G-Card wars

[deakie]

its interesting to watch the war between the graphic cards as they heat up but seriously, what is the difference betwen them when they go squeezing for that extra byte of performance.

well, the current war is all centred around the hardware lighting engine. this is the real battle for the immediate future.

with the advent of ragdoll physics and realtime lighting, the manufacturers are on the hop to ensure their direct x and opengl performances are optimal.

recently, we had the trade offs wit the nvid and ati pros, where the battle was for speed. here, both manufacturers were slogging it out using drivers(ati) and memory speed(nvid) to slap each other into second place. dominance of performane is the order of the day when fans go to spend their money.

with ati's 9800 pro, the ppl were granting kudos to the ati team with the idea that they can only get better.
however, the advent of the 5950 ultra, has seen nvid coming back into the foray with a 25mhz increase on the engine of the gpu.
this will no doubt shake ati into action again, or so we hope... :D

only the consumers ca benefit from this tug o war.

im looking at this closely as my lil matrox cannot handle the newer gmes coming out and i also need something that is very good in terms of 2d for film. you can easily see my dilemna.

next post!

[deakie]

with ati calling their latest series of drivers, catalyst to lend to them the credence of speed, its no wonder that references to the 5950 ultra are termed emergency. hahahha
still, nvid also produced a 5700 ultra to diminish any talk of more affordable cards in the ati range. they just dont want to sew but to completly sew up the market.

a closer look by myself and it becomes obvious what is going on.
its all about ddr ram. as you go up the scale of cards, there is a general increase in the speed of the memory. generally going from 5ns to 2.5ns.
engines remain basically at the same speed.
also, they incorporate the dual channel technology to reduce latency in frames/sec timings for games.

so for nvid to squeeze another 25mhz out of the same engine, tells me they are now clocking. so i went looking for the 5950 to see what it looked like and sure enough, there is the tell tale sign. a cooling system sitting on top of the card. however, its cleverly designed by having a channel that sucks in from inside to outside by having vanes that output through the metal itself at the back where you would connect your cable.

yes, ok so the 5200 runs at 400mhz and the 5900 series runs at 800mhz. but thats the ram. the engine bubbles along nicely at 400 and rises if mem serves me right to 475 on the new 5950 unltra.

however, the ati runs its ram at lower speeds but have slightly higher engine factors.

ooooo.....this can only get better.

so if i buy a 5200 and use the softy to clock, add more cooling, like a big a** fan, check out which bios's are available for yanking out the last morsel of speed, then really, i would have saved myself a pretty penny. ok ok, i'll have to cool the mem too, that should swat up my performance no end, but it could be worth the fun and i gain in economising.

who cares about error rates when the very protocol you are on(udp) doesnt even bat an eye when the wrong info gets passed. i could be swanning it with the top end if i play with my fans right...... ;D 8)

lets see what they will come up next with as the hardware lighting engine takes its place among the norms of gaming and vid cards.... :)

all in all though, ati should brace itself for a fight, for the little lapse nvid had while exploring 3d glasses for the vid card, may be over, who's to say whats next, considering they are now giving viatech a serious run for their money in the motherboard chip wars. nv3 is already on the market. via cannot afford to sit still with nvid being primary vid chip manufacturers as well. they may start doing a microsoft and match things up in ways via cannot hope to match.... ???

[Skillachi]

Question have any of you techies heard about XGI Graphics Cards before. They just came out with a 256 MB Graphicard recently and they claim that theirs can roll with the best and sometimes even do better than the rest of the best, but then again they are supposed to say that. But anyway, anybody ever heard about them? anything good to say about them?

[Nastrodamus]

I have Skillachi....

Reports are that they provide good graphics and utilze directX 9.

At this point however it is going to be hard to compete with Nvida and ATI because of the names that they have established for themselves..... unless they have are good marketing strategy planned!!!!