New AMD/ATI card kicks butt

[gurusan]

could you please link us to where they said that?

Taken from here:Custom PC

AMD explains Radeon HD 2900XT's poor AA performance 1:16PM, Monday 14th May 2007

The R600 is finally here, and in keeping with its mysteriously long gestation, in at least in its first incarnation as the HD 2900XT, AMD's new GPU still poses a lot of questions. One of the things we noticed during our in-depth testing of the card is that compared to its principle rival, the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, the HD 2900XT performs poorly in many games when anti-aliasing is enabled.

In F.E.A.R., at 1,600 x 1,200, with AA and AF disabled, the HD 2900XT easily outstripped the 640MB 8800 GTS, delivering a minimum that was 23fps higher than the latter's. However, with 4x AA, the HD 2900XT's minimum framerate dived from 82fps to 21fps, while the 640MB 8800 GTS produced a minimum of 30fps. Adding 4x AA results in a 74% drop for the Radeon, compared to only a 49% drop for the GeForce.

The Radeon's framerates suffer disproportionately with anisotropic filtering, too. Again testing in F.E.A.R. at 1,600 x 1,200, we saw the HD 2900XT's minimum FPS drop by 10 per cent with 16x anisotropic enabled, compared to 3 per cent for the GTS, although the HD 2900XT still had a faster average. It was a slightly different result at 2,560 x 1,600, as the HD 2900XT's massive bandwidth gave it a boost, although adding 16x AF still had more impact than it did on the 640MB GTS.

As most gamers will want AA and AF enabled in games, the HD 2900XT's poor performance with these processing options enabled is a serious problem for the card and ATi. We asked ATi to comment on this surprising result and the company revealed that the HD 2000-series architecture has been optimised for what it calls 'shader-based AA'. Some games, including S.T.A.L.K.E.R., already use shader-based AA, although in our tests the 640MB 8800 GTS proved to be faster than the HD 2900XT.

We asked Richard Huddy, Worldwide Developer Relations Manager of AMD's Graphics Products Group, to go into more detail about why the Radeon HD 2000-series architecture has been optimised for shader-based AA rather than traditional multi-sample AA. He told us that 'with the most recent generations of games we've seen an emphasis on shader complexity (mostly more maths) with less of the overall processing time spent on the final part of the rendering process which is "the AA resolve". The resolve still needs to happen, but it's becoming a smaller and smaller part of the overall load. Add to that the fact that HDR rendering requires a non-linear AA resolve and you can see that the old fashioned linear AA resolve hardware is becoming less and less significant.' Huddy also explained that traditional AA 'doesn't work correctly [in games with] HDR because pixel brightness is non-linear in HDR rendering.'

While many reviews of the HD 2900XT have made unflattering comparisons between it and Nvidia's GeForce 8800-series, Huddy was upbeat about AMD's new chip. 'Even at high resolutions, geometry aliasing is a growing problem that can only really be addressed by shader-based anti-aliasing. You'll see that there is a trend of reducing importance for the standard linear AA resolve operation, and growing importance for custom resolves and shader-based AA. For all these reasons we've focused our hardware efforts on shader horsepower rather than the older fixed-function operations. That's why we have so much more pure floating point horsepower in the HD 2900XT GPU than NVIDIA has in its 8800 cards... There's more value in a future-proof design such as ours because it focuses on problems of increasing importance, rather than on problems of diminishing importance."

 

[maroon1]

[did u know they outperform 8800 ultra?])

No it doesn't

AnandTech: New Ultra High End Price Point With GeForce 8800 Ultra

8800Ultra beats 8800GTX ACS3 in shader-intensive games, because of the higher shader speed that ultra have

 

[veg1992]

Taken from here:
Both systems should get terrific performance. It may be true that, with a killer cooling solution, the Striker Extreme motherboard will be able to push a CPU a little harder——but is it worth a $140 difference? For that matter, will Joe have a gaming experience that's $566 better than Frank? I doubt it.

I haven't even touched on licensed gear, like the various stuff available with the Fatal1ty logo. There's pros and cons with licensed gear, assuming that the person who's doing the license really has had a hand in the design of the product, or has otherwise tested the product.

Note that both our gamers above have bought into the idea that SLI will give them a better gaming experience. I haven't specified what display they're using, but if it's anything less than 1920x1200, then a pair of 8800 GTX's in SLI mode is overkill. Also, it's worth noting that the eVGA 8800 KO ACS3 card actually has a higher core clock rate out of the box than eVGA's version of the 8800 Ultra—which costs $200 more.

ok i believe what u say, looks like ET was wrong...

 

[kobe24]

agreed^^

 

[gurusan]

Now benchmarks are showing the x2900xt outperforming the GTS in most cases and in some cases the GTX..even with AA+AF! Looks like I spoke too soon....will definitely be keeping my eye on this one...

benches here: [Testing] Sapphire X2900XT - XtremeSystems Forums

 

[Charvell]

the 2900 does win at that high resolution but the price for performance is not justified AT ALL

You can get the HD2900XT for $399 on Best Buy.com, just throwing that out there.

 

[zmatt]

the card has some serious muscle like i said. i cant wait to see how it will improve over time.

 

[Deathawk]

Now benchmarks are showing the x2900xt outperforming the GTS in most cases and in some cases the GTX..even with AA+AF! Looks like I spoke too soon....will definitely be keeping my eye on this one...

benches here: [Testing] Sapphire X2900XT - XtremeSystems Forums

No kidding you did.. hope that keeps moron1 quiet.. **** fanboys.. ^^

 

[maroon1]

hope that keeps moron1 quiet..

The only game that was test in that link is Test Drive ultimate and it was compared to 8800GTS 320MB.

And this post was made my normal user, it is not a reliable source.

And HD2900XT image quality was worser in that website. Just look at the sky and the sea in Test Drive Ultimate, it looks better on 8800GTS

And according to this website 8800GTX produce better image quality than HD2900XT
Legit Reviews - ATI versus nVidia -- DirectX 10 Benchmarking - Image Quality & Test System

And 8800GTS performs better than HD2900XT in many benchmarks
IT-review.net - R600 testing week - Wednesday

Just look at the benchmarks for STALKER, it performs much better on 8800GTS

 

[Deathawk]

Uhh, image quality, TMK, would be drivers. If that's the case, it's fixable. BTW, I like how the hd 2900xt performs better than the 8800gts 640mb in the legit reviews.. and I like how the HD 2900xt outperforms the 8800gtx in most of the benchmarks @ 2560*1600.. can you explain that for me?

In the Lost Planet benchmark legit reviews again attributes problems to drivers.. Anyway.. I'm fairly confident stuff like this will get kinked out.. ^^