Why such strong performance from 3850?

A

arthur_tuxedo

Gawd
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In most of the benchmarks I've seen, the 3850's performance doesn't seem to drop off a cliff at high res despite only having 256 MB of RAM. The delta between 3870 and 3850 seems to be pretty much the same at 1920 x 1200 as it is at, say, 1280 x 1024. Yet the 8800 GTS 320 gets creamed by the 640 at 1920 in newer games, and that's with 64 more MB than the 3850. Any idea what makes the 3850 hold up so well at high res with so little RAM?
 
arthur_tuxedo said:
In most of the benchmarks I've seen, the 3850's performance doesn't seem to drop off a cliff at high res despite only having 256 MB of RAM. The delta between 3870 and 3850 seems to be pretty much the same at 1920 x 1200 as it is at, say, 1280 x 1024. Yet the 8800 GTS 320 gets creamed by the 640 at 1920 in newer games, and that's with 64 more MB than the 3850. Any idea what makes the 3850 hold up so well at high res with so little RAM?
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ati have shader based cards and are a stronger performer than Nvidia in that area.
Or to say it simple, ati build cards for the future and high resoultions and Nvidia for yesterdays games the way the games wasnt meant to be played.
The tech within ati cards are superiour.

You can read more at beyond3d forums where you get better answers than "gnomes".
rarely seen such disrespect and little knowledge across forums as the answers here.
 
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQxOSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

As you can see both the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 have 320 stream processors, 16 ROPs and 16 Texture units. The Radeon HD 3870 is clocked faster than a Radeon HD 2900 XT; 777 MHz, versus 740 MHz for the Radeon HD 2900 XT. This isn’t a big clock speed advantage, but it is slightly noticeable in games since, with this architecture, when you overclock the core you are also overclocking the stream processors. The Radeon HD 3850 is clocked at 670 MHz, so the only difference in shader performance between the 3850, 3870 and 2900 XT is clock speed.
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Flopper said:
ati have shader based cards and are a stronger performer than Nvidia in that area.
Or to say it simple, ati build cards for the future and high resoultions and Nvidia for yesterdays games the way the games wasnt meant to be played.
The tech within ati cards are superiour.

You can read more at beyond3d forums where you get better answers than "gnomes".
rarely seen such disrespect and little knowledge across forums as the answers here.
Click to expand...

Erhmm...did you miss the latest launches? :rolleyes:
Not only does NVIDA have the best preforming cards...they also have a slighty better IQ than ATI now.

And are you saying that NVIDIA dosn't have unified architechture, that can't do "shader-stuff"?
 
arthur_tuxedo said:
In most of the benchmarks I've seen, the 3850's performance doesn't seem to drop off a cliff at high res despite only having 256 MB of RAM. The delta between 3870 and 3850 seems to be pretty much the same at 1920 x 1200 as it is at, say, 1280 x 1024. Yet the 8800 GTS 320 gets creamed by the 640 at 1920 in newer games, and that's with 64 more MB than the 3850. Any idea what makes the 3850 hold up so well at high res with so little RAM?
Click to expand...

Even with the cut-down bus width on the RV670's, they still have very good RAM bandwidth, so even though a 3850 256mb is doing a fair amount of texture swapping at higher resolutions, it's swapping them pretty fast.
 
Croak said:
Even with the cut-down bus width on the RV670's, they still have very good RAM bandwidth, so even though a 3850 256mb is doing a fair amount of texture swapping at higher resolutions, it's swapping them pretty fast.
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Ah. That makes sense. Thanks.

Then again, the gnome theory also seems very plausible...
 
Flopper said:
ati have shader based cards and are a stronger performer than Nvidia in that area.
Click to expand...

Like having the shader units handle AA? That did wonders for them...w00t for shader based!

Flopper said:
Or to say it simple, ati build cards for the future and high resoultions and Nvidia for yesterdays games the way the games wasnt meant to be played.
The tech within ati cards are superiour.
Click to expand...

I wouldnt call allowing a competitor to have more powerful cards for over a year, coming 6 months late to the battle, and still getting its ass kicked...superior. But thats just me.

Flopper said:
You can read more at beyond3d forums where you get better answers than "gnomes".
rarely seen such disrespect and little knowledge across forums as the answers here.
Click to expand...

Lighten up.
 
Flopper said:
Or to say it simple, ati build cards for the future and high resoultions and Nvidia for yesterdays games the way the games wasnt meant to be played.
Click to expand...

I like this in the sense that, my R480 has lasted 2 years, and was available I believe another year before that.

It's still going strong, not one game I have to run on all low to be playable yet, not even Crysis.
 
Borgschulze said:
I like this in the sense that, my R480 has lasted 2 years, and was available I believe another year before that.

It's still going strong, not one game I have to run on all low to be playable yet, not even Crysis.
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So...plenty of people are still using there 6800 series as well, and they came out before R480. Nothing special about ATI..
 
I just retired my 6800GT with the launch of the 8800GT. It lasted me over 3 years and was available a while before that. Card still works like a champ, it just can't hang at 1680x1050. :(
 
rhagz said:
I just retired my 6800GT with the launch of the 8800GT. It lasted me over 3 years and was available a while before that. Card still works like a champ, it just can't hang at 1680x1050. :(
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I'm replacing my 6800vanilla with an 8800GT. Should be quite a nice improvement, needless to say.
 
I'm upgrading my 3yrs old rig for a nice HTPC, retiring AGP 6800GT, and 64 3700+ 1MB Cache (The fastest 754 processor) with Q6600 and most likely ATI HD 3850.
If anyone is interested in my old rig parts, hit me up.
 
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