I was contemplating a minor upgrade of my video card - a GF4 Ti4600.
I notice the current range includes :
FX5900
FX5900PV
FX5900XT
FX5900Ultra
FX5950Ultra
Talk about confusing. My local supplier is selling a reasonably priced FX5900XT for half the price of a 5950. Good value or ripoff ?
(Please no “buy a Radeon instead” comments). :wink:
The XT is a budget card, so slower than a 5900 and even slower than a 5950.
Don’t forget the 5900SE, which is actually a great card, despite the SE-Kiss-of-Death moniker. What was Nvidia thinking?
XT and SE are the same.
Your loss.
I went with a non-ultra 5900 for around 200$, seemed like a nice bang for buck ratio. Nice experience with it so far.
It’s really clever, or ruthless, of NVIDIA to create an “XT” line that’s slower, which is no doubt accidental because ATI has an ultra-fast “XT” model.
Either they get to benefit from people associating XT with “fast,” or they hurt the perception of ATI because XT is associated with “slow.” It’s win-win for NVIDIA.
The 5900 XTs are probably the ‘best bang for buck’ for their price range, though if you care about good AA and plan on keeping the card through 2005 I’d worry about the DX9 shader performance.
I agree about the 5900XT probably being the best bang for the buck, and if you plan on keeping it you probably don’t care that much about good AA. I don’t think that PV or SE come from nvidia, I think that XT is the official and SE is just something that some manufacturers use. What I think is more confusing (and annoying) is that a card that is simply called ‘5900’ can have 700Mhz (2.8ns), 800Mhz (~2.2ns) or 850Mhz (2.2ns) memory, especially since they don’t always make it clear that the card uses 2.8ns memory. The XT is the one that “should” have 700Mhz, and I’m not sure why some manufacturer used 800 because it was probably still 2.2ns. The differences in GPU frequencies are minor, I think it is 390(XT), 400, 450(Ultra), and 475(5950).
Your loss.[/quote]
Die.
( fucking ATi fanboys. - ALWAYS with the comments… your company may be older. But,.just die.)
Oh… and if you can get an ultra get an ultra - they are king ( oh and the 5950 whoops any ATi card in a majority of tests.)
Google for reviews.
… or you could wait- the new NV40s are coming in a month or so.
What, really? I guess I’ll just wait for those when I need my new Doom3/HL2 card then!
Yeah, both NV40 and R420 are due soon (April-May). My prediction: NV40 faster at Doom 3, R420 faster at HL2. . .which is more important to 'ya?
Rumors strongly have ATI using the move to the .13u fab process to double their effective units, so if they keep their clock speed at 400Mhz or so that means a doubling of their shader performance (though this does not mean a doubling of frame rate since no game is 100% computationally bound), which means NVIDIA will have to basically triple their current shader performance with NV40 to match ATI.
I just hope both companies stop with all the cheating (NVIDIA) and filtering shortcuts (NVIDIA and ATI). It’s 2004, people, and you want us to pay $200-500 for these boards and some of them won’t do full trilinear even when requested by the application, or the applied level of anisotropy suddenly drops from 16x to 2x on the terrain textures when I roll my fighter in IL-2? Give me a break.
Argh! I probably should just wait. I don’t use AA anyway (not much point on a GF4 Ti4600).
My only hassle is some of my latest games are less than stellar on my current system - ie. COD, LOMAC, and X2TT. BF1942 and addons play great on my system.
I had the same problem - so i went out and bought a shitty (shh Ati fanbois!)
FX5200 - it performs OK… and will do till i save up real bucks for the
NV4(0)*s … I can’t wait.
What are your current system specs.
Currently -
ASUS A7V266-e motherboard (266 FSB)
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.0GHz)
1024 MB PC2100 ram
GF4 Ti4600
As you can see I need to upgrade all the components. The motherboard won’t accept anything faster than the 2400. I think I’ll just have to be patient and wait until the 2nd half 2004.
Send me your computer.
I have a no name brand motherboard, AMD athlon XP 1600+, 384 Meg of SD Ram… and a geforce FX 5200 ( had a geforce 2 MX before.)
If you were loaded, you could go out and get the new Athlon 64 51+, they cain almost everything on the market. ( even though I’d wait until they figure out what they’re doing with their motherboards.)
Wait and see what the NV40s do.
… as for motherboards- go with what you like… I haven’t seen huge performance gains in different brands. ( though there are shit brands out there )
Let us know how you go with the upgrade.
And, as you are an Aussie, might I sugguest heading over to the ocau forums and talking to the guys there. ( or maybe atomic. ) they’ll point you in the righ tdirection for prices and specs.
www.overclockers.com.au
www.atomicmpc.com.au
Current rumors have NV40’s shader performance right around that of a 9800 XT, which is a helluva improvement for NVIDIA but it won’t be good enough to compete against R420. But how much will DX9 shaders be used in games in 2004 (aside from Half-life 2 and Vampire)? Who knows. Both cards sound like they’re going to be fill rate monsters.
One point that does sway me in ATI’s favour is that their cards still look like normal video cards.
nVidia’s latest cards are absolute monsters. Why is it that ATI can build fast space efficient cards and yet GeForce FX’s require humungous cooling solutions that take up the space of two slots ? :roll:
That’s what happens when you acquire 3dfx.
Well, Ati aquired Artx and Nvidia got 3dfx. The current generation owes a lot to these acquisitions. Did artx design the Radeon 9X00 series? Seems like ati got the better deal.
John - can you link us up with the rumors on shader perf?
I know a few guys that would want to check it out.
Oh, and here’s one I prepared earlier :-)
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=213188#213188
( it’s a link to a link - but the 2nd link is in german )