Graphics GTX 470 + 480 Vs. ATI

LOL- you're upset about my position on the card power?

If you read my post, you saw that it would cost $40 a year more (than w/5870) here if you game ten hours a day, seven days a week.

Since you apparently have 3 kids, I would put it to you they don't really care about what you can do for them with change like $40 a year. That's $13.33/kid/year you're talking about shorting them. (if you could game 10 hours a day, seven days a week)

Since we both know you have a job and three kids, you're not gaming 70 hours a week to lose that $40, you're not even gaming 35 hours a week. You're way too busy.

So who's making sense here?

The guy who pointed out that the difference in power consumption between a 5870 and GTX480 won't even buy your family dinner at McDonalds if you had time to game 5 hours a day every day?

Or the guy who tried to pick a fight over nickles and dimes worth of power when he's apparently considering a $400 5870?

I'd also say if the $100 difference in cost is a big deal to you, maybe you shouldn't be buying $400 cards like the HD5870. (or $500 cards like the GTX480- but this time the difference boils down to $33/kid)

 

There's not much I can say in response to your request. NVIDIA made a business decision to lock down drivers for PhysX based on not wanting to spend money on QA competitor's products.

I'm sure they're aware they may be losing some lower end card sales, and have weighed this against the cost of the QA, or possible damage to the PhysX brand name if they just allow users to use "at their own risk".

Nothing I say will change it, but I'll send a copy of your post to a senior mgr there along with my response here.

 

thanks. want me to clean it up a bit?

my point is mainly that, before nvidia imposed the restrictions everything was fine. they had a disclaimer saying no guarantees of this working with competitors cards, but for our particular market thats not a big problem. how many mainstream users will want a dedicated physx card? nvidia can make it perfectly clear that it might not work, but thats a risk im willing to take. except nvidia outright blocked it forcing the need for hacked drivers (which i dont particularly want to use if im spending money).

nvidia seem to be treating their customers badly, and anyone who has bought an nvidia card is a customer. they shouldnt have to be locked down into buying yet more nvidia hardware. it certainly isnt the case with the vast majority of other companies in this business.

i wouldnt even just use it for physx, id do some folding on it too.

 

It's a risk you're willing to take, but that's not how business works.

NVIDIA has sunk millions into PhysX, their OEMs depend on the experience being good and QA'd.

If ATi does something with their drivers or hardware that screws up PhysX, the fact there's a disclaimer on it won't stop people like Charlie D from posting articles like "What a joke, NVIDIA PhysX crashes Uber 5870 rig." and the like.

With what they're doing now they can at least have quality control.

 

but what about something like overclocking?

OEMs definately dont support it, yet people are willing to do this at their own risk. if someone has a failed overclock people arent gonna start complaining to intel, because they have gone outside the QA'ed experience. sure intel have made it very easy to overclock, but they dont outright support it. then again they havent outright banned it either.

if nvidia were to make it outright clear that its not supported, and its only guaranteed to work on all-nvidia hardware, and whatever else they want to spin, then someone like charlie wouldnt be able to gloat because it is a clearly unsupported config.

perhaps its just me - i like openness, and hate companies who lock their products down. hence why I hate apple so much, and why i have a disdain for nvidia at the moment.

 

1. Not everyone is rich and have great big psus and don't care about power efficiency.

2. Most people are looking for the best price/performance card i.e. ati at the moment.

3. ati still have the best graphics card on the market the 5970.

4. nvidia supports closed software (physx) while ati supports open standards such as havok.

 

Can you really say that the 480 is faster than Ati when it consumes a lot more energy and produces horrendous heat?
I would like to see an ATI overclocked in order to generate the same level of heat and energy consumption and then do them benchmarks.
I realise most people dont care about components being shockingly ineficient but it is not fair at all to compare an insanely overclocked piece of hardware (90cº!) with another one that runs cool and produces just 10fps less, which you wont really notice in game (there are some reviews in which ati even outperforms fermi).

 

Havok isn't open. OpenCL is and both AMD and Nvidia are supporting it.

 

i think he means that Havok runs on OpenCL which is open (same with Bullet Physics), whereas PhysX runs on CUDA which is most definately not open.

 

In answer to your points:
1. People who have $500USD to spend on video cards usually don't have cheap PSUs. A good PSU is the backbone of a system, people who buy enthusiast parts usually have enthusiast components for other pieces of the their system.

2. Yep. I bet as price goes down, size of market goes up, because more people have less money. Most people here want Ford Focus's, but BMWs are better cars.

3. That's sort of out of line with you two "rich guys" comments above. In the States the 5970 costs a whopping $200.USD more than the GTX480.

4. My guess is the market in general doesn't care whether standards are closed or open. Havok doesn't provide GPU acceleration of physics.

 

why do you guys keep feeding this tool? lol...

 

Because they enjoy it lol...

 

Because its funny to his blatant and shameless bias and propaganda shine through that veneer of "impartiality".

 

I must admit it is funny though, And hay we all need some entertainment in life dont we.

 

Well I was a long term NVIDIA graphics card user since I bought my first RIVA TNT back in 1998 apart from a brief stint with an ATI HD3850 AGP card on my last PC. I was hugely excited about the GTX 480 and decided that it would be the idea replacement for my reliable but ageing GTX 280. When ATI released the HD 5870 last October I sensibly declined and chose to wait to see what the new NVIDIA cards were going to be like despite the increasing amount of negativity surrounding them on sites like SemiAccurate, etc. The fact that NVIDIA cards have PhysX and game profiles just made it easier for me to wait.

Then the reviews came. Initially I was excited at the performances results and the fact that these cards had more than 1 GB of video RAM, nice because I play games at 1920x1200 with lots of AA and v-sync on so I use triple buffering via D3DOverrider. It was unnerving to read about the GTX 480 fan noise, heat and power issues but in a moment of what I know realise was sheer stupidity I pre-ordered one, a Gainward, from Scan for a mind-blowing £438. It was after that that I started to get cold feet, wondering if I'd made the right choice. Did PhysX really matter than much when only a few games ever used it effectively, most notably Batman: Arkham Asylum? Did game profiles matter more than a large electric bill and burnt hands (I read reports of people burning themselves touching these cards during testing!!!)?

The answer I concluded was no. Thus I cancelled my pre-order and bought a Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X instead for £339 which arrived two days later from Novatech. It's a nice card; quiet, cool and sufficient for my needs even if DX11 tessellation performance falls short of NVIDIA's new cards. I'm satisfied with it but my heart was really set on the GTX 480 so sometimes I feel like I've opted for second best. That said, there's no denying that the HD 5870 is far better value than the GTX 480, particularly here in the UK where it's almost £140 cheaper if you look around (I saw an HD 5870 going for £295 at eBuyer a few weeks back). As it is the GTX 480 is an awesome chip stuck on an ugly card and I'd almost describe it as unfinished and rushed because NVIDIA have had so many problems with the Fermi chip. Maybe when NVIDIA have die-shrunk the Fermi so its less power hungry and hot and released a card with the full 512 cores then I'll consider buying one.

 

Yep, and I'm days away from joining the Eye Finity crowd in 3 panel gaming for mine. (although I'll be in 3d)

 

Yeah 3 panels are pretty cool.

But if you have more than 3 screens your in for a ride. I watched this video of this guy who was trying to run Dirt 2 with like 9 screen or something stupid and he couldn't play it. FAIL. This was because the ATI card wasnt enabled for this many screens. And it doesn't help with the fact that ATI support iis not very good.

Okay okay, I know that only like 5 people in the world use 9 screens for gaming. But I thought this was rather funny and was worth a mention.

 

Clicky

 

It's six panel Eye Finity, it's no good because the bezels of the middle two monitors split your main field of view.

I've used it, hated it, but the three panel stuff from either company is very good.

 

Rollo, you were banned from AnandTech (for good reason) and now you're back to lurk and troll at Bit. Wonderful.

This debate has gone on waaaaay too long simply because you insist on proving nVidia superior at every turn, when literally every single member on this board recognizes the 5870 as the better value card. PhysX and 3D Vision are zero-value features for a great percentage of us, and just because you enjoy 3D Vision it doesn't mean the GTX 480 is suddenly a better value than the 5870.