nvidia 5800 or ati 9700?

[15th Warlock]

You've obviously got more talent than me in doing reviews!

And let me throw in this link, as a gift

LOL, none of that, it's just that maybe I have too much free time in my hands, practice have been very slow in the office these days

And thanks for the link, it was very interesting, particularily the part about nVidia using higher precision color rendering and how even back in the day, and support for more complex shader instructions, and how in spite of all this advanced features the FX series fell hard on their face in terms of performance because of some other architecture implementations like the 4x2 pipeline configuration.

It's interesting as well how nVidia was separarting itself from the unified shader architecture, so long ago, making completely separated pixel and vertex shader hardware units. Even to this day, nVidia would rather have this shader processors separated, as can be seen in the G80 architecture, quite a departure from Ati's use of unified shaders.

 

[_33]

LOL, none of that, it's just that maybe I have too much free time in my hands, practice have been very slow in the office these days

And thanks for the link, it was very interesting, particularily the part about nVidia using higher precision color rendering and how even back in the day, and support for more complex shader instructions, and how in spite of all this advanced features the FX series fell hard on their face in terms of performance because of some other architecture implementations like the 4x2 pipeline configuration.

It's interesting as well how nVidia was separarting itself from the unified shader architecture, so long ago, making completely separated pixel and vertex shader hardware units. Even to this day, nVidia would rather have this shader processors separated, as can be seen in the G80 architecture, quite a departure from Ati's use of unified shaders.

I have always been an ATI fan, but I'm Canadian also. None the less, ATI have rarely lied or cheated with their technology, and that's what got me hooked. The FX series, as I remember was a big publicity stunt, way way beyond comprehension. ATI's humble 325mhz 9700 stood there, calm, like a black belt Karate champion, waiting for the hits.

I remember reading a while back that the team that designed the 9700 chip is the same team that designed the award winning 8500 chip. Also, being the same team that designed the XBOX 360 GFX solution. That is the reason why ATI was trailing behind when the 6800 hit the market, as the original 9700 team was working hard for Microsoft's game box.

If that team had stayed full time for the GFX card market, we'd probably have had more substatial updates from the 9700 by that time, and Nvidia would of had huge competition for the 6800. That's what I suppose people expected back in 2004, and never happened.

 

[15th Warlock]

Didn't know about the Xenos design team being the same one behind the R300 (and the R200) If that's the case they deserve my respect

IMO Ati definitely has a history of designing GPUs with a more elegant architecture as opposed to nVidia's brute force approach, (funny how it used to be the other way around with nVidia fighting against 3dfx SLI video cards by using more elegant and efficient designs) though in the end, both companies produce excellent products, and it's admirable how competition between them has lead to reaching rates of 2x or even 3x the increase in performance every 12~18 months, certainly no other sector in the IT industry can claim such accomplishments.

I'm a fan of both teams, and I will always buy which ever card has the best price/performance ratio at a given time, I've always been like that, owning the full spectrum of video accelerator brand names from Trident to S3 to 3dfx to nVidia to Ati to nVidia back again.

I just hope all this AMD-Ati thing doesn't leave in the future nVidia as the only provider of discrete video card solutions, competition is always good, and there's no better time to be a gamer than today, when prices fall very fast and new technology hits the mainstream market sector faster than never before

 

[Tatty_Two]

I'm sorry, you're right, it had a 128bit memory interface, I was under the impression that both high end models were 256bits, but I guess I was wrong Sorry for the confussion

yeah but we are not talking about a proper 9700 here....just a 95series card flashed to 9700, but agree that the 5800 was a donkey as was the 5600 which I owned for about 2 weeks before I got rid of it and bought a 9600pro at the time.

 

[_33]

if the card support the 9800XT clocks you can flash to it, wich is your 9500?

The 9700 didn't have an F-buffer. I wouldn't bet on a successful bios flash.

 

[dccool879]

anyways we got http://cgi.ebay.com/Geforce-6800LE-...ryZ80187QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
i've read from different people and it seems the vast mojoroity of leadtek le's will mod to a 6800 vanilla (never read someone who couldnt do this softmod), and some lucky ones will have 6800 gt's without artifacts. 50 is a good price for it, considering some are getting really expenisive!! like this one, http://cgi.ebay.com/E-VGA-Geforce-6...oryZ3762QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem