is ATI going to get their drivers in order?

PD had higher clock, more cache, DDR2 compared to athlon x2 and still...

lol

Not to mention, a lot of games are optimized to run on Nvidia cards nowadays and not the other way around. The games I've seen that don't have the Nvidia the way its meant to be played logo, seem to have the 3870 and 8800gt at pretty much the same level.

I have been wondering when ATI cards are going to be able to run AA without a huge drop in frame rates, guess this is it. Although when the 8800GTX first came out the drivers were not so good, but with time it got much better. If ATI can't get the next two drivers running with good AA then its too late for the series of cards.

ATI's and Nvidia's cards have different architectures like someone said but they didn't explain what it was. Nvidia's cards have a great design to run DX9 games because they require tons of texture units. Because of these units in DX9 they can pump out the frame rates and will be fine with AA because AA in DX9 is tied to the number of texture units. ATI's cards in comparison have tons and tons of shader units but relatively few texture units. the ATI cards are designed specifically for DX10 which does everything with shaders, including AA. I dont know what ATI was thinking by releasing a card this far ahead of the software but it wasnt a good move.

And to all you who are thinking "but Crysis and a couple other have DX10 and the ATI cards don't perform well in those." Well its pretty easy, ANY game that is not VISTA ONLY is not a dx10 game. It will be a DX9 game with some "dx10 like" effects. To take advantage of the massive amount of shader units in the ATI cards the game has to be written from the ground up for dx10. The ATI cards should be far superior in dx10 games but seeing none exist they are currently losing to cards that are designed for todays games and not tomorrows.

I remember quite some time ago (couldn't fint it) there was an article on weather AA should be done in hardware versus software, but some games (Oblivion) without AA looked as good or better than some with AA. I played Oblivion for 500 hours on a 7800GTX without AA and I never noticed any jagged edges or any uneven lines.

Now Ghost Recon Advanced Warefighter doesn't even support AA, it has something Ubisoft calls "Edge Smooth" which makes the game blurry or out of focus. It seems Oblivion had AA built into the game engine which is why it was so hard to run on most systems including mine. I think this AA debacle needs to be addressed by the card makers and software companies, because a game that doesn't support AA can't use it even if the hardware can.

Oh good so I'm not the only one who noticed this......

I suspect that we will see more GDDR4 once graphic cards move beyond 512MiB since it is more power efficient than GDDR3. Architectural NVidia will steer clear of GDDR4 as lower latencies are more important to them then thanks to their high clocked Shaders. For a highly parallel GPU, like AMDs R6xx series for example, GDDR4 is a gift. With a nice, wide bus, GDDR4 should really work great for AMD as long as they can keep the GPU speed up.
I suspect that Nvidia won't jump on GDDR4 like AMD did and that will keep it more expensive and finally make it not competitive price/performance wise until GDDR5 arrives.

Don't even begin to tell me what you think I should be doing, the last time I checked I don't live in a communist country where I have lost my freedom of speach. Show me where I bashed ATI, if you can. All I stated is during a game no AA didn't bother me, get a grip on yourself. FACT:Nvidia cards don't suffer as much as of a frame drop when using AA compared to ATI's cards, if you can't handle truth then it seems like a personal problem to me. I NEVER said anything about ATI drivers causing crashes or instability, did I?

@strangestranger You seemed to have missed everyone intent, were talking about standards for AA. Example,

If you have a problem with where this thread has gone then beat it! I can't stand winers!!

I think it is extremely humorous that you think we all live in a communist country where people don't have freedom of speach. Your request is denied because I live in the USA and the last time I checked I still live here.

I thought it was deferred lighting?

systemlord, lol take it easy. I think you read his comment wrong. I believe the only part of strangers comment aimed at you was the first two words. The rest of it was a comment toward the OP.

I guess its that some of the posters (there were a few) were assuming my pictures of GPU-Z were fake, "a poster stated, "you had it coming for posting fake pictures". If someone really wants to piss me off is accuse me of something that I didn't do. Then I have many posters PM'ing me telling me what a dumna** I am, and if that doesn't stop soon...

My thread came under fire when the other post was made, "In responce to Systemlords Bullshyt. The PM's won't stop now as I have even pleaded with them nicely to quit pm'ing me with bad language and insults, you though the post ended badly just have a look at the pms.

Alright, I was unaware of this big on-going battle I guess. Kinda explains why you would take offense to a comment that seemed innocent to me.

*puts on flame retardent suit*

O yeah, I wish I had a pie for every face that called me a cheat or for faking my GPU-Z and 3DMark scores! Anyway back to the thread topic, I think Nvidia will use GDDR3 for awhile because of the latecy hit for going from GDDR3 to GDDR4. Remember that going from DDR2 to DDR3 is a small performance difference.

Its a little funny in the end, because I was right and they were wrong and now all those pm's just shows how much more ignorant they were. It has stopped for now so I'll let them slide, but if I get anymore then the flames of hell will be known to them.

It was one post that I feel I couldve worded better, but why cant people have a quick giggle at their own expense. My post was simply showing how easy it is to fake benchmark and gpu-z scores / stats and add them to a forum.

Systemlord couldve avoided feeling insulted by simply taking my thread for what it was... a joke.

It seems too many people on here feel their 'online reputation' is more important than anything else. Which is silly, because how many of us on here will ever meet one another?

Since my thread, I dont believe I've said anything more derogatory against him, or anyone else... but people do need to chill their asses and possibly get laid or something.

ATI drivers have come as far as they can with the current line of products, only things likely to improve by any measure will be dx10 performance, dx9 under vista performance, and crossfire and crossfireX performance, plus games that still need some better profiling, COD4 & Crysis come to mind.

ATI performance lag boils down to 2 things:

1) Weak texturing ability, especially in comparison to 'older' Nvidia 8 series cards,

2) 'The way it's meant to be played' is all pervasive, debate the causes of that among yourselves, but that means these titles are made with Nvidia cards in mind.

Ive read some ridiculous posts saying that shouldn't have that much effect, but if thats the case then Nvidia wouldn't be doing it, or working with developers at all, they would simply hand over a bag of cash and say: "there you go, now please put our logo on at program startup, have a nice day'.

Taking big hits with AA & AF enabled is down to taking a different route with GPU architecture, which ATI consciously made with open eyes some time ago. They decided to go that route so Im not sure if it could be called a flaw in their cards, but there you go it happened anyway. Ive read it'll come in handy when dx10.1 is the defacto standard as dx9.c is today (forget dx10 for a few months yet people) and ATI are getting a thorough grounding as to how to implement this in hardware and software, but in the meantime (which could be a long, long meantime) their cards lag behind Nvidias with filters enabled, and their reputation has suffered accordingly. Nvidia will (apparently) have to make a similar move themselves in the future, so they might be behind ATI in this aspect of GPU design and at a disadvantage in the future, but this future is still sometime away (dx10.1 only games being the norm. Miles away then!).

Cheers

Yeah, yours is obviously better than my 7800GT CO edition but suffers in the same games. I kept the 7800GT for a spare, and it was an OK card. But Oblivion was a quick sign of times to come for that card. I say quick because I was playing Oblivion when I first made a swap from AGP (A64 & 6800U) to PCI-e and the 7800GT was my first PCI-e card. But I bought the 7800GT before buying Oblivion so I didn't take that games performance into consideration. As it turned out the 7800GT wasn't much better than the 6800U in that game so it didn't earn my respect by any means. But it got replaced by an X1800XT right away and then I could enjoy the new PCI-e rig.

Anyway, after Oblvion, I found the 7800GT was terrible at Need for Speed Carbon, and now of course Crysis, COD4, UT3, etc. make the card look older than it is even. I wish I had sold the 7800GT and kept the X1800XT instead; but the X1800XT brought in more money of course.

The 7 series was a bit weak on the shaders if I recall correctly. Funny thing is that I don't remember the X1800 being a shader powerhouse either. It wasn't until the X1900 that ATI really upped the shader count.

Not flaming in any way... but Oblivion is horrible with jaggies. Not to say I didn't play without AA, as my ATI 9600 xt and the following x800 GTO couldn't really handle it, either. But, it was extremely noticable. I would even go to say it is one of the worst games like this. Some games are worse than others with jaggies. I don't know how many times I would re-enable it hoping that some monumental change happened in my system that would give me enough performance to run AA enabled. As, I am sure you could guess, it never worked

Are you certain you didn't have AA force enabled in the driver controls?

The 7 series wasn't that much better than the 6800Ultra/GT, remember the 6800Ultra 512MB offered in limited numbers? My first graphics card was a plain 6800 non-GT and playing Doom 3 on either the 6800 or 7800GTX only allowed my to bump up my resolution from 1024x768 to 1280x1024, other than that FPS was the same. Going from a 7800GTX to a 8800GTX was a HUGE difference! I can't remember no AA bothering me that much, everything else was just eye candie. This makes me want to install Oblivion again.

For the HD3870 you might not see much in improvement. For the HD2900Pro/Xt there is still room due to the 512bit memory bus which can allow more memory bandwidth especially when paired with GDDR4 and better transfer rates from the GPU to the memory and vice versa.

If ATI starts to work on their drivers seriously like they used to and once DX10 becomes a more overall standard, The HD2900Pro/XT might start to show their true power and the HD3870 as well. But thats a big If and since AMD took over it seems ATI has been lacking due to having to convert all of their chipsets to AMD only.

Yes, the X1800XT did very well at 12x10 with HDR and 2xaa. I probably played a good 150 hours of Oblivion on that card before getting an X1950XT. The X1950XT obviously did better in Oblivion, and also much better in NFS:Carbon.

edit: Remeber, you aren't running HDR with that X850XTpe, so Oblivion will look better with the HD2900.

For my HD3870, I've finally upgraded my Catalyst drivers from 7.11 to 8.2. 7.12 was absolute crap for me and I was scared off of 8.1 because of that. I'm afraid for 2900 users AMD are just gonna ignore them and focus on the 3xxx series.

Sure with AA the 3800s or 2900s suck, but thats what Crossfire is for (or so I was told by a sales rep)!