Confused???

B

brasscorpion

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 21, 2006
Messages
95
I don't get it???

Why doesn't the ATI 2900XT perform as well as the 8800GTX??? I read the review from TOM's Hardware and it looks like the 2900XT has all kinds of new bells and whistles for the future of gaming. This card seems like a good deal better than nVidia's, especially the part about including a Tesselator (spelling).

Also about 5-6 weeks ago, I heard everyone bashing the 8600GTS when it came out. The main gripe and complaint was "it's 128Bit". Thus it is crippled with Low bandwidth at 32Ghz/sec.

So why don't I hear good things about the 2900XT when it has 105Ghz/sec of bandwidth and the 8800GTX only has 86Ghz/sec. So if the 2900XT performs worse...does bandwidth matter or not??? Wouldn't this bebunk the complaints about the 8600GTS. You can't have it both ways. On one card people claim it is a really important factor but then on another card they don't say "WOW the 2900XT has killer bandwidth".

So has anyone really found out or has anyone really pinpointed why the 2900XT dosn't outperform the 8800GTX? I read the reviews and seen the results but after that...nothing...silence. No one has tackled the issue of why the bad results.

I am about 6 weeks away from purchasing a new card for my system. I am just waiting for the release of the 2600XT to see where ATI sits among the Mainstream cards. I am predicting the 2600XT will be the card that sits between the 8600GTS and the 8800GTS. I hope!!

Brass
 
Why doesn't the ATI 2900XT perform as well as the 8800GTX??? I read the review from TOM's Hardware and it looks like the 2900XT has all kinds of new bells and whistles for the future of gaming.
Click to expand...

1st off, you are reading toms hardware. Tom's is imo, one of the most biased websites out there. They rave about MSI and ATI (always have). 2nd, "for the future of gaming".. yea, its not the future yet. There isn't any dx10 games out yet. We won't see any clear winner until then.

What I don't get is why people get up in arms about having to have the absolute bleeding edge with videocards. If 3dmark and fraps never came to be, nobody would give half a crap about frames per second as long as it was above about 35-40. ATI's card gets a lower score on 3dmark.. whoopty freaking doo. I would be happy with either card as long as I got smooth gameplay on my native res.

If you put both cards in front of me and said I could have one, I would get the ATI.. Want to know why? It has an hdmi output.. thats it. If it didn't, I would close my eyes and point to one and be happy.. I know with both cards, I could max out my games and pull 40+ fps.
 
bandwidth is wasted unless processes are making full use of the bandwidth available. seems to me that the 2900 is kinda like a ten-lane freeway; all it needs is drivers to effectively fill up the road. or so some would claim. i personally think it's just a crappy highway wrought with cops and speed traps.


traffic jams are alot less likely with 512 'lanes' so HD resolutions shouldn't choke the card as much as say a card with 128 'lanes'.


and it's anyone's guess as to why the card with the smaller bus performs better than the card with the massive 512-bit bus. i'm gonna go with... f-zero style nitro chevrons on the green highway.
 
I am really not bashing one card manufacturer or GPU chip maker. This is an honest inquiry by me...and I really don't need the "fastest" bleeding edge card.

You have to be in my position to really understand why I am confused. I am still running a system based on KK266 format. I am still running PC100 memory and a Geforce 400MX at 4X AGP.

In reality ANYTHING I purchase will be a serious upgrade. However I noticed that the 1 component that gets the most attention over any other is the GPU. I am also considering that it is the most easily swappable in the future.

My issue is, I want to pick the best card and then not come back to it for probably 3 years until DX10 and Vista Bugs are all worked out.

But I need a card that "WILL WORK" 3 years from now. Will the 8600GTS work, the 2600XT or do I need to spend 500.00 now for a 8800GTX.

Or is the ATI card the best choice because of the inclusion of all the new bells and whistles...(according to Tom's).

But I do want to know why the ATI failed to beat tthe 8800GTX. To me after scrubbing the stats of both...it looks like Raster Operators and Texture Units of a card are far MORE IMPORTANT than any other component on a GPU because that is the only place that the 8800GTX has over the 2900XT.

So when looking for a card it seems these are the first 2 STATS a person should look at.

Brass
 
I'm amazed that some people are in the mindset that either card will do because it will give you smooth performance either way.

But what about future games, when they get more video card heavy performance is going to drop and you're going to need to upgrade faster if you got the slower card, it still matters!

I think the hardware inside both Nvidia and ATI's cards is getting beyond anyones comprehension here (outside of the developers) we all speak of things like memory bandwidth being a bottleneck but none of us really know whats going on inside the hardware enough to comment where the bottleneck is exactly.

One thing is for sure and that's once the hardware is released the only thing that can improve performance is drivers, sure we might see some actual performance increases from legitimate optimisations but the chances are that we'll see the same thing that happened last time a card flopped badly (the FX range) and that's a lot of questionable optimisation to increase performance while lowering image quality.

I wouldn't expect a massive gain in FPS from driver updates alone, it will definately get faster but not enough to warrent buying one over the competiton. It's just slower hardware end of story.
 
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