ATI 4xxx Series Thread

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

Seems odd to me that you "hate them more every day" and I can't find problems.

Really? And why is that odd exactly? Perhaps your tiny sample of games simply misrepresents larger samples?

There's 59 page UT2004 thread running since Nov 06 where nVidia finally admit there?s a driver issue. What more evidence do you need?

If you want newer games fire up Crysis with any beta 17x.xx driver and observe the missing back wheels on the vehicles. Now before you respond ?don?t use beta drivers?, the last official drivers we?ve had were in December 2007.

Such driver "support" is beyond comical. ATi bleeds millions of dollars per quarter yet they still manage monthly WHQL releases. What?s nVidia?s excuse for not doing the same?

Although I don't OC for the most part, and running products out of spec can cause misreported "NVIDIA driver errors" from what I've seen on NZONE.

Overclocking can do the same for any vendor; what?s your point?

You put too much faith in WHQL. The 174.74 drivers are WHQL certified and going by your description still suffer from the missing wheel problem.

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: nRollo

Originally posted by: lopri
That heatsink looks like 3850's. The core is definitely different, though. Thanks for the pic, Killrose.

I am eagerly waiting for AMD's new offerings. Day by day I grow resentful towards NV's Vista drivers. (it could be the 780i issue or both, though)

And day by day I use them with no issues.

I've used NF4, 680i, 780i, 790i with many combinations of NVIDIA video cards, and eveyr version of VISTA pretty much uneventfully, just working like I'd expect.

Seems odd to me that you "hate them more every day" and I can't find problems.

Although I don't OC for the most part, and running products out of spec can cause misreported "NVIDIA driver errors" from what I've seen on NZONE.

Building my 780A rig Saturday, but that one will be XP due to need to have a machine that runs MS Small Business Accounting 2006.

your statement implies that lopri is overclocking his sli 8800gt's. Is it even possible to oc an sli rig? Lopri, are your 8800gt's in sli overclocked?

nice to seem a tri-sli platform for amd.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995

Originally posted by: nRollo

Originally posted by: lopri
That heatsink looks like 3850's. The core is definitely different, though. Thanks for the pic, Killrose.

I am eagerly waiting for AMD's new offerings. Day by day I grow resentful towards NV's Vista drivers. (it could be the 780i issue or both, though)

And day by day I use them with no issues.

I've used NF4, 680i, 780i, 790i with many combinations of NVIDIA video cards, and eveyr version of VISTA pretty much uneventfully, just working like I'd expect.

Seems odd to me that you "hate them more every day" and I can't find problems.

Although I don't OC for the most part, and running products out of spec can cause misreported "NVIDIA driver errors" from what I've seen on NZONE.

Building my 780A rig Saturday, but that one will be XP due to need to have a machine that runs MS Small Business Accounting 2006.

your statement implies that lopri is overclocking his sli 8800gt's. Is it even possible to oc an sli rig? Lopri, are your 8800gt's in sli overclocked?

nice to seem a tri-sli platform for amd.

Not necessarily. Errors other than actual NVIDIA driver errors are misreported by Windows as "NVIDIA driver errors".

Only time it happened to me (that I'm sure of) was when I underpowered my 3 way SLi and it would TDR constantly or blue screen me, referencing NVIDIA drivers. Upgraded to PCP&C 1200W, voila, "NVIDIA driver errors" diappear.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

Seems odd to me that you "hate them more every day" and I can't find problems.

Really? And why is that odd exactly? Perhaps your tiny sample of games simply misrepresents larger samples?

There's 59 page UT2004 thread running since Nov 06 where nVidia finally admit there?s a driver issue. What more evidence do you need?

If you want newer games fire up Crysis with any beta 17x.xx driver and observe the missing back wheels on the vehicles. Now before you respond ?don?t use beta drivers?, the last official drivers we?ve had were in December 2007.

Such driver "support" is beyond comical. ATi bleeds millions of dollars per quarter yet they still manage monthly WHQL releases. What?s nVidia?s excuse for not doing the same?

Although I don't OC for the most part, and running products out of spec can cause misreported "NVIDIA driver errors" from what I've seen on NZONE.

Overclocking can do the same for any vendor; what?s your point?

Thanks for reminding me, I meant to delete that thread......

JK of course

BFG, my advice to you if you're a big time UT2004 player is upgrade to Vista or downgrade video cards.

To me it seems like a waste of time posting 59 pages about a driver issue they know about and are working on, but probably is on the back burner as the game is 4 years old.

You've got to think this last year almost all driver team resources went into Vista compatibility and newer games.

Like I've said before- if they were spending manpower getting those old games you reported issues with working, they need me managing work flow. You code for the quarter million people wanting to play Crysis- not the 8 guys that still remember what "Red Faction" was.

No company promises eternal support for games- and your just going to have to get used to the fact that PC GPU archs change and you may not always be able to play Serious Sam one the way you did back in the 90s.

 

[bryanW1995]

here's my translation of what rollo just said:

nvidia builds the best video cards and dominates the market. until ati comes out with something that is actually competitive, we're going to consistently ignore people who plays games longer than they are used for comparison benchmarks. sucks to be you guys if you find a game that you like and want to play for more than 6 months! - love, nvidia.


BTW: this is a major reason that I bought a 3870 last year. I think that nvidia currently destroys amd at every price point except the $350-$375 "I want dual gpus with a single card" market, which is, uh, small. However, they have consistently shown no concern for long-term support, or, at best, little concern for it. I don't blame them, btw, b/c most consumers clearly prefer to get a few extra fps today and don't think about the future, but for knowledgeable enthusiasts it makes the decision quite a bit more difficult.

 

[ajaidevsingh]

Seeing that both GT200 "two G92b's with connected cores" and RV220*2 "4870X2" will sport twin cores connected to be seen as one huge core... I think the era of multi cores has just come about!!

 

[BenSkywalker]

nvidia builds the best video cards and dominates the market. until ati comes out with something that is actually competitive, we're going to consistently ignore people who plays games longer than they are used for comparison benchmarks. sucks to be you guys if you find a game that you like and want to play for more than 6 months! - love, nvidia.

Have you seen how the 3870 performs under Win3.11?

I understand what it was like to have issues that were sort of similar to BFG, ATi broke Sacrifice not long after it came out and refused to ever get it working properly again. Unfortunately this was pre-unified drivers so the game never ended up working on any R3x0 or newer GPU properly. At that point in time I was willing to do whatever was required to get it running properly, but ATi refused to acknowledge the problem at all- repeated emails to them were just simply ignored as is typical, threads were locked talking about it on Rage3D- ATi was in full control at that point in time and refused to let anyone acknowledge the issues existance. I ended up selling off my R9500Pro because of this, went back to a Ti4200 until the R9800Pro came out and hoped it would take care of the problem, it didn't but unfortunately at that point in time the Ti4200 was falling way behind the performance curve and nV had absolute garbage hardware to offer so I waited for another year or so hoping ATi would eventually fix the problem(they would never so much as acknowledge it existed btw, it appears that the problem was they dropped WBuffer support which resulted in massive image corruption, but they never actually said that was it).

My understanding of this problem is a little bit different, it seems it only happens on legacy OSs with new vid cards? Is that not correct?

However, they have consistently shown no concern for long-term support, or, at best, little concern for it.

Really? Because I found that to be far more true of ATi then nVidia overall. How many years did it take for ATi to realize there was an API called 'OpenGL'? They break games too, check out you board trying to play Thief as an example- any fix coming for that? nV has the same problem ATM, not trying to say it is just ATi, but let's be realistic, ATi doesn't care about you any more then any of the other companies do.

I don't blame them, btw, b/c most consumers clearly prefer to get a few extra fps today and don't think about the future, but for knowledgeable enthusiasts it makes the decision quite a bit more difficult.

You are rolling the dice with either company. Which games you care about will end up determining which company is going to screw you over more, unfortunately we don't know in advance which games which company is going to break.

 

[lopri]

The instability I'm experiencing is system-level, not game-level. Alt+Tab'ing, playing games in window mode, GPU acceleration in PDF, virtual machine windows, HD playback, or even the Dreamscene (movie wallpaper) causes troubles on my NV system. A pic says a thousand words. Only reason the reliability has been going up is that I've been using my main rig a lot more lately, leaving the NV system idle most of the time.

http://img375.imageshack.us/my...age=reliabilityxa2.jpg

Sorry about this off-topic post.

 

[nRollo]

As usual, it's hard to add to one of your posts Ben.

If I were to do so, I'd note that ATi has a lot of current issues with drivers as well (e.g. CrossfireX not working with ET:QW) or their drivers not working with Linux very well.

Check out what Xbit said on 4/30 about Crossfire drivers:

You should be aware that the driver is not yet polished off, and CrossFire technology doesn?t work in all applications.......The R3870X2-T2D1G OC beats its opponents thanks to the factory overclocking, but only in those applications where CrossFire works correctly. If you consider buying it, you may want to check out beforehand whether it?s compatible with your favorite games.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the current state of AMD multi-GPU tech.

People need to realize that support of games isn't forever, PCs aren't consoles, and they need to consider what's important to them.

For BFG it may be support of 5-10 year old games that I've long since thrown away.

For me it might be new titles.

I'd say neither is right, and the user should choose based on their priorities.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: BFG10K

Seems odd to me that you "hate them more every day" and I can't find problems.

Really? And why is that odd exactly? Perhaps your tiny sample of games simply misrepresents larger samples?

There's 59 page UT2004 thread running since Nov 06 where nVidia finally admit there?s a driver issue. What more evidence do you need?

If you want newer games fire up Crysis with any beta 17x.xx driver and observe the missing back wheels on the vehicles. Now before you respond ?don?t use beta drivers?, the last official drivers we?ve had were in December 2007.

Such driver "support" is beyond comical. ATi bleeds millions of dollars per quarter yet they still manage monthly WHQL releases. What?s nVidia?s excuse for not doing the same?

Although I don't OC for the most part, and running products out of spec can cause misreported "NVIDIA driver errors" from what I've seen on NZONE.

Overclocking can do the same for any vendor; what?s your point?

You put too much faith in WHQL. The 174.74 drivers are WHQL certified and going by your description still suffer from the missing wheel problem.

the point there was that ATI actually bothers to release the new drivers as a final release. While nvidia is just calling everything a beta and tells you it is not supported and not to use it.
When it comes right down to it, regardless of the INTENDED price the market adjusts to the REALISTIC price. The price of each card quickly gets raised or lowered by etailers to the point that the cheapest you can find is priced in line with performance (ie, a 10% slower card is 10% cheaper)... that is ofcourse, in the 150+ card range. and in market segments where there is competition...

Anyways, the point of it all was that i moved from exclusive ATI to exclusive nVidia during 2006 because of nvidia's superior drivers. (one driver for everything since the TNT for windows XP, and less buggy).
I am incredibly disappointed with nvidia's current approach to drivers (and ATI has been making superb strides there, including the open driver initiative, monthly WHQL, resolving long standing installation bugs, etc... ALL of which started AFTER the AMD aquisition, but have now finally matured). So there is a very good chance that my next card will be ATI.

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
your statement implies that lopri is overclocking his sli 8800gt's. Is it even possible to oc an sli rig? Lopri, are your 8800gt's in sli overclocked?

My CPU is overclocked (not much) but GPUs are not. Actually the other machine (see sig) is overclocked more. Both systems are pretty solid hardware-wise. The system level issues (lock-ups, crashes, application hangs, etc.) are definitely software issues (OS, drivers, application, whatever). For instance, if I use 2D GPU acceleration in Acrobat - one system works fine but the other one will eventually hang.

 

[n7]

Though i am all too aware of the deficiencies in nVidia's drivers, this thread is about AMD's upcoming 4000 series cards.

I don't want to have to start cleaning posts out of here to keep this thread on topic, so i'm thanking all you guys in advance for keeping that in mind for future posts in this thread

n7
Video/Memory/Storage Mod.

 

[lopri]

It was my fault mentioning off-topic issues. My apologies.

 

[bryanW1995]

no, I think that I actually started it.

let's talk about more interesting things, like jen-hsun huang's nickname. rollo, tell them what you told me the other day about that. Have you heard any more info?

ok, back on topic for real this time, and, in a way, the drivers ARE on topic, but it's DAAMIT's drivers that we should be discussing. Based upon what we've seen for the past few years with their very strong driver support, I think that rv770 is going to be in a BETTER position vs nvidia. I think that we can all agree that official driver updates once/month is VERY good. I'm not saying that rv770 will be faster than gt200, in fact I'm very confident that it won't be, but just like with my 3870 I do feel that it could have some serious staying power b/c of ati's strong recent (post amd acquisition) driver support.

 

[BFG10K]

You put too much faith in WHQL.

I disagree; among other things it guarantees the drivers won?t balls up Windows in the specific scenarios Microsoft tests for. While it won?t necessarily improve games it will help general OS stability.

The 174.74 drivers are WHQL certified and going by your description still suffer from the missing wheel problem.

This is quite true but WHQL is part of the bigger picture. It isn't WQHL per-se but rather the overall commitment and support of a given vendor.

If nVidia want to release non-WHQL drivers then fine, but they need to support them and need to release them monthly. At the moment we get random driver scraps along with a "we don't support beta drivers". Uh-uh, that?s not good enough.

Now to keep this relevant to the topic, the 4xxx series will be intertwined with ATi driver support so that means users of such hardware can look forward to monthly WHQL releases.

I have to be honest here: if the 4870 is significantly faster than my 8800 Ultra and the GT200 isn't significantly faster than the 4870, I will seriously be considering ATi this time around.

 

[Bateluer]

ATI's drivers have been solid since they reorg'd under the Catalyst name, that hasn't changed with AMD's acquisition. At least, their Windows drivers have been decent, their linux drivers have been hit or miss and vary greatly depending on the card in question.

 

[bryanW1995]

I have to be honest here: if the 4870 is significantly faster than my 8800 Ultra and the GT200 isn't significantly faster than the 4870, I will seriously be considering ATi this time around.

this makes sense, but realistically I think that most of us think that the odds are pretty low that 4870 will be "close enough". maybe they'll prove us wrong, however...

 

[lopri]

Does anyone know how AMD get the PowerPlay to work? Conventional wisdom is that GPU doesn't know what is rendered on screen, and should always draw pixels as fast as possible. Yet I can clearly see the GPU usage moving up and down in the control panel. And the usage does make sense, going up in a seemingly GPU-heavy scene and vice versa.

 

[JPB]

RV770 GDDR5 supports 512-bit

One of the two chips


The fastest of ATI's two upcoming chips, the RV770XT, will offer support for two cool memory marchitectures. One is GDDR5, a very fast memory, and the second is 512-bit memory interface.

We are getting back to the memory controller of R600, but possibly significantly improved, and this time the chip can cope with GDDR5 while the previous controller could only cope with GDDR3 and GDDR4.

As GDDR4 didn?t really get these cards any faster, ATI decided to go for GDDR5. We believe this is the future and this definitely makes the RV770 a bit bigger than the RV670 and this will be the most significant difference between the chips.

The launch date still remains June, with volume availability in July and onward

 

[BFG10K]

I don't see the 4xxx series having 512 bit memory especially not since the GDDR5 is rumored to be cranked to high clock speeds. I think it?s like the others say that the 512 comes from 256 x 2 for the X2 version.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

You put too much faith in WHQL.

I disagree; among other things it guarantees the drivers won?t balls up Windows in the specific scenarios Microsoft tests for. While it won?t necessarily improve games it will help general OS stability.

The 174.74 drivers are WHQL certified and going by your description still suffer from the missing wheel problem.

This is quite true but WHQL is part of the bigger picture. It isn't WQHL per-se but rather the overall commitment and support of a given vendor.

If nVidia want to release non-WHQL drivers then fine, but they need to support them and need to release them monthly. At the moment we get random driver scraps along with a "we don't support beta drivers". Uh-uh, that?s not good enough.

Now to keep this relevant to the topic, the 4xxx series will be intertwined with ATi driver support so that means users of such hardware can look forward to monthly WHQL releases.

I have to be honest here: if the 4870 is significantly faster than my 8800 Ultra and the GT200 isn't significantly faster than the 4870, I will seriously be considering ATi this time around.

1. Drivers that are non-WHQL have gone through the same QA at NVIDIA

2. I'm guessing (along with Ben Skywalker) the RV770 won't be an upgrade from your 8800Ultra let alone close to a GT200.

R600 vs HD3870 has shown us memory bandwidth isn't the issue for this core arch.

The additional TMUs and shaders will help, but my guess is they bring AMD to parity with your 8800U.

As the RV770 is the same VLIW arch/16ROPs, and given the 3870X2 trades benches with your 8800Ultra, I would be shocked speechless if a single core RV7700 is "significantly faster than your 8800Ultra".

Given your hatred of multi-GPU, I'd say you have one choice again BFG if you want high end.

 

[Killrose]

It would be a let down if the 4870 only brings ATi parity with the 8800U, but only for the consumer in reality. For ATi it would at least give them a GPU that they could now get $500+ dollars for instead of the $180 they are now getting for a single 3870 GPU.

For ATi/AMD having a GPU worth a substantial amount over what they now have would certainly help the company financialy.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Yet another Fudzilla link...

"The fastest of ATI's two upcoming chips, the RV770XT, will offer support for two cool memory marchitectures. One is GDDR5, a very fast memory, and the second is 512-bit memory interface.

We are getting back to the memory controller of R600, but possibly significantly improved, and this time the chip can cope with GDDR5 while the previous controller could only cope with GDDR3 and GDDR4.

As GDDR4 didn?t really get these cards any faster, ATI decided to go for GDDR5. We believe this is the future and this definitely makes the RV770 a bit bigger than the RV670 and this will be the most significant difference between the chips.

The launch date still remains June, with volume availability in July and onward."

I don't know much about building video cards, but I would imagine that having two versions of the same card, one with a 256bit GDDR5 and one with a 512bit GDDR3 would not make much sense. I would think that would add quite a bit of complexity and just confuse consumers.

At any rate, I absolutely couldn't be happier with a video card then my 2900 Pro, but yet I think I will want to get a 4870 when it comes out just for the sake of upgrading. My last 4 video cards before my 2900Pro were all Nvidia, while I wasn't unhappy with them, I am absolutely spoiled by ATI's frequent driver releases. Despite what the Nvidia spinsters say, there seem to be a lot of driver issues with the 8800 cards, even though they are faster then the current Radeons I think I'll stick with ATI for the immediate future at least just because of the drivers. Does anyone know if a 48xx will crossfire with a 29xx?

 

[JPB]

Originally posted by: SlowSpyder
Yet another Fudzilla link...

"The fastest of ATI's two upcoming chips, the RV770XT, will offer support for two cool memory marchitectures. One is GDDR5, a very fast memory, and the second is 512-bit memory interface.

We are getting back to the memory controller of R600, but possibly significantly improved, and this time the chip can cope with GDDR5 while the previous controller could only cope with GDDR3 and GDDR4.

As GDDR4 didn?t really get these cards any faster, ATI decided to go for GDDR5. We believe this is the future and this definitely makes the RV770 a bit bigger than the RV670 and this will be the most significant difference between the chips.

The launch date still remains June, with volume availability in July and onward."

I don't know much about building video cards, but I would imagine that having two versions of the same card, one with a 256bit GDDR5 and one with a 512bit GDDR3 would not make much sense. I would think that would add quite a bit of complexity and just confuse consumers.

At any rate, I absolutely couldn't be happier with a video card then my 2900 Pro, but yet I think I will want to get a 4870 when it comes out just for the sake of upgrading. My last 4 video cards before my 2900Pro were all Nvidia, while I wasn't unhappy with them, I am absolutely spoiled by ATI's frequent driver releases. Despite what the Nvidia spinsters say, there seem to be a lot of driver issues with the 8800 cards, even though they are faster then the current Radeons I think I'll stick with ATI for the immediate future at least just because of the drivers. Does anyone know if a 48xx will crossfire with a 29xx?

I already posted this 4 posts above yours

 

[JACKDRUID]

Originally posted by: nRollo
I would be shocked speechless if a single core RV7700 is "significantly faster than your 8800Ultra".

agreed.

For RV770 to be significantly faster than 8800ultra, it would have to equal to performance leaps such as 4200-> 9700pro, 7900->8800gtx....