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  • phusg - Tuesday, September 12, 2006 - link

    Hi Derek,

    I'm a little late to the ball but still

    > cheaper price tag

    really grates me! I know it's pretty endemic but it's still logically incorrect. A price tag can be lower of higher, but not cheaper, unless it's the price tag being sold. It's the product itself that can be cheaper.

    Cheers Derek and don't let me catch you making this one again or there'll be hell to pay ;-)

    Pete
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link

    Could you post a link to the bf2 demo you use, so we can compare are systems video cards to new ones?
  • Stele - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    At first glance, it seems that ATI has markedly improved their OpenGL implementation, at least for the Doom 3 engine:
    quote:

    ...the latest ATI OpenGL enhancements that have drastically improved Doom 3 engine based game performance.

    quote:

    ...clench Quake 4 as a benchmark that greatly favors ATI hardware when running at the highest possible quality settings. This is the exact opposite of what we have been saying about Quake 4 performance ever since the game launched....

    However, after a moment's thought considering the vast difference in performance from before, and also the following qualifiers:
    quote:

    Of course, not all OpenGL games faired well with the latest round of drivers from ATI, with City of Heros/Villains performing very poorly in spite of its use of OpenGL.

    quote:

    ...but it seems ATI has finally solved their OpenGL performance issues -- at least with this particular engine.

    one can't help but wonder - just wonder - if there's anything here that smells like the last quake.exe driver optimisation trick ... which, curiously enough, was also pulled by ATi (iirc it was during the Radeon 8500's time?). I wonder!
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    There's no quackery as far as we know of. The problems with City of Heroes is a shader corruption bug, and a bug related to rendering on a secondary buffer, according to Cryptic(the developers of CoH). Whatever ATI did to speed up OpenGL performance here, they apparently didn't take in to account CoH.
  • Stele - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link

    Excellent! Am deciding between the X1900GT and 7900GS (when the latter shows up in the channels), and this improvement would help strengthen the case for the X1900 a bit. :)
  • S3anister - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    found an XFX version on this card on newegg for 189MIR.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...
  • emilyek - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    A worthless sku. x1900gt and x1800xt/gto2 are better and almost $50 cheaper.
  • sharkdude - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    The Oblivion percentages are the same in this graph as in the graph on page 4 for all resolutions when in fact only the 800x600 numbers should be the same. On page 5 the numbers should be 4.1%, 10.1%, 6.4%, and 7.3% for 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. Note the text below the chart should also change 15% to 10%.
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    corrected -- but your number for 16x12 appears to be wrong as well. :-)
  • Lifted - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    Thanks for including the 6600 and 6800 cards in the benchmarks.
  • munky - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    quote:

    In spite of the fact that F.E.A.R. is an OpenGL game, the X1900 GT maintains the advantage.

    FEAR is a DX9 game, not OpenGL...
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    I'm looking into this at the moment but having trouble finding documentation on it.

    I suppose, as I was recently testing quad sli and saw huge performance increases, I assumed the game must be using the 4 frame afr mode only possible in opengl (dx is limited to rendering 3 frames ahead). I'll keep looking for confirmation on this ...
  • MemberSince97 - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    Jupiter EX is a DX9 rendering engine...
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    corrected, thanks ... now I have to figure out why FEAR likes quad sli so much ...
  • MemberSince97 - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    Nice writeup DW, I really like the mouseover performance % graphs...
  • PrinceGaz - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link

    So do I, but there is one error
    quote:

    With equivalent stock clock speeds and potential 14% and 20% advantages in vertex and pixel processing respectively...

    That should be 14% and 25% advantages

    The 7900GS has 20 PS while the 7900GT has 24 PS. That makes the 7900GS 20% slower than the 7900GT, but it makes the 7900GT 25% faster than the 7900GS. It's important to remember which one you're comparing it against when quoting percentages.

    Hopefully the percentage performance difference in the graph itself was calculated correctly, or at least consistently.
  • PrinceGaz - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link

    Ooops sorry, please ignore my post. For some reason I thought for a moment the 7900GS had 16 PS and the 7900GT had 20 PS (despite writing the correct values in my comment). The article is correct, I was just getting confused.

    PS. an edit function would be nice.
  • Frackal - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    There is no way an X1900xt gets 75fps at 1600x1200 4xAA, at that same resolution and AA setting I get well over 120-130fps average with an X1900xtx. Most sites show it hitting at least 100+
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    if you use the built in demo features to run a timedemo with dice's own calculations you will get a very wrong (skewed upward) number. Dice themselves say that results over 100 fps aren't reliable.

    the problem is that they benchmark the load screen, and generally one card or the other will get better load screen performance -- for instance, the x1900 gt may get 300+fps while the 7900 gt may only get 200fps. (I just picked those numbers, but framerates for the load screen are well over 100 fps in most cases and drastically different between manufacturers).

    not only does no one care about this difference on a load screen, but it significantly interferes with benchmark numbers.

    the timedemo feature can be used to output a file with frametimes and instantaneous frames per second. we have a script that opens this file, removes the frame data for the load screen, and calculates a more accurate framerate average using only frame data for scenes rendered during the benchmark run.

    this will decrease over all scores.

    we also benchmark in operation clean sweep which has a lot of fog and water. we use a benchmark with lots of smoke and explosions and we test for some ammount of time in or near most vehicles.
  • splines - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    Ownage approved.
  • sirfergy - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    Woot had this card for $139 a few weeks ago. So glad I jumped!
  • artifex - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link

    I wish I'd bought 3 and sold them on eBay. Instead, I bought 0. :(

    http://www.woot.com/blog/BlogEntry.aspx?BlogEntryI...">woot entry

  • Spoelie - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    I dunno the situation in the US, but Europe is seeing an interesting war. We have 7900GT's costing 230€, right above there is the X1900XT 256mb at 244€ and the X1900XT 512mb at 280€, with the overclocked 7900GT's overlapping in price with the X1900XT's.

    Check it on www.alternate.de for example.

    At these prices, the X1900XT's are a pretty sweet deal, and warrant the little extra money paid over the 7900GT imho.
  • Spoelie - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    just to be clear, those are the minimum prices found, in general you have about price parity between the GT's and XT 256mb, with a few superclocked cards costing as much or more as the XT 512mb...

    Incredible value in the 200-300€/$ range imho, with cards that just months ago were in the 300-500€/$ range
  • Spacecomber - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    The concluding paragraphs on pages 4 and 5 are identical (i.e., the proper paragraph is missing for the XFX 480M Extreme vs. Stock Performance section).
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    thanks, fixed
  • Spoelie - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    there's also a layout error in the table on page 9
  • TheLiberalTruth - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    I don't know if it's just me or what, but I can't get any page from this article after 1 to load. :\
  • peldor - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    The BFG 7600GT is down to $115 after rebate at Newegg.

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