Which ATi is better?

[Rook Zimbabwe]

Because of an eBay blunder in bidding I find myself with an ATi 9550 and an ATi X1050 AGP 256mb Graphics card.

My query is: Which one is better. I have played Doom3 on both and it is liquid smooth and fast. 1024X768 32bit on both...

Is there anything that would gie either one an edge?

Oh and if ATi bought as much Advertisement space as nVidia more legions of fanboys would swagger around insisting ATi was better... (For some reason I can't use that as a POLL pick!)

That is why magazines like CPU review nVidia with a huge hardon!!!

[maw]

Currently I cannot recommend AMD/ATI for either GPU or CPU. Their hardware is simply inferior at the moment. And why buy inferior products? A couple of years ago I had an Athlon X2 4400+ because then AMD was superior to Intel's Prescott fiasco! I also had Radeon 9700, and later 9800, when they where far superior to anything nVidia managed to produce (anyone remember the leafblower FX5800? ).

Since buying up ATI AMD doesn't seem to be able to catch a break. Neither their CPU's nor their GPU's turn out the way, I assume, both they and their customers expected. And right now my major concern is that AMD might not survive actually, seeing as AMD is now worth less than they paid for ATI. That would leave nVidia and Intel without competition... Need I say more than Creative...

Though I'll never forgive ATI for writing Catalyst Control Center in .NET...

[Num3]

nvida...

I had experiences with both, and nvidia is much better in terms of drivers and less hardware problems with memories, motherboards, cpu's...

[thefool]

Sadly Maw is right. Nvidia leads the way currently. ATI is behind. Its not long time since it was the other way around, but it will turn again, perhaps. But this time i'm running nvidia and intel, last time ati and amd.

[Tipperton]

Ever since the Pentium divide bug and Intel's initial response that they would not replace processors with the bug, my opinion of Intel has been rather low so I've always used AMD processors and have never had a problem with any of them, so I will continue to choose AMD over Intel.

My one experience with ATI was awful, the drivers were so unstable they rendered the system practically useless. I went back to nVidia and have never looked anywhere else since. Unlike my ATI experience, I have never had any problems of any kind with nVidia's chips or drivers.

[PB]

nVidia. Always. No question.

[Foz]

nVidia, for the only reason that their drivers work a LOT better on Linux than ATI's.

I am hoping that since AMD now own them, they will be producing decent Linux drivers soon.

I actually have an nVidia 6200 in my machine while I have an ATI X1900 in a drawer gathering dust. It's a sad state when I am actually using a massively inferior card simply because of driver issues.

[DarkDragon]

I found a bug in ATI and GLSL, where it couldn't even understand that you want to pass the element of an array to a method. It throws senseless errors everywhere. There's no real error-description like on nVidia.

On some nVidia Hardware there's a smaller bug, where you can't write gl_FragColor within multiple if sections, like that:

Code: Select all

if(mode == 0) {
  gl_FragColor = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
} else if(mode == 1) {
  gl_FragColor = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
} else {
  gl_FragColor = vec4(0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0);
}

You have to do it like here:

Code: Select all

vec4 color;
if(mode == 0) {
  color = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
} else if(mode == 1) {
  color = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
} else {
  color = vec4(0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0);
}
gl_FragColor = color;

The error message even gives you the whole assembler-source of the compiled shader with "internal error" as header.
On ATI you would just get "Error: I don't know what to do with it.".

I found out, that the nVidia bug was because of having oCol as source register in a command, but oCol is write-only. But the ATI bug.. I have never found out why it is there.

[blueznl]

nVidia is way ahead. I've thus far used Geforce256 (yeah, the very old one ), Geforce 4 Ti, Geforce 6800GT, and now 8800GTX. Oh, and a bunch of Geforce4MX's. All working well.

I've had endless problems with ATI chipsets... poor performace, artifacts on screen, and very, very, very bad multiple monitor support.

Sad thing is: I'm an AMD fan, and I only use an Intel box because a. performance is great, and b. I got it cheap.

(Let me add that in real world applications I've seen the AMD X2 series perform very nice, much nicer that they are given credit for by the tests.)

It's just that I could buy this machine for such a good price, I just couldn't justify not to buy an Intel

[Derek]

I've got an old computer with an nvidia ti4600 that I think is still more powerful than the ati one in my new-ish laptop, an X1250.

Nvidia any day.

[Tipperton]

The nVidia chips I've used (in order) are Riva 128, GeForce 256, GeForce FX5950 Ultra, GeForce 6800 Ultra, and my current GeForce 7800GS.

For my upgrade to a dual core 64 bit system I'm trying to decide between a GeForce 8800GTS or a GeForce 8800GT.

The 8800GT looks more powerful but it's standard clock speed is faster than the GTS' so it's kind of hard to tell if the better specs are simply becuase it runs faster.

The deciding factor will be whether I can find a graphics card that isn't over clocked. Besides not believing in over clocking there are lots of complaints about the over clocked cards running very hot and burning out in a couple months or less.

From the pictures of the cards, I suspect the problem is because the manufactures use the reference design's fan and heat sink which is really only design to disipate heat generated when running at stock speeds and can't handle the extra heat over clocking produces.

So far I've found a couple of GTS based cards configured to run at stock speeds but have not been able to find a single GT based card that isn't over clocked.

FWIW: Steam just did another hardware survey of it's members a month or so back and the results of the survey shows that about 63% of the survey responders use nVidia and about 32% use ATI.

[Mistrel]

GeForce 2 Ultra, Quadro 2 Pro, Quadro DCC, Quadro 4 750 XGL, GeForce 6800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS.

Nvidia. It just works. :roll:

[Thalius]

To the ATIs the X1050 is better.

Basically its a Question wheter you want PS 2.0 or not .
Driverwise i say Nvidia (sicne their drivers run at least). ATI Cards in Terms of GPU Power / HW ( especially the new Series ) has some very very nice features (such as the new programmable 512 bit registers which you can for ex use as additional CPU ... and the R6x series now is a power- saver while NV still eats Wattage ) which blows NVs totally away...

The only ATI Driver Issue i had ever was on Linux ( Their linux drivers suck ... ) so i went back to the opensource driver ( which works flawlessly even with 3d now .. so *shrug* .. - tho i admit its just an R200 =P ).

I havent been buying cheapüo cards such as the Hightech, Excalibur or such crap - they always had crappy pic quality and crappy drivers ( no matter of ati or nv ) .. so hands off from them.

I ve been using ati and nvidia for years - so currently if you want to use linux get an NV ... easer to install. Or wait til January when AMD releases the rest of the Chipspecs to the Opencommunity ( yay !! ) - which will make it possible to run even teh newest cards on opensourced drivers under linux ( theres a huge upgrade coming ). So finally teh ATI guys are off teh driverchain hehe....

Aside from that my ATI ( Build by ATI - not Powered by ... ) have been stable and well running all the time. So i wonder a lil about theese much comments on the ATI side .. i guess theres more cheap crapcards with ( mostly old old ) ATI chips on them...

ti4600 that I think is still more powerful than the ati one in my new-ish laptop, an X1250.

your definitivelly doing something wrong .. lol =P

But ofc one should know how to properly configure a system ... =P since i havent seen one comp which wasnt a server which was properly setup yet .... not in the surely 1000 machines i installed ... :roll: but thast offtopic..

Thalius

[Derek]

ti4600 that I think is still more powerful than the ati one in my new-ish laptop, an X1250.

your definitivelly doing something wrong .. lol =P

I know it's not but it just seems to work better, probably because the laptop is using shared memory (I think).

[Tipperton]

Aside from that my ATI ( Build by ATI - not Powered by ... ) have been stable and well running all the time. So i wonder a lil about theese much comments on the ATI side .. i guess theres more cheap crapcards with ( mostly old old ) ATI chips on them...

When I tried ATI and had all the driver problems, it was with an ATI built card and their best (at the time) chipset, so it wasn't a cheap card or an old chipset. Plain and simple, it was ATI's crappy drivers. Never again.

I also don't buy cheap video cards either, the Riva 128 and GeForce 256 cards were made by Creative Labs, the GeForce FX5950 Ultra and GeForce 6800 Ultra cards were made by LeadTek, and the GeForce 7800GS card is made by eVGA. My next card will likely be a LeadTek since they seem to be the only manufacturer that produces cards running at stock speeds. Everyone else appears to be over clocking their cards.

I know it's not but it just seems to work better, probably because the laptop is using shared memory (I think).

It probably is, every laptop I've ever looked at used a portion of main memory for video memory.