2900XT can't take the top spot

[momoceio]

Looks like after many delays and promises of a kick butt video card...AMD has dropped the ball. It has trouble keeping up with the 8800GTS let alone the 8800GTX, it's even beat by the x1950xtx on a few tests.

 

http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/431/1/

[powsmowl]

the XT was only supposed to deal with the GTS..the XTX might even beat the Ultras...and i think once the drivers are sorted out the 2900 will leave atleast the x1950XTX in the dust and probably offer the same performance as a GTS

[momoceio]

Well in mosts of those tests the 8800GTS spanked the 2900 so I it's more of a driver limitation and not hardware. We'll see what the XTX does when it's released.

[miamisc2]

techreport.com has a good review with some drivers that were sent to them last minute and the xt edges out the gts just about everywhere and even comes close to the gtx in some games. they are happy about some of the new custom filtering modes, although nvidia could come out with the same. vista crossfire scalability is also excellent. on the down side, i think the card should cost $350 to really make it competitive (which i hear it will be), and it's also 6 months late, uses a ton of power, and runs hot. i'm really curious to see what overclocking tests are going to show. hopefully when this gpu is brought down to the 65nm process, there will be improvements across the field. this release definetly won't give ati any bragging rights, but at least they're getting there.

[Guest SPQQKY]

Odd how techreports review is so much different than the [H] review with the same drivers.........:confused:

[Angry_Games]

i think with some mature drivers, real DX10 apps, you'll see that the 2900's strengths lie within doing extremely high res rendering.

 

The price includes 3 games that are going to be top sellers (Team Fortress alone is worth the price of a single game if you played it even 1/10th as much as I used to, and I was considered a total noob for years because I didn't have 16 hours a day to play), HDCP compliance + HDMI out (that does audio as well!), and already-excellent 3d performance.

 

I'd say that within a couple weeks they'll be $350-ish and have more mature drivers, which should put them slightly above the 8800GTS 320MB cards (and consider you don't get those 3 games + HDMI+audio.

 

Looking at NVidia's drivers for the 8800 series in XP as well as Vista, I'm not too impressed. However the 8800 is such a great gpu that even with kinda crappy drivers it still is the best card on the market by far and if you can't play any game at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/16xAF and everything maxed...well I don't know what to say lol.

 

The driver release 'wars' go back and forth between ATI and Nvidia, just like the performance 'wars' do (as well as between AMD and Intel etc etc). For a while ATI was like magic with Radeon drivers and Nvidia was so-so, and then during the GF7 series Nvidia banged out driver after driver and SLI became the THING to have for all-out performance, as it worked in real games, unlike the Crossfire...disappointment...

 

Maybe ATI has something in secret they are perfecting and putting this out so we'll all stfu about WHERE THE HELL IS ATI?? lol. Maybe this is their wad and they've blown it but it wasn't all that great like we expected it to be. Maybe the 700 million transistor gpu is truly a supermonster but is sorta stupid because the drivers aren't utilizing it as well as it could (same thing seems to be happening with the 8800 gpu drivers).

 

Maybe it is because it is optimized for DX10, and until we start seeing pure DX10 apps - which we won't for years most likely because game devs need to make money, and the overwhelming majority of PC gamers still have, and will have, Windows XP, and MS's great wisdom declared that DX10 won't be ported down to XP, so game devs will have to write for LCD *Lowest Common Denominator* which means DX9, not DX10, until such a time DX10 penetration is at least 60%, which could be 3-5 years, so this, like dual core cpu's, is maybe actually a case of hardware ready before the software's time...

 

Maybe we consumers are finally starting to expect TOO MUCH because of all the previous hype as well as actual performance gains (which are never as good as the hype, but still a good chunk better than the previous "best" hardware was capable of).

 

Maybe this is the Mfgs' fault for how aggressive their marketing is as to how it creates consumer expectations.

 

Or maybe it is just simply simple...the 2900 gpu is great, but still not as good as the Nvidia. Maybe this round still goes to Nvidia, and if so, then I'm sure ATI or AMD or whatever they call themselves now will take it to heart, just like they have for cpu's when Intel's Core2 trounced the AMD for cpu-specific tasks.

 

Sometimes you got to concede a round or two in a row because your bigger plan is working on something that will stay ahead of the competition's next THREE releases (like AMD did to take the crown with the A64, and now the Core2 and Quad stuff will be tops for two or three generations of AMD chips).

 

If I remember correctly, the 8800 cards didn't really fair all that well for the first couple of weeks, often coming in behind a couple of less-expensive SLI cards or a hefty single X1950XTX etc. A few drivers later, the 8800 seemed godlike.

 

DX10 is new to everyone. MS might decree it to be the next thing and force hardware mfg's to move to it, but that's MS's blindness (purposeful blindness too you have to admit) as they have no interest in the hundreds of millions of PC users that have Windows XP and DX9...no, they aren't making much money at all from Windows XP anymore, but they got to make that money on Windows Vista. The hope that because you can only play DX10 games on Vista means you'll rush right out and buy it is so much folly that I can't believe Microsoft even dreamed of trying it on consumers...ESPECIALLY not with the internet's evolution as a very open, very vocal galaxy of message boards and opinion sites.

 

Look how violently we react to certain things in our own little bubble of computer games or computer hardware (or both combined). The outrage and the 'up-in-arms' torches and pitchforks showing up at my DFI-Street forum door sometimes was a real eye opening experience, and when you apply the wisdom that if it was like that for a VERY TINY niche company's users like DFI's, you can estimate the level of radioactive fallout when say...Intel or AMD or...ATI gpu's...a very NOT niche piece of hardware that affects...everyone (not just 30,000 of us at this forum, but 300,000,000+ around the world).

 

And we've seen it happen. Nvidia's NF590 and AMD's AM2 and Intel's Presler Pentium D and Crossfire and at first SLI, etc...all sorts of opinions and outrage and disappointment based upon sometimes nothing more than a press release, often times on "pre-production" hardware (ie: beta stuff).

 

I'm of the mind that what you guys and I are is caught in the middle. Caught in the middle of MS's need to sell this new OS and forget about XP, which forces the hardware manufacturers to build new hardware that is optimized for an OS that has almost zero penetration and has zero software built natively for it, and still is so horribly unoptimized itself as to not even have stable drivers for a lot of COMMON hardware (like printers and All-In-One office stuff, etc).

 

Yet 95% or more of us still have XP because we have software that we MUST be able to use, or we have hardware that still doesn't work in Vista properly, or Vista offers a grand total of zero reasons to migrate to it since nothing works better in Vista, or a combination of any or all.

 

And guess what, we got XP maxed out for performance, as do game developers. DX9 hardware is maxed out for performance too since DX9 has been around for years but MORE IMPORTANTLY DX...3 all the way up to 9 was upgraded in succession. Sure the OS changed from 95 to 98 to ME to XP and NT to 2000, but as long as MS was supporting Windows 95, DirectX would be able to be upgraded...as long as Windows 98 and NT and 2000 etc are supported, they are able to get DirectX updates. Something that apparently Microsoft screwed up going from 9 to 10 and forgot how to make DX10 work within Windows XP.

 

Well friends, that leaves us with hardware that has zero software that is optimized for it. Even the DX10 demos can't be considered optimized because DX10 is so new, drivers are still too immature...not to mention the Vista OS itself is, let's just say, less than worthy of being on anything but a test machine.

 

Yet we have to fall back on the software that we are familiar with and recognize, which is all Dx9 gaming and benchmarks. As I've pointed out probably too many times, therein lies the problem.

 

Some of you might take this as an anti-Vista rant, and you'd be correct in your own way, as I still believe Vista is nonsense, but this is more just a general rant that Microsoft has mostly just punished us, the guys who made computing cool, gaming relevant, and pretty much instigated the arms race between tech companies like Intel vs AMD, ATI vs Nvidia (and 3dfx before it!), yadda yadda yadda. For that, I think we are getting punished in some executive's wet dream that we'll just buy anything because GAMES ARE COOL! (as well as PEOPLE ARE STUPID since that whole Vista user control security thing is build for the LCD linked above, and I didn't realize it but people are STILL so damn stupid as to just click anything and everything without any thought to consequence, and they've continually been 'dumbed-down' by the industry by providing them anti-virus and firewalls and such, which isn't bad, but those things are marketed to be 'one-suite' and 'fully automated' etc meaning you can just install it and never have to learn WHY you shouldn't go to certain sites or open certain emails, you just expect your security software to do all that nonsense for you, you ain't got time for all that, you got free porno waiting for you somewhere on the web).

 

I'm not really pleased with it. Maybe I dig conspiracy stuff so my brain is making it out to be more than it is. Who knows. I don't blame ATI nor Nvidia as much as most do, because I'm pretty sure I understand it is not really their fault. Sure they need to step up and write some drivers that will be stable and solid performers, but it's hard to paint the car and put the sales sticker on it when the car is still on the assembly line at the design studio.

 

I certainly believe that ATI will make good of their drivers and the 2900 will be stellar. Keep in mind they don't just imagine one day putting 700 million transistors on a chip and soldering it to a pcb with 512MB RAM and putting it on the shelf.

 

Oh no sir. They use supercomputers (or super-clusters would probably be more accurate) to do theoretical design of microchips. They use computers that are so powerful in calculation strength that they can 'mock' up gpu (or cpu, memory, etc) design in a program on these supercomputers and then have it execute code as if it were a real, solid piece of hardware. Those of you familiar with "Virtualization" know exactly what I'm talking about. You don't just try to fabricate new chips, that would be an incredible waste and you'd never get there. You have to design these things in 'virtual' space first and test the design out with current and common software and hardware to make sure they could execute the design code (x86 in our case) and get an idea of performance, as well as failures, problems, whatever.

 

Maybe (god I love the maybe game sometimes, but it's important to be objective and try to think your way around something from as many angles as you can, even if you detest some of the other angles but others aren't and would view it from that angle) they mocked up the 2900 gpu and ganked in some Microsoft DX10 code and optimized the design for that while assuring DX9 and earlier compatibility. Maybe in their little supercomputer simulation, the 2900 blew the doors off anything prior they'd seen in a pure DX10 environment, but there is sometimes a HUGE difference in those design simulations (closed environments, like a very small beta test group with very limited hardware) and writing drivers that are compatible with all types of DX9 and DX10 hardware configs (as we have a zillion different combinations of hardware out here in the wild).

 

Who knows. Best not jump to too many conclusions or write them off just yet. Best just to be objective and try to think of the bigger picture. We'll just have to wait and see. Hopefully that bit about Dell saying they will continue to offer Windows XP will cause others to follow and MS will have to rethink their DX10 strategy being Vista only, otherwise they will have to get off their asses and make Vista properly stable and compatible and give their hardware manufacturer partners as much help as possible getting the drivers done for them. I certainly have kept a good and large chunk of users from getting Vista for all the right reasons (as once I feel Vista is worthy, you can be assured that I will ram it down your throats as hard as often as possible like I always do when I thoroughly enjoy something and feel it is worthy of everyone's attention).

 

Ah well, for now, my 8800GTS 320MB is just proper, and good price too (mine was free but you know what i mean). So I'll be waiting until the 2900's are worthy.

[Angry_Games]

lol ps, someone on my MSN list msg'd me while I was playing Xbox360 (yeah, you can sign in on MSN now while on the 360), and gave me a link to Dell, and I got an order in before it was too late, but I doubt they'll honor it...

 

 Order Detail


Item Description 	Unit Price 		Quantity 	Total Price 	
Viper 2900XT ATI Radeon 512 MB GDDR3 PCI-E Graphics Card 	$19.98 	1 	$19.98
Subtotal: 	$19.98
Shipping and Handling: 	$4.99
Tax Total: 	$1.20
Total: 	$26.17

[Branjo]

lol ps, someone on my MSN list msg'd me while I was playing Xbox360 (yeah, you can sign in on MSN now while on the 360), and gave me a link to Dell, and I got an order in before it was too late, but I doubt they'll honor it...

 

 Order Detail


Item Description	 Unit Price		 Quantity	 Total Price	 
Viper 2900XT ATI Radeon 512 MB GDDR3 PCI-E Graphics Card	 $19.98	 1	 $19.98
Subtotal:	 $19.98
Shipping and Handling:	 $4.99
Tax Total:	 $1.20
Total:	 $26.17

 

I would Lmao if you got it dude, fingers crossed for ya.

[GutBuster]

lol ps, someone on my MSN list msg'd me while I was playing Xbox360 (yeah, you can sign in on MSN now while on the 360), and gave me a link to Dell, and I got an order in before it was too late, but I doubt they'll honor it...

 

 Order Detail





Item Description 	Unit Price 		Quantity 	Total Price 	

Viper 2900XT ATI Radeon 512 MB GDDR3 PCI-E Graphics Card 	$19.98 	1 	$19.98

Subtotal: 	$19.98

Shipping and Handling: 	$4.99

Tax Total: 	$1.20

Total: 	$26.17

 

Why the hell did you only get 1?!?!?!

[Chump]

Why the hell did you only get 1?!?!?!

 

 

Asif kicking Dell in the then wasent enough he he.

[Booster]

Haha Dell removed it around the time you posted about it. That would kick butt if you got one. I still want to get one but I've started to think about waiting till they shrink the core since I didn't think about my PSU being able to support it.

[Guest SPQQKY]

I don't think hopes of better drivers are gonna save this GPU. Didn't ATi already say they dumped the 2900XTX because "there's no need for it, because two 2900XT in crossfire is more than enought GPU power"? That sounds like "if we release this card, we're doomed" or "wowsers....did we screw the pooch on this one".

If not, I don't see how [H] could make that statement as a quote from ATi....dunno, maybe I read it wrong.

 

Is ATI going to completely drop out of the high-end segment? If you ask anyone at ATI they will tell you that they actually haven’t because you can CrossFire two of these video cards to achieve higher performance. But do you really want two of these high wattage hot running video cards in your system? There are gamers that actually prefer just using one video card and have not bought into the dual GPU solutions. We asked ATI why there is no higher-end version and they pretty much told us that no one would buy it when you take the CrossFire into consideration. Well, we know that is simply false because there are people that buy $499 and $599 single video cards, case in point the GeForce 8800 GTX. ATI’s answers were a painful copout to not being able to get the job done and it was obvious.

 

 

I have a strong suspicion that the R700 will be able to compete in the high-end. The R600’s main problem is that the GPU is inefficient and draws so much power that they have simply hit a wall as to how fast they can make the Radeon HD 2900 XT. There is simply no way they can make it faster with the current ASIC design. There will be a 1 GB version in the future utilizing GDDR4, but from what we hear it will most likely not bring much of a core or memory clock speed increase, it will simply be a 1 GB version of the HD 2900 XT. GDDR4 should help some, with the power utilization, but even with that it appears the 2900 XT is simply running into a big brick wall.