AMD Vs Nvidia: Top End Cards
With the appearance of DirectX 10, effectively Microsoft’s collection of functions related to graphics and multimedia, the manufacturers of PC video cards have started to release various products to harness its power. Nvidia’s 8 series, for example, support Dx10, beating competitor ATI.
Now that all seems to have changed with its ATI’s HD PC video cards and the battle between the two video card giants has become fiercer. The Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra, until the 9 series the top of the line, lost in the speed stakes to the Radeon HD 3870 X2. According to Fudzilla, in terms of industry standard benchmarks, the 8800 Ultra scored 14,197 in 3DMark 06 while the HD 3870 X2 scored 18,467. Of course, the HD 3870 X2 has two GPU’s while the 8800 Ultra has only one, but even so, the difference is significant.
Push the resolution up to 2,560×1,600 and the Radeon HD 3870 X2 scores 12,578 versus 8,746 for the 8800 Ultra.
No wonder that everybody has been anticipating Nvidia’s response to ATI, the 9800GTX and 9800 GX2. Although there is still no official word from Nvidia about the cards, specifications have been leaked from the company which, as Electronista notes also has a benchmark as well.
Benchmarks show: most games will be playable at 50 frames per second or higher with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering. Adding a second or third card for NVIDIA’s SLI mode is also said to either improve frame rates in games by 2 or 2.5 times as much, making some games playable or smoother at previously impractical resolutions and settings.
Indeed, the 9800GTX seems to be a very powerful solution, and you can run almost all DX10 PC games smoothly. However, if you want to play Crysis at 1600×1200 with 4xAA/16xAF buy the 9800 GX2. The GTX runs the new game at 20 fps. More on the battle between Nvidia and ATI will likely emerge on 25 March when the cards should be officially released.
Photo: © PunkJr
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