New AMD/ATI card kicks butt

[baron5]

i know but so does the 8800 series

 

[ThirdLeft152]

they both are a work in progress. i still think that previews of dx10 performance look a little depressing. my friends 8800gtx can barely handle the new lost planet dx10 demo. im not really sure if its really dx10 but the point is at 1900x1400 or some res like that it can barely handle 30+ avg fps. then again the game looks like it was brought straight over from xbox 360 with no computer coding in mind.

 

[Apokalipse]

i know but so does the 8800 series

true, but I think they're better than the X2900's drivers so far

 

[gurusan]

Drivers.
Yes, AMD has had some time to work on them. But not as long as they need, and nowhere near as long as Nvidia. They are far from perfect.

Drivers are not going to suddenly change everything. With improved drivers a few hundred 3dmarks will be unleashed...

The x2900xt is still a great card..it's just not all it's been cracked up to be. There was so much hype about how the R600 is going to destroy everything....

Anyway with all that I have said, there's a good chance I might pick one of these up as my next upgrade.

From what I've seen so far, even though there are a lot of cons, the few pros are very significant and outweigh the cons for me:

Cons: Runs pretty hot, draws tons of power, outperformed by the 8800GTS in a few cases (even the 320mb), and from what I've seen the image quality is significantly inferior to the G80

Pros: Significantly outperforms the 8800GTS in most cases, the price is definitely right.

 

[Apokalipse]

Drivers are not going to suddenly change everything. With improved drivers a few hundred 3dmarks will be unleashed...http://www.legionhardware.com/Bench/ASUS_Radeon_HD_2900XT_vs_ASUS_GeForce_8800_GTS/X3.png

Drivers can make a significant impact on performance. Especially if the drivers are poorly written at first, and contain bugs which don't let certain games utilize certain aspects of the card properly etc. I think you can expect that with a very different GPU architecture.

 

[gurusan]

Here are some more interesting benches against the 8800GTS 640 and 320mb versions, taken from Legion Hardware:

However, one thing to note about these benches is that I'm pretty sure little to no AA were used...and with AA enabled the x2900xt has shown to be terrible with most games as it was designed for shader-based AA rather than the more common multi-sample AA found in 99% of todays games...and this is 1 reason why I'm hesitating to choose the x2900xt....in my opinion this was a mistake on AMDs part unless they can make multisampling AA perform better.

Benches that aren't very exciting (particularly the supreme commander one...wowee)

 

[gurusan]

Benches that are quite exciting indeed

 

[Puffnstuff]

I switched back to nvidia years ago after struggling with poor software and driver support from ati. With that said I'm hoping that the release of this card will drive down prices on the gtx so that I can afford one.

 

[gurusan]

well so now I've decided against the ATI card for sure as once AA+AF are enabled in 99% of games the x2900xt is crippled...it can barely keep up with the x1900xt in some cases.

 

[baron5]

man i love being a nvidia fan boy lol