Originally posted by: Extelleron
Originally posted by: coldpower27
Originally posted by: Extelleron
Originally posted by: SolMiester
Nv lead ati right up to the 9600xt and 9800 series, had dual cards, SM3.....ATI has crap driver al the way up to then!
I could give a toss about 90nm man process and use a projector to watch movies, & dont care HDR+AA.
Dont agree with your superior image quality except for the 7xxx series which nv brought out.
the 800/1800/1900 & 1950 were all catch up cards anyway coming out after nvidia had brought out their cards so they always had more time.....as I said, always playing catch-up!
Image quality... you should care about it, what's the purpose of buying a high-end card that can't make a game look good? I don't know about you, but I don't buy a $400-500 card to see jagged edges and shimmering.
And those cards were not "catch-up cards". The X800 series launched in May 2004, a half a month after nVidia launched the 6800 series. The X850 series launched in late 2004/early 2005 and nVidia had nothing really to compete (besides 6800 Ultra 512MB, but who bought it?). The X1800 series was late to market, but still only 4 months after nVidia launched the 7800, and it provided more than enough extra performance and features to justify that. The X1900 was launched in January 2006, BEFORE nVidia launched the 7900 series. The X1950 series was launched in the summer of 2006, and nVidia launched no new cards to compete with it. Well, they had the 7950GX2 but that's not the same market IMO.
The only time ATI has really been behind is with the R600. The X1800 was a few months behind, but nothing major especially since nVidia only launched the 7800GTX in June and the 7800GT in August. They didn't have a full 7xxx series product line until March 2006.
ATI's been launching after Nvidia alot since the Radeon 9800's. The Radeon X800's were alright, but they were lacking in feature set, compared to Nvidia new Shader Model 3.0 cards as well, the X800's also had ATI's "trylinear" filtering, the same optimization used on the 9600 Series. The only time in the past while where ATI was first was the X1900's. Nvidia didn't need mainstream 7 Series SKU as fast due to Shader Model 3.0 capable 6 Series holding the for for the moment. And regarding the X1950 XTX that was matched with the 7950 GX2, they are both in the same category, relatively speaking. It doesn't matter if the 7950 GX2 is 2 PCB with 2 GPU, it's still Single PCI-E motherboard slot.
Nvidia also introduced SLI which meant they didn't need a refresh as X850 XT PE can't match a pair of 6800 Ultra's in SLI. So while the Single card absolute performance ignoring programability was X850 XT PE, overall performance remained with Nvidia. ATI Crossfire didn't come till a long time after.
AF quality wasn't too bad between the X800 and 6800, it's the 7 Series, that ATI had a major edge.
ATI and Nvidia are pretty even with regard to AA quality up to 4x, 6x is a better usable mode in current games compared to Nvidia 8x which is much higher workload as it incorporates SSAA. Nvidia has better Transparency AA though with SSAA though in the 7 Generation.
The X800 series cards had a feature set that was right for the games of 2004 and 2005, and that's what their purpose was. They provided performance that was (with the exception of OpenGL games) superior to that of the 6800 series and were pretty amazing cards. The lack of SM3 didn't begin to matter until around 2006, and even then, I don't think you're going to find a 6800 Ultra playing Oblivion with HDR at maximum settings. SM3 on the 6xxx series is one of those features that was too ahead of its time to be useful... by the time games used SM3, the 6 series could no longer offer good enough performance to utilize tose features.
As for the lack of a dual-card solution, it doesn't matter that 6800 Ultra SLI can beat a single X850XT PE. Two 6800 Ultra's are going to run you $800-900, and a single X850XT PE is around half of that price. I've always seen dual-card solutions as a waste of money and 6800 Ultra SLI is no exception. I don't think there were any games available back then that a X850XT PE couldn't max out at 1600x1200 4x/16x, so there wasn't much need for more performance anyway.
That's why I also don't view the 7950GX2 as a competitor to the X1950XTX. Sure, performance wise, it competes pretty well. However, the 7950GX2 is an SLI solution, whether or not it is disguised as a single card. As an SLI solution, it depends on drivers for performance. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to have to depend on nVidia SLI drivers for my performance, especially now in Vista.