Current State of Play : Nvidia and ATI

Hi All

Im not looking for a "which is the bestest" thread but more a quick update on where Nvidia and ATI are at present. I've been out of the loop for a year and it seems to have shifted slightly.

It used to be that ATI and Nvidia were pretty much on par with ATI edging ahead slightly a couple of years ago (which is when I switched from Nvidia to ATI). Now with a new card upgrade looming it appears (from my research anyway) that Nvidia hold a bit more power with gaming than ATI.

My reasoning is the PhysX function which appears to be a great addition to a crowded market (now that its integrated and not an addon card).

Any opinions on this tho? Has ATI lost out?

There's nothing between the top of the line chips in terms of raw performance (new drivers on both sides), until you get to multi-screen rigs.
But the ATI cards are cheaper and come bundled with free games, and the NV has Physx. Right now it comes to what games you play. Do they use Physx ? Does your favourite game benefit from any brand-specific advantages like AvP ?

Tarinder said the following:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/2...ml#post2677777

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tarinder

Also, NVIDIA rolled out new beta GeForce drivers yesterday that offer up to 15 per cent extra performance, though the majority of gains are sub-five per cent.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/art...vers-released/

We took a good look at the improvements and decided that, on balance, the gains weren't significant enough for a full-on analysis, per Catalyst 12.11.

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As usual,it all comes to price and whether you overclock IMHO.

Hmmm. Thats quite a performance hike.

I don't think its worth picking a brand purely because of one game, as you're bound to get bored of it, however I was under the impression the PhysX function was viable in a number of games.

I hear what you're saying about price. Personally I don't really overclock unless its tried and tested by others :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Diggah

Hmmm. Thats quite a performance hike.

I don't think its worth picking a brand purely because of one game, as you're bound to get bored of it, however I was under the impression the PhysX function was viable in a number of games.

I hear what you're saying about price. Personally I don't really overclock unless its tried and tested by others :P

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The latest AMD drivers had a big performance boost:

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...ormance-gains/

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...1_Performance/

:p

General performance wise they're as similar as makes no real difference for the same price point - what you tend to find is they slightly stagger the price points, so you might get a slightly faster card from nVidia at the top end (just for example), but that it costs a bit more. Lower down the range you might find an AMD card faster than the equivalent nVidia card, but shops therefore sell it for a bit more as well. One thing is that at the highest end nVidia are the more energy efficient for this particular round, bucking the usual trend.

That basically means you get your monies worth whoever you go for.

As for differences between the two - in our house we've run both for years. The general impressions I have are that nVidia cards tend to work better for new games when they're first released, unless they are AMD supported games then AMD drivers take a little while to catch up. nVidia cards seem to be better for upscaling and video playback as well. The drivers for nVidia are less good these days in my opinion in terms of compatibility/stability - the best driver for a game tends to be the one released about 6 months after the game comes out, and newer drivers can be worse for older games. AMD drivers have improved no end, and can usually be trusted to be very solid these days as well as having some nice image quality features.

Hardware wise we've had a better experience of AMD cards surviving - in the cards we've had nVidia have perhaps pushed the manufacturing a bit and they've tended to fail after a few years.

PhysX we have not found to be any benefit at all - the titles that use it are so few and far between, and anyway I would prefer developers used open standards so all PCs could enjoy them. For more general computer AMD GCN seems at least as powerful as nVidia's kepler - more actually if you look at the reviews that test it, but again it makes no difference in games.

In the future TXAA could be a nice AA mode for nVidia cards, if you don't mind a small loss of sharpness. AMDs PRT could be a really nice texture mapping trick, if games use it, which they probably won't. AMD seem to be doing something neat with global illumination as well, if the results of the latest engine from codemasters is anything to go by (Dirt Showdown) - I'm OK with that if really is something neat rather than software nobbling of the way a competitor does things.

So umm. you basically get a great card whichever you go for this generation. We're currently running a gtx 560 and an hd 7870 for reference.

The way i see it amd currently have better performance for value, due to their cards ability to overclock a lot, surpassing their nvidia counterparts. However if you only plan to play nvidia optimised games then nvidia are obviously the better option (and vice versa), there are pretty even without overclocking so tbh whatever you pick you will have a high end card.

The latest catalyst 12.9 has made a big difference to my 7970M, it stuggled badly even on some old games prior to that. It was a fraction on the cost compared to the nvidia models.