WIll ati retake throne of fastest gpu again?

8xaa and up at 2560 the 295 begins to lag behind I believe.

 

Are u implying that the 295 stutters?

On a side note i like ur setup quadfire user. :banana:

 

Yet won't a number of games be unplayable at that type of res aa irregardless of the pc's setup and whichever gpu u are using?

I doubt that many ppl even own 30 inch screens.

 

SOme people have told me ati has better quality in terms of the image. Yet i have used both ati and nvidia gpus and cannot see the diff.

Is it apparent in say watching a movie?

 

I'm not sure i agree with this at all. The 4870 had the beating of the gtx260 when they were both released. And those 2 cards were in direct competition. I bought a 4870 because it was also much cheaper.
I own a gtx 260 aswell, but to be honest i have had nothing but trouble with it lately, the new nvidia drivers are awful on my system for some reason. I'm not an ati fanboy, but i have had far less problems with their products than nvidia's. So basically no your statement was incorrect, and at this moment in time i personally have more confidence in ati's products.

 

I think this will be an interesting read for those who wonder what ATI's strategy is w.r.t. market share, building the fastest graphics card and such:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3469&p=1

 

Very cool read, thanks for posting it.

They are definitely some marketing geniuses over at ATI.

 

I think ATI would probably stay on top for the most part, because they cost less. I think the numbers ppl get in bench marks would most likely show up on that system only, 'cause even two systems are bulit the same dosen't mean they will run exactly the same. Thats just what I think.

 

I think what the article shows is that ATI realized that having the fastest graphics card will appeal only to a small amount of people (although most people visiting these forums tend to believe otherwise I think ). The biggest market is the one for mainstream graphics cards, so ATI decided to try and become leader in that segment.

Their 'top mainstream card', the HD4870, turned out to be almost equal to nVidia's top card at that time, at a significantly lower price. So ATI fueled the high-end war again, at least in the eyes of some, while they were aiming to overtake the mainstream market with good, cheap, low-power consumption cards.

 

I like ATI having the throne of price/performance...nothing matters more

 

Fastest of not but when are people going to realize that if they want the fastest card hopefully they have all the high end gear to run it at its full potential or it just just a waste. The main gear for me would be make sure you can afford a 30' monitor. Only gaming at this res is worth it for the uber cards that will come out.

 

Amen, brother!!

 

Short answer: Yes! I think so anyway. It's all about preference really. That being said, motion picture hardware acceleration on ATi cards has never caused me any problems... ...unlike Purevideo decoders back in the day.

At the time of buying my 3850, nVidia couldn't provide hardware acceleration for .avi files. I know that ATi cards accelerate all video formats. I don't know if 9xxx series or 2xx series do now.

All the games I play are optimized for ATi, so it's probably a little biased to suggest the graphics are better.

 

for me its about smoothness not speed. i think the 295 is winning atm but not my much and that might change with a new driver release.

next build i will consider going ati and amd again. from my experiences i'm not 2 sure intel and nvidia are worth the extra cash.

both have driver issues but i think nvidia is the lesser of two evils as it were. i really wish nvidia and ati would merge and concentrate on getting the best performance for us the consumers not out to beat each other.

personally im still 50/50 as 2 whether the 295 is free from issues like micro-stutter.

but in answer to the question will ati regain the fastest gpu crown? who knows? tbh i dont care..

but i dont see questions like this very important. more important are issues like drivers/microstutter/sli and xfire support..

 

It doesn't mather who has the most powerful card at the moment if you ask me, it's way more important that both ATi and Nvidia have good cards on the market so that the competition brings down the price.

Just my thoughts.

 

i agree 100 percent. people should be less interested in speed and fps and more into smoothness...graphical quality.

2 much crappy my fps are 100 etc etc when in fact people dont mention you get micro-stutter or crashes.

i think this issue has been long overdue..

 

But if they merged they then could charge us whatever they saw fit, and having no competition wouldn't stoke the flames of development IMO!

Whereas ATM, hey guys ATI just made an awesome card, quick lets make one better.. then hey guys NV just made a better card again lets lower the prices of all our cards and make one better!

But if they were on company it would be very different!

 

Sounds like you need to read the reviews....the 295 is not 2x 260 55nm, it's two hybrid cards between the 260 and the 280 based on 55nm. It has the memory bandwidth/size of the 260 but the same number of stream processor and texture filtering units as the GTX 280.


GTX 295:
240x2 Stream Processors
896mb of VRAM
448bit Memory Interface
28 ROPs
80x2 TFUs


GTX 260 (55nm):
216 Stream Processors
896mb of VRAM
448bit Memory Interface
28 ROPs
72 TFUs


There is the difference between the 55nm GT200b on the 295 and the 260. It's basically two "270's" if the card existed, they did this so the card would overtake the 4870X2.

This is obvious when you consider the fact that a 4870 1Gb is slightly faster (in some cases) than a 55nm GTX 260 C216. So NVIDIA added the additional stream processors and texture units to boost the performance to always outperform the 4870 1Gb.

The funny thing is they have optimized the 295 so much that in certain benchmarks it beats out GTX 280 SLI and that just doesn't make sense. I've seen it on 3 or 4 review sites who all say the same thing, that NVIDIA did some additional optimizations on the 295 only, not all GT200 cards.

 

To me, it's always about price vs performance. I don't see any justification in spending an additional 90%-110% of the value of a base card just to get an extra 10fps at most in power hungry games.

As far as actually taking the throne for the most powerful card, it always has and always will teeter totter between ATI and Nvidia. One will release an amazing card ( usually for an outrageous price because they know suckers will buy them ), just to have a new card released 3-4 months later that tops that.

 

I think people need to keep in perspective that the 8800 GTX cost more at launch than the GTX 295 and the Ultra was $300-$400 more than the GTX 295 at launch. Due to the economy and huge competition (which is why I love ATI (owned 3 Red Team cards)) people are able to purchase "the fastest single PCI-E slot GPU in the world" for less than the previous generation. I couldn't believe it when I heard the $499 price mark, that is when I knew I had to get it. When you realize that the GTX 260 C216 was running for anywhere from $240 to $280 and the GTX 295 had higher performance on each GPU than any 260 version, it was an obvious decision for me. Especially realizing that I'm on a Crossfire board so I couldn't buy two of any NVIDIA cards and I was unhappy with ATI driver support (4850 Crossfire) it was the only card that could suit me at 1920x1200 and last me at this resolution for at least a few years to come.

Crysis all Highest @1920x1200 with 2xAA 40fps avg is really impressive on a sub $200 CPU