Best Graphics Card On the Market.....

There is an interesting interview with John Carmack here: http://www.gamespy.com/e32002/pc/carmack/ . It sounds to me that lots of people will be making video upgrades to play Doom III (see his comments on page 2 regarding a GeForce2 SDR will only be playing at 320x240.) It's scheduled to be out in 2003 but I'm hoping id will release a beta or demo in 2002.
I found John's comment to be very interesting: "There are interesting things to be said about the upcoming cards, but NDAs will force me to just discuss the available cards." (NDA = Non-disclosure Agreement)
I happen to agree with him that the 8500 is a better card on paper but ATI just doesn't have the driver quality of nVidia. ATI committed to better drivers about a year ago...I'm still not impressed. They are off my purchase list until I see comparable driver quality.
Update: This article about the id booth at E3 is interesting: http://www.msnbc.com/news/758337.asp . It sounds like the next generation ATI card runs DOOM III faster than the next gen nVidia card...

Actaully, it isn't the drivers that are "holding" anything back. Here is a great little Q & A with Carmack that might help explain a few things.


Regarding his publicly-stated (but somewhat veiled) "complaint" (re GF3/GF4Ti vs 8500) about multiple passes based on the number of texture accesses he needs (7, as he stated) and that although the 8500 should, in theory/based-on-specs, be faster but somehow the GF3/GF4Ti is "consistently" faster even with 2 or 3 passes (compared to the single one on a 8500). My question was whether the 8500 may have a problem in terms of latency even if its single shader does all the work (bandwidth savings accepted as well) :
Quote:
No, latency should not be a problem, unless they (JC's talking about ATI's 8500) have mis-sized some internal buffers. Dividing up a fixed texture cache among six textures might well be an issue, though. It seems like the nvidia cards are significantly faster on very simple rendering, and our stencil shadow volumes take up quite a bit of time.

Several hardware vendors have poorly targeted their control logic and memory interfaces under the assumption that high texture counts will be used on the bulk of the pixels. While stencil shadow volumes with zero textures are an extreme case, almost every game of note does a lot of single texture passes for blended effects.

IZ'NT EVERYONE SICK OF TALKING ABOUT WHAT IS DA BEZT VIDEO CARD DUDE?!?!?

No one wanna talk network topologies or operating system engineering??? Codec Programming? Router configuration? Contraception ( ) ???

Haha!!! I like it Phantasm66.

If you can tell me anything about any of the subjects you suggested I would be grateful. As the starter of this particular thread I to agree that it is about time to end this discussion at least until the best generation Nvidia and ATI cards come out!!!

I have just moved from the ATI camp... had a Radeon 64 and it has been a great card. But wanted a fast upgrade so I went for a Gainward Geforce 4 Ti4400. I think that Gainward are one of the top manufacturers and their cards always seem to come out on top in reviews (see tomshardware etc) The card also comes with an overclocking feature straight out of the box!
Sometimes a bit dearer than the other brands but you get what you pay for I guess!

Cheers

Toms Hardware Guide Video Card shootout!

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020418/index.html

Hey can u look at my rig and see if its a boltneck.
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V:wave:

It doesn't seem that you have a bottleneck in your system. Granted its not the best system out there, but all your components are pretty evenly distributed.

It really depends on the OS your running. If your running XP then your memory could be a problem, but any other OS should be ok.

If your serious about getting good gameplay then I suggest upgrading your system to a faster processor and vid card. A mobo upgrade and ram upgrade would also be advised. I guess what I'm trying to say is if your serious about 100+ FPS in Quake then you'll need to upgrade your entire system.

Holy Schnits Batman, Has anyone checkout out those R300, *cough, I mean R9700 reviews?

This thing is sometimes 200% and 300% faster than Geforce4Ti4600, when AA and Anisotrpic filtering are applied!

Limited to PCI

I know that AGP is going to dominate the market for a while, but I'm stuck with a PCI slot only. Is mx 420 the best pci or is voodoo better? Any insight for an older computer would be helpful.:blush:

DooDz
This thread will be longer-mayb-than
this 1 .
Wonder what the posts will be like in..say...3 yrs if this thread is still active.

Me thinks ATI has just answered this question for the next 4-5 months w/ their ATI R9700.

I herd that the Ati Radeon 9700 AGp 128mb is the best graphic card on the market.

Yes, right now it outperforms the GF4 Ti 4600, although I don't know if I can say the same about the up & coming GF5. Underdogs in the businesses tend to do that, release a powerhouse right before the next line of cards/chips from the leading manufacturer. (i.e. the Athlon before the P4, the Athlon beat the P3 like it was nothing, but then the P4 came out...)

I'm a big fan of distributed backbone mesh topologies. How about you?

While Mesh topologies are great for redundancy, the cost can't be justified when you can easily configure a star/mesh hybrid (or redundant Star) topology for less than half normal full mesh costs.

All I can say is .. ATI's numbers look too good to be true and they most likely are. They have always been the little brother of whomever else was on top .. be it Voodoo and now nVidia. Don't show me 3DMark scores .. I want to see how it handles multiple games on multiple OS's. Folks who bought Radeon9700's are already reporting mega problems with some new games (Battlefield 1942 and others). I wanted to believe the hype as much as anyone out there but wait for the dust to settle and I think we'll all see the 9700 for what it is. ATI is still ATI guys. nVidia is like the New York Yankees ... if you're a fan they're great .. if not you hate them. I'll stick with nVidia.

When we see card makers releasing GAME SPECIFIC patches like ATI is already talking about doing ... it's not a good sign.

Well, it' been out for a while now, and there aren't any serious issues with ANY games as far as I can tell. It seems that unless you have the latest BIOS for your mother-board, you will have some issues, but it seem to be easily fixable.
BF1942 has no issues, although it seemed to while it was a DEMO, but the game itself runs flawless on the R9700.
There were "rumors" of the R9700 not truly having AGP 8x support, but it seems the fix for that is a download (again) of the most current BIOS for AGP8x motherboards.

The R9700 smokes the Ti4600, no contest, and the card still has plenty of headroom. Since the NV30 won't make it until dec. (at the EARLIEST), ATI has the fastest card out there for at least 1/4 year.
Thimgs can change quickly in the technology market, and to think that nothing will ever change seems a little off, from here.

BTW, how can Nvida be like the YANKEES? Nvida's only been around for a few years, ATI has been established LONG before Nvida was a gleam in anyone's eye. ATI just decided to get into the high-end gamomg market with the original RADEON, and seems to have finally caught up and surpassed Nvidia (currently) for the 1st time.

All this points to great news for consumers. I can't believe the R9700 is already down to about $300 on-line after only 3-4 weeks, with no current competition.
Not that I would ever spend that much on a new video card- I'll never spend more than $100 bucks again.

I only paid $50 for my ATI64mbR8500(retail)-bought it used, of course

It is fun to see the graphics wars heat up. Something tells me the NV30 will really be something, but ATI will answer, and so on, and so on....

http://babelfish.altavista.com/urlt...cn/view.asp?type=news&id=7897&lp=zh_en&tt=url


Read this if you think the AGP 8x works properly. They aren't just rumors. Also the comparison between nVidia and the Yankee's didn't have anything to do with longevity (did you actually grasp what I was trying to say?).

bad link?

no reason to get testy- perhaps you didn't mean what I thought you did..the yankees have been around forever, and have a LONG tradition of excellence (dating back to the 1920's)....while Nvidia is the new kid on the block..I'd say they're more like the St. Louis Rams since Kurt warner started at QB

Check out the Rage3d forums- plenty of R9700 users there- and BIOS uopodates from motehrboards solved virtually ALL AGP8x problems.

ATI has responded as well:

We are talking about implementing a new standard, ther are bound to be a few hiccups in the beggining...remember when AGP4x hit the streets

As I've already stated, it's pretty easy to check the forums and you'll see that there are many unfounded rumours, but new bios updates solve any potentila problems for nearly everyone. There is always a rare case where a card my be actually broken in haredeware, but the R9700 suffers no more than any other card on the market