ATI 2xxx HD

Post by **Ddrak** » Wed May 16, 2007 10:15 am

Well, ATI's new DX10 cards are out. Been reading the reviews (and there's lots of stuff to read):

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/05/14/ ... _from_ati/
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2988

Seems it's pretty well priced ($400 for top end) to compete with nVidia's offerings, though doesn't match the 8800GTX's performance at the top end. Tom's and Anand seem to differ on their power usage measurements so not sure what to read into that. What I don't see is any sort of DX10 benchmarking, which is where I suspect the ATI card will shine having a bunch more "stuff" in the chip devoted to taking load off the CPU than nVidia does. It's a little unfortunate that they haven't even tried to look at that side of the performance equation because, really, isn't that the whole focus of a DX10 card?

Dd

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Wed May 16, 2007 11:58 am

It's certainly not looking very good in the Lost Planet DX10 demo.

Post by **Ddrak** » Wed May 16, 2007 12:04 pm

Really? Damn. Looked so pretty on paper too...

Dd

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Wed May 16, 2007 5:24 pm

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/505/1/

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=409

AMD to Reviewers:
Tomorrow, NVIDIA is expected to host new DirectX 10 content on nZone.com in the form of a â€œLost Planetâ€

Post by **Ddrak** » Thu May 17, 2007 9:05 am

I downloaded the Lost Planet Demo last night and I just have to say that I hope people like playing in a blizzard! The snow was pretty amazing to see the whole screen fill with actual flakes but did there really have to be so much? Aside from that, getting it to run required .ini file hacking so that was a little painful.

Sifting through the benchmarks, the Call of Juarez demo seems to have the ATI card performing better than nVidia, but again there's a lot of questions in my mind about companies providing specific "benchmark" versions of games to demo the abilities of their cards. Seems to negate any meaningful comparison.

Overall, seems like ATI has a bunch of driver issues to work through before we can see anything. Still disappointing from them, but we saw the same thing from nVidia on the 8800 launch too I guess.

Dd

Finglefinn · Post by **Finglefinn** » Thu May 17, 2007 10:17 am

I just upgraded to a 7900 a couple months ago. So when is the 8800 price going to come down? Next year? $300 looks like the cheapest 8800 I can find. And that's the GTS version. I think I'll wait a year before upgrading again.

Post by **Ddrak** » Thu May 17, 2007 10:25 am

Waiting at least a year is a good idea if you just got a 7900.

Dd

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Thu May 17, 2007 2:14 pm

Ddrak wrote:Overall, seems like ATI has a bunch of driver issues to work through before we can see anything. Still disappointing from them, but we saw the same thing from nVidia on the 8800 launch too I guess.

It just worries me to see some of the problems the ATI card had with Lost Planet. It's hard to tell if it's Vista, DX10, the game, or ATI's drivers that have issues.

Hopefully things will get fixed up soon. I'm going to need a DX10 card soon, and I'd be happy to buy another nVidia card, but having another choice is good too.

Post by **Ddrak** » Thu May 17, 2007 5:45 pm

It's hard to tell if it's Vista, DX10, the game, or ATI's drivers that have issues.

Game engine development summarized in one easy sentence.

Dd

Select · Post by **Select** » Thu May 17, 2007 5:58 pm

7900 as well. I'd wait, it's a great card.

Finglefinn · Post by **Finglefinn** » Fri May 18, 2007 9:59 am

Ddrak wrote:
It's hard to tell if it's Vista, DX10, the game, or ATI's drivers that have issues.
Game engine development summarized in one easy sentence.

Dd

Not a job I'm ever going to have in my life. For example, I thought I fried my MB when I put my DVD-RW drive in a few weeks ago. Yeah... not. The CPU fan and whatnot was so plugged full of dust that it just quit working. And I needed a friend of mine to diagnose that for me.

<--- loses at 'puters