia seem to be heading in completely different directions, architecture-wise, whether it be physics, memory, shaders, DX10.1, etc. Things have been pretty smooth lately so I'ld hate for things to return to the days where some games run fantastically on one GPU and awfully on another.

boogle wrote:

Same could be said about the 280s thought. Really this is a great example of a wait and see situation. I personally hate ATI after having driver issues with them with every ATI card I have ever touched.

I meant it in connection with the part where it was mentioned that the 9800+ was on par with the 4870 (even though the graphs i've seen say it performs worse). I doubt the 4870 will ever catch the GTX280 more than it already has done.

kuddles wrote:

My biggest concern is how ATI and Nvidia seem to be heading in completely different directions, architecture-wise, whether it be physics, memory, shaders, DX10.1, etc. Things have been pretty smooth lately so I'ld hate for things to return to the days where some games run fantastically on one GPU and awfully on another.

That is a potentially a big problem. There's one of two ways it can go, IMO.

1) The technology shifts with physics - developers for the PC of big games (diminishing as they are) find it more convenient to have a unified platform of DX 10 and physics all on one card with well-documented hardware designs. They shift to NVidia because of this and the TWIMTBP programme. ATI is forced to keep pushing to get up to the big leagues but developers find it difficult to programme for two sets of graphics architectures and two sets of physics GPGPU architectures efficiently and cheaply. They are pushed down towards the low-mid-end of the graphics kingdom and are eventually bought from AMD by Intel.

2) ATI show strong growth from their cheap, high-performance cards and Nvidia follows this route. Next on the chopping block after smaller, cheaper cards - efficiency, heat and electrical leakage improvements. Intel joins in but is relegated to the corporate mass-market.

Either way, i think we need a unified physics platform a GL variant or something - which i thought PhysX was going to be before Nvidia gobbled them up :/

[Edit]
Am i really lucky or something? Pretty much every component i've ever had has been great. Including graphics cards:

Geforce 2 MX 32 MB
Geforce 4600 128 MB
Radeon 9800 pro 128 MB
Geforce 6800 LE 256 MB
Radeon X1950 pro

None have given me any trouble physically or driver-wise...

Heh, I've been similarly lucky Duoae:

ATI Rage 128 - loved it, it lasted me a while
Geforce 2 MX - great solid card at the time
Geforce 4 ti 4400 - I was going to get a 4200 and OC it, but the 4400 I ended up with had more RAM and was a good bang for the buck
Geforce 6800 GT - awesome, solid card. Only replaced it due to a forced system replacement, and the replacement didn't support AGP, just PCI-X
Geforce 7600 GT - this was the best price/performance ratio I could get when I had to snag a PCI-X card for the replacement system
Geforce 8800 GT - I've loved the 7600 for two years, great card that held up pretty well. But it's a point now where I needed a nice step up, and the 8800 GT 512 MB hit the sweet spot. Absolutely love it, and will probably be good for another two years before I upgrade again (or, when the 8800's get cheap enough, might go the SLI route with a second one).

Me too. I've run:

Voodoo 3 2000
Radeon 9600 Pro
Radeon 9800 Pro
Radeon X800XL
GeForce 7800GT
GeForce 8800GTS

All with no driver-related issues. Although the fans on both the 9800 Pro and X800XL did eventually die. And I did accidentally chip the GPU on the 9800 Pro trying to remove the dead fan, effectively destroying the entire card.

But that's not really ATI's fault.

Nvidia 5200
Nvidia 6800
Nvidia 8800GTS 640mb
My stack is puny.

Oooh, a videocard listing?

I've had quite the videocard history, including more than one card from two or three generations. The 7 series in particular dug into my wallet in a big way.
Diamond Voodoo 2 Banshee
Voodoo 3 2000
Geforce 2MX
Geforce 2 GTS
Geforce 4 Ti4200
Geforce 4 MX
Geforce FX5900
Geforce 6800GT
Geforce 7800GT (X2)
Geforce 7900GS
Geforce 7900GTO (X2)
Geforce 8800GTX

Note the solid lack of any ATI product. I've had two experiences with ATI videocards, both of which involved unsuccessfully trying to help acquaintances fix horribly broken video drivers. One was a 9800, the other was some earlier generation. The first experience was, I believe, the one that convinced me to stick with the Geforce line and buy my first Geforce 4 series card. Couldn't tell you what the ATI card was though. The second just convinced me to stick with the camp I'd been in even longer if possible. I can count the number of big problems I've had with my cards on the fingers of one hand, and most of them were pretty easily fixable with some internet searching.

Out of the list I still actually have the GF4MX, the FX5900, the 7900GS, and of course the 8800. The rest have all disappeared one way or another.

Malor wrote:

God, I have owned so, so many graphics cards. I'm sure I'll miss some here:

The list was supposed to be for cards that we've had no problems with

I'd count my pre-Geforce 2 cards but i had so many problems with them and games back on the old Pentium 2.

God, I have owned so, so many graphics cards. I'm sure I'll miss some here:

Matrox Millennium 1
Matrox Millennium 2 (god these were great cards for the time)
A super-version (Canopus?) 4MB Voodoo 1
A 'windows accelerator' card that played Warbirds well, I think with a second-gen S3 chip;
Diamond TNT1
Creative TNT2
GeForce 1
GeForce 3 (I'm pretty sure I skipped over 2)
Radeon 9700 (fast, but crappy drivers, and a horrible RAMDAC; all their other cards would drive high resolution at high refresh rates, but their super-expensive card WOULD NOT, and I swore off ATI for years because of this)
Couple more cards that I can't remember clearly;
EVGA 6800GT;
NVidia 7300 via the Mac Pro;
ATI x1900 via the Mac Pro, blew up from a bad Accelero X1 cooler I installed. This is where I discovered that ATI wasn't so bad anymore.
ATI x1950 with a factory-installed Accelero X1 that blew up in exactly the same way; those Accelero coolers were entirely inadequate.
EVGA 8800GTS, first gen, stock cooling.
This was where I had the chance to compare the x1950 with the 8800GTS, head to head; I was very surprised by how much nicer the 1950's image was on my 2405FPW.

I have an 8800GT in the Mac now, but I haven't used it in Windows, so I don't think of it in quite the same way.

Thank you, Malor - I've been wondering where all the Voodoo 1 cards were!

"Single card for video and physics? In my day we had separate cards for basic video and 3D, they had to be hooked up with a serpentine passthrough cable OUTSIDE of our computers, uphill in the snow both ways, and we LIKED it!"

HAHA!!

I still remember the satisfying "Click" of my Orchid Righteous 3D's solenoid (Voodoo 1 card) when it snapped into 3D mode.

I'm pretty sure I still have it in a box somewhere.

For you youngsters: originally, 3D cards were 3D only. You ran the output from your existing video card to the IN port of the Voodoo, and then went from that secondary out port to the monitor. In regular 2D, the 3D card just passed the signal through. When you started a 3D game, it shut off the 2D signal, and took over the display entirely.

They didn't run at high resolution, and were terribly slow by modern standards, but they were absolute revelations at the time. 3D games before that tended to be choppy and slow. You could play them, but the thought of fast action in 3D was pretty much laughable. The Voodoo changed that entirely, starting a long string of changes that's moving toward 2D becoming a special case of the ubiquitous 3D display.

I remember seeing the MechWarrior 2 demo, which is still pretty neat, and saying to my friends, "You know, someday, we'll be able to play games that look that good in real time." Everyone agreed; it was obviously true, and we couldn't wait. Even so, I think we all underestimated just how good things would get. The small improvements from game to game to game have sure added up.

For me and my peeps, it was all about GLQuake - which looks pretty assy now, but at the time, my god...I distinctly remember driving down the highway on a nice day thinking, "Man, reality looks almost as good as GLQuake."