Graphics card Rankings

[Ste]

I will not make any changes to the original post unless Sora asks me to.
But I did sticky it..

I am interested in the Rankings as well, there by, I mean I am surprised that the 2900XT beats out the newer ATI cards.
But, its also interesting because the world 3dMark06 score is held by 2900Xt's in crossfire. (Of course they have like uber phase change on the cores for uber clocks)

That being said, if the 2900XT's (512 bit) still beat out the new ATI cards, then I will have to crossfire them, they are so cheap anyways...

 

[gurusan]

HD2900pro 512MB should be just above HD3850

HD2900Pro 1GB should be under HD2900XT 512MB

the 3850 512mb is slightly faster than the 2900pro. 670mhz vs 600mhz...the extra memory bandwidth that the 2900pro does diddlysquat

Not to mention the 3850 overclocks much more than any 2900...but I don't think we're taking ocing into account here.

 

[Sora]

As far as I am concerned these rankings are based on cards at stock and are comparing to the newest games to date since the list is with the newest cards to date. For example when they put the 1GB above the HD3750 Hd3850 I think they were looking at games such as Crysis and games where VRAM actually does help a little more. As far as just about any other games made in the last year or more the HD38xx series would be faster so its everyones call whether we should base them on the most cutting edge games or not.

Also on wikipidia apparently the 2900 series has a higher bandwidth per second transfer than the HD38xx series...although i don't know how either. If that is true then that would make sense why it is ranked higher.

Take a look at Tech-reports benchmarks on the new video cards. Most of the games show the X2900XT barely beating out the HD3870, they are very close and i guess the ranking takes how close they are into account except gives it the lead becuase of the majority of benchies it barley took and that it has 1GB.

AMD's Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 graphics cards - The Tech Report - Page 5

 

[Apokalipse]

they are using the drivers from the disk on the 3870's, which isn't really optimised for them.
Currently, I think the crysis hotfix drivers work best (even in games other than crysis)

 

[aaronkupen]

they are using the drivers from the disk on the 3870's, which isn't really optimised for them.
Currently, I think the crysis hotfix drivers work best (even in games other than crysis)

Yah, and the driver that came right out actually decreased performance with the following newer driver to send performance rick back to 7.10 levels. hd3870 will not perform better than it currently does and I agree that the 2900xt is more powerful just out of first hand experience with the hd3870.

 

[Apokalipse]

Yah, and the driver that came right out actually decreased performance

but fixed some bugs.

with the following newer driver to send performance rick back to 7.10 levels.

with the bugs still fixed.

The crysis hotfix drivers (based on 7.11) work best so far. Crossfire performance is especially improved with them. And, they seem to have any crashing and bugs pretty much fixed.

hd3870 will not perform better than it currently does

yes it will. It's only a question of how much.

and I agree that the 2900xt is more powerful just out of first hand experience with the hd3870.

Depends which drivers you use.

the R600 itself, is not more powerful than the RV670.
In fact, the RV670 is R600, but with changes to improve performance and power consumption.
ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670 - HotHardware

R600 is fast, but it isn't as fast as RV670.

 

[aaronkupen]

No, hd 3870's do not have a 512 bit bus like the 2900xt's. So all the extra oomph that the 3870's have do not overtake the 2900xt from my experience at 1600x1050.

Hd3870 will not come out over the 2900xt.

 

[gurusan]

No, hd 3870's do not have a 512 bit bus like the 2900xt's. So all the extra oomph that the 3870's have do not overtake the 2900xt from my experience at 1600x1050.

Hd3870 will not come out over the 2900xt.

in almost everything the 3870 is marginally faster than the 2900xt, but only because of the clocks.

However, clock for clock the 2900XT is indeed faster.

 

[Apokalipse]

No, hd 3870's do not have a 512 bit bus like the 2900xt's. So all the extra oomph that the 3870's have do not overtake the 2900xt from my experience at 1600x1050.

does the 256-bit bus cripple the 8800 GT, compared to the first GTS? or the 8800 GTS G92 compared to the GTX?
no.

the memory bus width doesn't really do much.
Especially considering the R600 and the RV670 have 16 texture units and 16 render back-ends. You'd really need more to actually be able to take advantage of a 512-bit bus.
Besides, GDDR4, with its higher speeds, will negate a lot of the small difference it will make anyway.

the RV670 also has improvements in other areas:

• Incorporates the UVD video decoder found in Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 cards, but not in the 2900 Pro and XT. It handles full entropy decode of both H.264 and VC-1.
• Supports DirectX 10.1, including Shader Model 4.1, mandatory FP32 filtering, mandatory 4x multisample AA with samples exposed to shaders, index-able cube maps, etc.
• Reduces power consumption when idle and especially during "light usage" scenarios, such as when rendering Vista's 3D desktop, thanks to an improvement to "PowerPlay."
• Improves cache efficiency, particularly when making lots of small requests.
• Offers better arbitration in the memory controller when different parts of the chips make requests
• Optimizes geometry shader performance.
• Improves efficiency by tweaking the render back-ends. This may be noticed in a small improvement to performance when enabling anti-aliasing.
• Tunes the UVD engine to offer better performance while reducing the number of transistors. The end user won't really see much of a difference, though.

Power consumption is massively improved. You can run two RV670 cards, and it will still use less power than an R600 card.

the RV670 is based on R600, but it is different enough for drivers to make a significant impact on performance.
R600 cards have had much longer for drivers to be optimised for it. And it did make a big difference when better drivers were released.

 

[aaronkupen]

So it's a dx10.1 card that will not be able to handle rendering a game in dx10.1. So that's nice, this card struggles with 4x AA on current games, why should I expect it to do 4xAA mandatory on games that utilize dx10.1?

Power consumption isn't performance, so that is a useless point.

And the cards are too similar in architecture for drivers to make much more of a performance increase. What we say with the hd 2 series is probably all the performance increases that can be squeezed out of that architecture.

And yes the bigger bus does make a difference in some games, and the reason the g92's perform so well is that it was clocked significantly higher than its brothers which made up for it, but the memory bandwidth is still slower and does show in some situations.