Video Card NOT ONLY for gaming

[chotto69]

In another post i was asking advice whether to buy a Quadro card or stick to normal high end cards.
I've made up my mind to stay away from workstation-only cards since if it's true that i'm not much into games (i like to play occasionally the new releases of Quake, doom, etc. though) and i mainly use my PC for video editing/compositing/some 3D, it appears that choosing a Quadro would juice up some applications but would give me no advantage in others and would definetely suck at games (thanks JAG87:beer: )
Now my concern is: shall i choose the new ATI 1950 XTX (i need a quiet(er) card: i have a little baby...:heart: ) or nVidia 7900 GTX (my mobo doesn's support the 7950 GX2)?
As i was saying before, for my line of work (well, hobby actually...) the applications i will be using most of the time are Adobe Production Studio ones (Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, etc.), Autodesk Combustion for composition and FX, Lightwave 3D for modeling and 3D animation (i'm a beginner in this, so i don't think i need a Quadro card). Some of these application make extensive use of OpenGL 2.0 and i want to choose the card that is stronger in this area, for realtime FX preview, etc.

Consider also that:
* I'm impartial about the two brands: i've had good experience with both brands in the past.
* Money is no concern here: i can get the 2 cards almost at the same price.
* Power consumption is not important: i'll be buying a beefy PSU anyway.
* My rig: E6600, ASUS PW5 DH mobo, 2Gb Corsair XMS2 PC6400, etc.

I suspect that both cards would be equally capable to give excellent results but i'm asking in case somebody might be able to shed light on a confused (for me) matter .
Thank you in advance and sorry for the long post.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

For the past three generations of 3D cards, nVidia has been much more effective in OpenGL than in DirectX. In fact, in the 5th & 6th generations, lagged way behind ATI in DirectX. They seem to be closing that gap, but ATI has also caught up in OpenGL, or is running very close behind in the current (7th) generation.

 

[tuteja1986]

X1950XTX if you can get it for $400 or below
otherwise i recommend ATI X1900XT 512MB with a 3rd Party Cooler = $300 for card and $30 for a 3rd party cooler

 

[TheRyuu]

Get a X1950XTX if you can afford it.
It often trumps the 7900GTX and supports the all important HDR+AA and also has better IQ then Nvidia.

Besides gaming, everything else you listed it wouldn't matter what video card you run except the 3d modeling/animation and if you don't do a lot of it you don't need a Quadro card).
ATI is about even with Open GL performance now so nothing to worry about.

 

[hardwareking]

the x1950 xtx would be the best buy.Slightly faster than the gtx.And pretty quiet too.
If they are both at the same price.Get the x1950 xtx.

 

[Nanobaud]

Another Non-gaming use of high-end graphics cards is as a coprocessor for numerically-intensive computations (in my case, scientific simulations). When I chose Nvidia a couple of years ago, it was because their SDK was IMO much more suitable for writing general-purpose algorithms (BTW, those of you who keep insisting the current-generation Nvidia hardware cannot combine HDR and AA, that is fundmentally not true. If you mean it is not likely to have sufficient speed for real-time / gaming and is therefore noone will bother to make it accessible in the drivers, that may well be true.) If I had been primarily interested in writing shaders (presumably for game development), the ATI SDK would have probably been more competitive. I have not reviewed that decision recently because I am not willing at this point to revise all that code, but a quick look at the ATI SDK makes it look still comparatively awkward for routines other than shaders.

nBd

 

[Munky]

No, the current Nvidia hardware physically cannot do multisampling on FP buffers. That's a fact, and that's why it cant do HDR+AA. The only two ways around it is either doing Bloom via shaders (like Source based games), or manually code SSAA in the game (like in AOE3, and the performance tanks).

For the OP, there's no point in getting a professional 3D card unless that's your main use for it. For things like Photoshop the video card makes no difference, and for gaming the x1950xtx is currently the fastest single-gpu card.

 

[Nanobaud]

I will defer to your terminology, since I am not in the video-gaming or related industry, and I can easliy believe the physical interconnects / microops don't provide the performance you (ie gamers) need to be practical, but certainly my manual code is processing multiple samples from the floating-point buffers (a few tricks applied, but they are well known and certainly not as tricky as some of the gaming optimizations). Definitely not as time-efficient as a few hardware AA ops would probably be (including many other procedures, it takes several seconds to process a single image, never tried only HDR & AA, but I don't imagine it would come off as smooth animation) , but to say it is physically impossible to do HDR + AA on the GPU must mean I have diligent pixies in there cleaning it up for me. I 've even seen fully-functional POVRay (including HDR) running predominantly on the GPU, so I still don't understand where this "physically cannot" comes from.

 

[Munky]

The NV hardware physically cannot do multisampling of floating point format buffers. That is a hardware limitation of the ROP's. If you can manually code supersampling AA, it's certainly possible to do AA+HDR, but the performance would suffer. Multisampling AA is the more common and efficient method of edge antialiasing, and the hardware can either do it or it cant.

 

[Nanobaud]

Thanks for the expanded explanation. So 'Multisampling AA' is a particular hardware-optimized image filter that's just not there on current Nvidia GPU, and other anti-alias filters can not support the throughput required for gaming-type applications. I will now better understand the stated restriction which I will admit I found perplexing before. It's always a good day when you learn something new.

nBd

 

[Nightmare225]

Originally posted by: chotto69
In another post i was asking advice whether to buy a Quadro card or stick to normal high end cards.
I've made up my mind to stay away from workstation-only cards since if it's true that i'm not much into games (i like to play occasionally the new releases of Quake, doom, etc. though) and i mainly use my PC for video editing/compositing/some 3D, it appears that choosing a Quadro would juice up some applications but would give me no advantage in others and would definetely suck at games (thanks JAG87:beer: )
Now my concern is: shall i choose the new ATI 1950 XTX (i need a quiet(er) card: i have a little baby...:heart: ) or nVidia 7900 GTX (my mobo doesn's support the 7950 GX2)?
As i was saying before, for my line of work (well, hobby actually...) the applications i will be using most of the time are Adobe Production Studio ones (Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, etc.), Autodesk Combustion for composition and FX, Lightwave 3D for modeling and 3D animation (i'm a beginner in this, so i don't think i need a Quadro card). Some of these application make extensive use of OpenGL 2.0 and i want to choose the card that is stronger in this area, for realtime FX preview, etc.

Consider also that:
* I'm impartial about the two brands: i've had good experience with both brands in the past.
* Money is no concern here: i can get the 2 cards almost at the same price.
* Power consumption is not important: i'll be buying a beefy PSU anyway.
* My rig: E6600, ASUS PW5 DH mobo, 2Gb Corsair XMS2 PC6400, etc.

I suspect that both cards would be equally capable to give excellent results but i'm asking in case somebody might be able to shed light on a confused (for me) matter .
Thank you in advance and sorry for the long post.

Just to clarify, a 7950GX2 would work on that motherboard, and would give you the fastest performance. Not sure what features of video cards appeal to you though...

 

[Pabster]

I love it when we get "Money is no concern".

In that case, a 7950GX2 is the best your money can buy. It's faster than the X1950XTX, and fairly close in price as well.

Perhaps you might consider an SLI or CrossFire setup if you really want to dump some ca$h ...

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: Nanobaud
Thanks for the expanded explanation. So 'Multisampling AA' is a particular hardware-optimized image filter that's just not there on current Nvidia GPU, and other anti-alias filters can not support the throughput required for gaming-type applications. I will now better understand the stated restriction which I will admit I found perplexing before. It's always a good day when you learn something new.

nBd

Nv can do multisample AA, but only on integer format buffers (the kind used by games without HDR). HDR, however, requires greater color range and precision, thus floating point buffers are required.

 

[chotto69]

Originally posted by: Pabster
I love it when we get "Money is no concern".

In that case, a 7950GX2 is the best your money can buy. It's faster than the X1950XTX, and fairly close in price as well.

Perhaps you might consider an SLI or CrossFire setup if you really want to dump some ca$h ...

Money is no concern BECAUSE i can get both cards at the same time
As for the 7950, after some googling i found that many people have them working with their PW5 DH. I wonder why neither nVidia nor Asus itself officially put this mobo among the ones that support this card...
Thanks to everybody for their contribution btw

 

[tuteja1986]

I will warn you one thing... Quad SLI isn't that great and its driver still need to mature. I use 7950GX at work and it has terrible support for older games and i have issues with old games like Starcraft , Kotor , Final Fantasy 7 ;( . I recommend a SLI GPU and you should either buy X1950XT or 7900GTX. with SLI or Crossfire you can disable them.

 

[chotto69]

Originally posted by: tuteja1986
I will warn you one thing... Quad SLI isn't that great and its driver still need to mature. I use 7950GX at work and it has terrible support for older games and i have issues with old games like Starcraft , Kotor , Final Fantasy 7 ;( . I recommend a SLI GPU and you should either buy X1950XT or 7900GTX. with SLI or Crossfire you can disable them.

Yes, i thought so too. I don't think that the 7950 is worth the possible trouble. I still stick to 7900GTX or X1950XTX

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: chotto69

Originally posted by: tuteja1986
I will warn you one thing... Quad SLI isn't that great and its driver still need to mature. I use 7950GX at work and it has terrible support for older games and i have issues with old games like Starcraft , Kotor , Final Fantasy 7 ;( . I recommend a SLI GPU and you should either buy X1950XT or 7900GTX. with SLI or Crossfire you can disable them.

Yes, i thought so too. I don't think that the 7950 is worth the possible trouble. I still stick to 7900GTX or X1950XTX

Yup, stick to an X1950XTX or 7900GTX. I'd personally recommend the X1950 - the X1900XTX beats the 7900GTX in most benchmarks and the X1950XTX is a bit faster than its predecessor. It supports AA + AF (as aforementioned) and due to its heavy pixel shading power (48 pixel shaders vs 24 on the Nvidia card) it is slightly more future-proof.

 

[chotto69]

Originally posted by: jiffylube1024

Originally posted by: chotto69

Originally posted by: tuteja1986
I will warn you one thing... Quad SLI isn't that great and its driver still need to mature. I use 7950GX at work and it has terrible support for older games and i have issues with old games like Starcraft , Kotor , Final Fantasy 7 ;( . I recommend a SLI GPU and you should either buy X1950XT or 7900GTX. with SLI or Crossfire you can disable them.

Yes, i thought so too. I don't think that the 7950 is worth the possible trouble. I still stick to 7900GTX or X1950XTX

Yup, stick to an X1950XTX or 7900GTX. I'd personally recommend the X1950 - the X1900XTX beats the 7900GTX in most benchmarks and the X1950XTX is a bit faster than its predecessor. It supports AA + AF (as aforementioned) and due to its heavy pixel shading power (48 pixel shaders vs 24 on the Nvidia card) it is slightly more future-proof.

I agree with you jiffylube1024. Actually i'm leaning toward the X1950XTX myself due to its spectacular specs. I've read the benchmarks but, as i stated in the first post of my thread, few or less more frames in a game benchmark are not so important for me. I'm more interested in knowing if choosing one card or the other will give me a tangible increase in performance with the video and graphic applications i use my pc for most of the time.
For example, Adobe recommends nVidia cards for both Premiere Pro and After Effects. I wonder if this is due to a real superiority of their cards or maybe a partnership the two companies might have.
Another issue that worries me a little about ATI is its drivers: most people seem to agree that Forceware drivers are better and more fine tuned...