DirectX 10 Shootout: Nvidia vs. ATI

It's truth time. Now that the first games using DirectX 10 have appeared, Nvidia and ATI have to face the real world and answer the question - which card offers the most performance under Vista? We look at Geforce 8x00 vs. Radeon 2x00 cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] index.html

Wow im both happy and sad after seeing that.
Happy that my "puny" 320 shows real good performance compared to "much better" cards.
And here i heard all week that my 320 is so much worse then the new Pro.

Sad cause i don't own a GTX or better...

Glad I did not wait to buy my card... I am enjoying it today instead of waiting for tomorrow...

Brilliant review much better than the budget DX10 one,AMD are up against it big time their new GPU better cream the Nvidea one or its bad news all round.

Going on the review i cant make a case for buying anthing other than a GTX and upwards (or sideways depending on how the new cards fair).
I hope they run the new cards through this set of benchmarks when they come out,and quickly to(im wondering if toms are still getting sent ref cards to test)seems to me that just latley you have to go to a different site to find a review of any newer cards or is it just me?
Would be nice to see them under DX9/XP as well as a lot of peoplwe still run it.
Mactronix

Am I the only one here that is shocked to see how much all of these cards blow with DX10? Do you remember all of the claims that not only was DX10 prettier but faster as well? Well we do we see these DX10 cards run faster than DX9 mode???? Give me a break...

700$ + for a card that cant run all games at highest resolution and max settings... wow

Using the 2900XT as a benchmark for an OC'd 2900Pro seems reasonable. A stock 2900Pro would under-perform a 2900XT in every way.

Overall the results are pretty shocking.

in company of heroes... 8600GTS performs better than 8800GTS... strange

All of those games tested are Nvidia optimised, so it's unfair to write ATI off.

I think I will stay with DX9 because of the 50-100% more performance, in Company Of Heroes theres very little graphics difference between DX9 & DX10 except for a crap load of performance drop under DX10. Buying a 24" monitor now seems like a bad idea after seeing the fps under Vista/DX10, DX9 is another story. Think I'll hold on to my 19" LCD for now.

I have a GTX and I'm glad I didn't wait to purchase the much heralded (by ATI fans anyway) 2900XT.

I don't see why the GTX won't run Crysis in all its DX10 glory. There appears to be ample overhead for next gen games.

I do agree that the 2900XT with 1 gig of GDDR4 memory should have been included, but it wouldn't have changed my opinion about the current line of ATI cards.

Nvidia rules the roost right now. And FPS/$ is a nice way of showing it.

Games with the same settings should run 10-15% faster in Vista than DX9 in XP.
Something is very wrong here. I guess the games tested are very NOT native DX10.

Taking a further look at the GPU frequencies of the tested cards, I see that the 2900 Xt that was tested was 743 mhz, whereas I note on Newegg, the top cards run at 800 mhz for the 512mb card and 825 mhz for the 1 gig card. That makes me wonder if a ATI card with a faster speed would have done better? Don't know and can't say for sure, but it leaves me wondering.

This does make a difference for me as I'm ordering parts for a new Vista machine build and I would like good information on which card is best, or best for the money. I run Nvidia cards on three of my four computers, but I'm not totally stuck on Nividia, but instead like a balance of performance for money spent.

You can't find any new games that aren't part of Nvidia's "TWIMTBP" program. Also, it doesn't guarantee the game will run better on Nvidia hardware. Look at Oblivion; it came out as a "TWIMTBP" title and ran considerably better on ATI hardware.

Atm DX10 is more of a super high quality level then what games are based on, you arent going to run every dx10 game in future on high are you, dont run every dx9 game on high.

Just wait until some proper dx10 games come out.

I agree with you. In principal it is always better to have a more complete representation of both players. I am actually more concerned with the low clocked card they used... most other benches I have seen do not show a big diff (if any at all) between the 1 gigger and the vanilla, but that is an 800 vs 825 mhz card... only a 25 mhz diff... NOT a 75mhz+ diff. And are there NO oc'd ati cards on the market? (that is a legit question, I thought there would be a few to be able to grab at least one...)

Other sites show similar issues though with other ati cards... the AA in WiC tanks it, but there is a patch for the game coming out (may already be out) that is supposed to fix that, so it may not be an ati driver thing but a game thing. (other games don't tank the card w/ AA like that one does) If I remember correctly Nv has been pushing their non-dx10 method of (old-school) AA and most twimtbp games optimize for it where ati is "proper" dx10 implementation... but that could be bogus memory on my part. Proper or not, the fact that a game patch is "fixing" it points at them not having it implemented correctly for the hardware.

Also, if you look at res above 1280 (and who runs under that after buying an 8800 or 2900?) you see many matches having the 2900 take the win over the 8800. Why do we even still have a 1024 res on these tests? Is there anyone still gaming at that size?! (unless you have 320 or less memory and you HAVE to) IMO that just removes frame buffer size as the large factor it is with AA and high resolutions and "equalizes" the smaller vram cards with their larger cousins. If you remove the 1024 from all calculations I would wager that the numbers would balance the 8800 640 and the 2900 much closer... maybe... probably... meh, I dont have time to check that, maybe I will tonight.

regardless, was a good article to combine with info from other sites.

This article also proves that gaming in Vista sucks arse right now and isn't worth a squirt of urine over XP. Give it about 2 years for Microsoft to fix their mistakes, for hardware (mainly GPUs) to catch up to the bloated OS and for mainstream DX10 games to be available.

Then "all of the sudden" gaming in Vista will be the best way to go.

Ahhh... you were expecting to have your cake AND eat it too? Surely you know better than that by now! Just think about Windows... every time a new version comes out, Microsoft tells us how much faster it is... and in reality, that's NEVER true. I'm sure I could dig up an article/press release about how much faster Vista is than XP... but what's the point?

Expecting, no not for a second... Surprised no one seems to be calling Microshaft on it, uhm yeah.

I honestly think there is some serious nvidia bias to this article. It's common knowledge that statistics can be manipulated to argue any point I think that is the case here. They did not use ATI's top card they used a lower end version of it. They compared 6 different versions of Nvidias 8800 and 1 of the 2900. I was unaware that the games were optimised for nvidia but even before that I could tell by the writing that this article was going to lean in favor of nvidia. Basically the first page said "haha we told you so and here's the proof". Further in the article the op jumps to the defense of nvidia blaming the game mechanics relying heavily on memory (this seemed like a very accurate analysis) but still sounded bias.

I'm a proud owner of an 8800 GTS 320 MB version and it pleases me to see my money was well spent however I often depend on Toms Hardware to make my comparisons as I could careless about ati vs. nvidia or amd vs. intel (I want the most bang for my buck). And with articles like this I lose faith in achieving a fair comparison from this site.

I thought I picked up that to, otherwise I would have thought (proove me wrong here, by all means) they would have a 2900 pro in it to compare to the 320

Memory Bug? I know there is some kind of 'bug' in some games like QW where the vid card refuses to use virtual memory, which is why framerates drop more than they should at 16 AA

I would also agree that this article comes across bias. Overclocked Nvidia cards and hand picked Nvidia hardware favoured games. My view is wait for other DX10 games to appear until writing ATI's offering off.

From the article leadin before the test:

"ATI simply needed more time - after all, Nvidia had six months to tweak its graphics drivers. Given enough time, ATI's drivers would be bound to improve, giving the Radeon 2900 XT the much-anticipated performance boost."

That sounds like a ready made excuse for ATI's lack of a better showing. nVidia has had six months or so to tweak drivers. And considering the memory bug in the 640 MB 8800GTS mentioned above, they are not done yet. But remember, the 2900 was supposed to ship concurrently with 8800's last winter. So ATI has had 6 months to tweak the hardware.

It seems to me that the reasons why the software is Nvidia tweaked is because there are really not a whole lot of ATI-tweaked games coming out right now. Maybe someone else can name a few mainstream titles if I'm wrong (wouldn't be the first time, nor the last). Considering that ATI took an extra 6 months to bring out the 2900, why would any software developers looking to get bleeding-edge performance write code for out-dated hardware?
Oh, and about the OC'd hardware- It's a good and relevant point to show that Tom's is comparing apples to oranges there. HOWEVER, if you ignore the OC'd versions, the price/framerate comparison is still valid.
How can anyone argue with the fact that the 2XXX series still can't handle any sort of AA/AF without dropping 50% on their framerates? SAD!
I'm still holding out hope that ATI still has some driver tweaks left up their sleeves for DX10 that will help improve performance. Nvidia needs some real competition on the top-end to help drag those ridiculously high prices down. Hell, I got my 8800gts640 for less than it sells today back in January for Godssake!!!