Radeon X800 XT vs GeForce 6800 Ultra

[Saza]

OK, so with this huge leap in graphical performance that we are set to see in the coming months, which side will you be supporting? Personally I've always been an ATI boy, but the Geforce 6800 Ultra is one sweet card. The Radeon X800 XT also looks damn amazing, but I cant decide which :confused: . So I need your help: which card would you go for and why?

Checkout a review of both cards:

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/510/510938p1.html

Cheers guys.

[Jest]

Or you can avoid the shitness that is Gamespy and check out this report a clannie passed on concerning the same thing. ;)

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=2044&p=11

[Zu (Pluto)]

I would advising waiting until they've actually hit the shelf and people are using them with real released drivers. Then just keep an eye on tech support forums and see what problems crop up and read reviews then.

I'm an ATI fan for some years now but I don't think ATI is better - I just prefer them based on the pros and cons it offers. These new top-of-range offers are nicely matched against one another. Remember though that the NVidia is more expensive. Depends on exactly what you're after.

Zu

[-FN-]

Yar, wait till 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 or whatever PCB revision comes out for whatever flavour of card you're looking at, ATI, or any of the Nvidia card makers.

I personally have always gone Nvidia for gaming, and ATI for Office or Multimedia work. I still use an ATI for my cable/home theatre PC, but I use Nvidia for my gaming PC. That's been strongly reinforced since I use the nForce chipset as well for my gaming box.

[Cytaur]

I used to be nVidia fanboi until I've seen X800 XT... im buying THAT

[-FN-]

I checked that out after I posted.. yes the first few graphs are somewhat impressive for ATI... but when crunch time kicks in and you see how they both perform with Full Screen Antialiasing and Antisotropic Filtering at 4x, a whole wopping difference of 3fps... woo. Odds are the Nvidia card will be cheaper in price as well. Also, don't take any single review as gospel. All cards peform differently with different types of chipsets, ram, cpus, etc.

My video card upgrade is happening in the middle of August as a birthday present to myself tho :p And I'll be doing it the way I always do. When that time comes, I'll look at the PRICES of all the video cards on Price Watch (http://www.pricewatch) and find the best Nvidia Card I can buy for ~$150. I love it when new cards come out, not for the new cards, but for the price drop on the cards that are still incredibly awesome for today's gaming :)

[Cytaur]

its just that nvidia is still relying heavily on opengl... OGL games would definately perform better on nv card rather than ATI... But OGL gaming is dead, unfortunately its now time for DirectX, which had already been dominating the industry for at least 2-3 years. NVidia always had a weakness with DX, since their core is based on 3Dfx... Also don't forget, those 6800 cards they require a dedicated psu line.

[Ormy]

As somebody who recently went from Nvidia to ATI (64MB GeForce 3 ti200 > 256MB 9600XT) I'd definately say Nvidia are better. This card isn't having any major issues, but it doesn't like being OCed (I OCed the GF 3 by almost twice the recommeded amount with no problems), some games won't maximise after being minimised (screen goes all funny colours, gotta bring up task manager) etc etc. Apart from the obvious speed increase (about 150%, pretty crap considering the engine and memory clock speeds are almost double and I have 4 times the RAM), i can now use my TV as an extra monitor, which is kinda useful and pretty cool.

If I had the money i would switch to the equivalent Nvidia card without hesitation.

[Cytaur]

yeah, Nvidia is good to overclock it... at least how major manufacturers market it. The catch is if you OC it, your warranty is voided o_O So it sucks to push the card to the limit where you actually get any performance, then it burns.

[Scikar]

As somebody who recently went from Nvidia to ATI (64MB GeForce 3 ti200 > 256MB 9600XT) I'd definately say Nvidia are better. This card isn't having any major issues, but it doesn't like being OCed (I OCed the GF 3 by almost twice the recommeded amount with no problems), some games won't maximise after being minimised (screen goes all funny colours, gotta bring up task manager) etc etc. Apart from the obvious speed increase (about 150%, pretty crap considering the engine and memory clock speeds are almost double and I have 4 times the RAM), i can now use my TV as an extra monitor, which is kinda useful and pretty cool.

If I had the money i would switch to the equivalent Nvidia card without hesitation.

Dude, you realise you've basically taken a card which is already overclocked to hell, and then overclocked it? If someone gave you a P4 overclocked to 4GHz would you then overclock that too? Also plain speed increase alone isn't much to go by. You still have the same RAM and CPU, if you have a 1.5GHz proc and 512MB of PC2100 RAM then even one of those 6800 Ultras isn't going to make your games run much faster.

I've preferred ATi ever since I picked up a 9000 Pro for the same price as a GeF4 Ti 4200, and found it outperformed the nVidia card. When it came to build this PC, I compared the top GeF FX (5950 Ultra? I can't remember now) with the 9800 XT and the ATi was a fair bit better in every review I found, especially with AA and anisotropy on. So it's a 9800XT here from this generation too.

But I'm not stupid. Nobody has really seen anything of the potential of the new cards. The drivers are all in their early stages, and there haven't been that many tests yet. If I was upgrading I would definitely leave it for at least 3 months to let the drivers get sorted and check some real reviews. One of those cards is going to be better than the other, it could be the nVidia card, it could be the ATi card. But right now, nobody can say which one.

[OpTi]

As somebody who recently went from Nvidia to ATI (64MB GeForce 3 ti200 > 256MB 9600XT) I'd definately say Nvidia are better. This card isn't having any major issues, but it doesn't like being OCed (I OCed the GF 3 by almost twice the recommeded amount with no problems), some games won't maximise after being minimised (screen goes all funny colours, gotta bring up task manager) etc etc. Apart from the obvious speed increase (about 150%, pretty crap considering the engine and memory clock speeds are almost double and I have 4 times the RAM), i can now use my TV as an extra monitor, which is kinda useful and pretty cool.

If I had the money i would switch to the equivalent Nvidia card without hesitation.


i did the exact same, cept i went from gainward GF4 TI4200 64MB to ASUS 9600XT 256MB and overclocked my 9600 to the max i could before it became unstable. The card is rock solid and no matter what i hit it with the core temp will not go over 50 and the memory will not go over 55. I never get GFX errors or anyother GFX problems. I did some reasearch before buying the card i could have tried to softmod a 9800SE and overclock to an XT but didn't want to take the risk.

[kurai]

I much prefer Nvidia's driver and applet software and multi-monitor support to ATI's, and was eagerly awaiting the 6800 Ultra tests.

They were suitably impressive, and people were writing off ATI.

Then the X800 XT results came in and they were equal or better than the Nvidia scores.

Plus the ATI runs a lot cooler and doesn't require a humungous power input.

On the negative side there's the lack of ATI's Pixel Shader 3.0 support, but since we won't see anything using that till after the next generation of cards are around, it doesn't seem like much of an issue.

On balance it looks like an ATI will be my next card.

[StrongSad]

ATI > nvidia...ATM

Unless nvidia wakes up and gets something going they will always be one step behind those dang canadians.

I had a chance to look at several reviews and comparison of both cards and the x800 pro even beats the 6800U. The x800XTPE is even more of a beast. Not to mention the x800 uses about half the power in their 'low-k' core design which gives the card its ability to get easily past 500 mhz and still stay cool.

My next card will be the x800XTPE with an AMD64 socket 939. That will scream. No bottlenecks for me :)

HOWEVER, the 6800GT (i think that is the name) looks to be a VERY fun card. Think a Ti4400 vs a Ti4600. The only difference is clock speed and price. You could easily buy a cheaper 6800GT and o/c it to or past a 6800U and have yourself a $500 card for $300. ATI on the other had gimps their cheaper cards such as the x800pro. It has 4 less pipelines that the flagship card so forget ever getting x800XT performance from that. :(

[Nash_Brigham]

its just that nvidia is still relying heavily on opengl... OGL games would definately perform better on nv card rather than ATI... But OGL gaming is dead, unfortunately its now time for DirectX, which had already been dominating the industry for at least 2-3 years. NVidia always had a weakness with DX, since their core is based on 3Dfx... Also don't forget, those 6800 cards they require a dedicated psu line.
o_O nVidia cards are DirectX but have OGL support for games that use OGL. And considering nVidia has stronger driver support, it is really ATI who is one step behind, so they try to makeup for their crap drivers with powerful cards, that are nothing more than 3 fps better (whoopti-do)

[Celt]

o_O nVidia cards are DirectX but have OGL support for games that use OGL. And considering nVidia has stronger driver support, it is really ATI who is one step behind, so they try to makeup for their crap drivers with powerful cards, that are nothing more than 3 fps better (whoopti-do)I had an ATI 8mb rage pro, back in 97/98.

It had driver problems with at least 50% of the games I played.

I swore I'd never buy an ati again, and I didn't until last year.

9800 for €200, or gf 5600 for €220

I picked the 9800 and am perfectly happy with drivers and support for the 9 months.

ATI had a terrible rep, and a deserved one, but they've been working very very hard to make it up.

NVidia have been going the other way, sadly.

[___T-X____]

Its all dependent on your CPU speed.

Dont even mention overclocking these till you can say your running a 4 Ghz CPU kiddies