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Up against Radeon HD 5850 XF and GeForce GTX 460 SLI. Who wins?
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Up against Radeon HD 5850 XF and GeForce GTX 460 SLI. Who wins?
Very impressive! I was always an nVidia buyer untill I got a 5870 earlier this year and have been stoked with its bang4buck/temperature/audio/power draw. Good to see that ATI have paid attention to what they were falling behind on - tesselation and dual card scaling.
Can't wait to see some real 6970/6990 numbers, but theres so much choice now its hard to pick! One high end card or two mid range cards? Or another 5870 which will only set me back about £280.. choices choices.
My suggestion, in a purely personal capacity, would be to offload the HD 5870 to the Bay of Fleas and go for two HD 6850s.
I think it will still be cheaper to get another 5870, and the performance will be way better? If its from an architectural point of view.. I could just get one of the new high end ones..
The thing that would change this is the fact that the 6850s stay so cool under load when CF'd and use so little electricity. I really can't believe the 100w+ energy saving compared to the GTX 460s.
Still no minimum frame rates in Hexus benches... so sad.
Is it just me or does Crossfire scaling seem to be up considerably for the HD6 series versus the HD5?
it's a documented featureQuote:
Originally Posted by sammorris
Indeed, but I was expecting some marginal gains, not near-100% scaling in every test. I'm baffled as to why this wasn't possible before, and suddenly is now. I was expecting one HD6850 to take on a GTX460 1GB, but I was not expecting two to take on two 460s and win. That plus the fact you can run them with only two PCIe 6-pins and use less power than a GTX480 is super-impressive. They run pretty damn cool as well owing to the fact that ATI have finally understood they should leave the dual-slot coolers on the single 6-pin cards as reference, though am I right in thinking the reference version of the HD6850 is not retailing? (Same as with 4830)
Wow... In the conclusion, the author go as far as to imply that ''3D vision'' is a serious deciding factor, worthy enough to actually prevent him from calling a winner! Hexus people, please, raise you hands, all of you who currently use 3D vision, or plan to use it in the next 12 months! I'm waiting... What? No one??? Who would have though!!! Minus 1 or 2 for the credibility right there.
At the same time, he carefully omitted to mention that AMD now support stereoscopic 3D as well. The last thing going for Nvidia, as far as ''worthy'' exclusive feature is concerned, is CUDA. Until OpenCL takes over that is. We will all be VERY happy to commemorate the death of one of the last proprietary format in the GPU world. The same is true for the 30ish games supporting PhysX; it's also living on borrowed time until OpenCL and DirectCompute takes over in 2011.
He also omitted to overclock both cards. The XFX 6850 Black is already clocking over 1Ghz @ 1.3V on air, and this is the first silicon batch! The 460 top at 850Mhz on air, and that's with cherry picked GPU that run very hot and consume a lot of power at that peed.
The price/performance/power ratio is clearly in favor of the AMD card here. Feature wise, my bet is also with AMD. 6 screens Eyefinity with ONE card, better quality HD decode, improved anti-aliasing etc...Far less power, far better overclockability, better and more useful feature set, for the same price. Why the fence???
I got a winner for you alright and it's obviously the 6850. Unless you already own a 460 and want to go SLI, or if CUDA is actually a deciding factor, then you have no reason to buy a 460 over a 6850. Oh, and the BOM for the 6850 is a lot cheaper than the 460, meaning that Nvidia is pretty much stretching the profit margin very very thin already as it is and AMD can still chop the price further if necessary. Not good for Nvidia.
look like a lose-lose situation for Nvidia. Can we say checkmate, when you also consider Cayman is around the corner? And then Antilles? LOL... As it is, the 580 is only a PR stunt, paper launch card at best and it's already beaten on paper. Nvidia is more and more looking like 3DFX: Desperate and dying. I rest my case.
Ramon
Yeah 3D Vision is worth a mention, but nothing more. That is a bit weird. I don't usually read concluding blurb much though, the results will speak for themselves, and few reviewers are totally unbiased.
To be fair, AMD's Stereoscopic 3D efforts are absolute crap. Is a shame, Driverheaven commented on their experiences.