My source says....

[RpPRO]

I've owned many ATI cards before, never been impressed with a single one of them. Their drivers are terrible too.

It's really sad you criticize ati's drivers in 2005. Plz come out from the cave where you've been living in the past year.

[OWA]

Sure, you can come out of the cave and see they still suck. The view is the same. :)

[NoWayDude]

It's really sad you criticize ati's drivers in 2005. Plz come out from the cave where you've been living in the past year.


Oh please, grow up.Just because you or me never ad any problem with drivers/hardware either NVidia or ATI it does not mean that other people didn't (had an Asus board for example, that give no end of bothers, so Asus for me is a non go, get the comparison?)
Look at the stutering issue with GF6xxx cards.Never had any problem with it, but other people do
So leave the "neanderthal" coments out, and instead ask him what problems he had.

[Soylent]

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/r520reviewxvxv/
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/

Now we know. The x1800xt will be slightly faster than the GTX most of the time(and gets it's *** handed to it in doom 3 engine games as expected).

Features AA for alpha test(like nV), AA for HDR, supposedly smaller penalty for 6xMSAA compared to 4xMSAA than before and good, old-school, high quality anisotropic ala geforce 4 ti and radeon 8x00 series. 3DC with support for compressed single channel textures(luminance maps, shadow maps and such).

XT slated for later; november 5th.

[nicorulez]

Looking at the reviews, it appears that in D3D games ,the x1800xt is even or faster without AA/AF at high rez but wins by a comfortable 10-15 fps with AA/AF combined. Look at the reviews at techreports.com, extremetech.com, etc. In Doom3 games, the openGL support blows and Nvidia waxes their arse. No comparison once the eye candy is turned on :D . I really am very impressed with Nvidia this time. They produce a card three months plus ago that is fairly competitive in D3D games with the X1800xt. Moreover, you can buy an OC 7800GTX for around 500 smackeroos. At this point, I feel more comfortable with SLI and still think I am going through with my original plan to get a 7800GTX OC SLI set up.

The x1800xt rocks, but SLI really is very appealing. I just might wait a bit to see if Nvidia comes out with a 512mb card. That would rock in SLI. This is coming from a guy who has owned a 9700 Pro and x800xt PE (yes, I got it on the first shipment last year....lucky me). However, I am more high on Nvidia at this point and actually got my brother a 6800GT and his card rocks. Regardless, Nvidia will get my dinero this round as I don't see it as clear cut win for ATI. Moreover, what is up with ATI's piss poor OpenGL drivers. It can't be the hardware, as it appears to be a beast with D3D?

[killahsin]

Yeah, I understand all that, but the fact that Dr. Kirk at NVIDIA wanted to make this a function of the GPU at some point and now it seems that ATI is at least marketing that functionality makes me want to at least "hear them out". Trust me when I say I won't be running out to buy one cause someone at ATI wrote out d/t = V using paint and plastered it on the front page near the countdown, but I'm going to keep an open mind about it. ;)

If a GPU is able to speed up physics like AEGIA wanted to with their add-in card, I'm all for it. I don't think any of us would be arguing if our graphics cards could do such things for us in future games and we didn't have to have a Physics Add-in card as well.

Maybe more than anything I am interested in why someone spent the time and the brain power to write that on one of the "sell sheets". Probably all hype and PR as you've pointed out though.


No Dr Kirk wanted to put an actual ppu combination w/ their gpu. Not say, "here our secondaries can be used for 'some' general purpose stuff." I mean every developer on earth knows secondaries can be used for other stuff. ATI isn't doing anything new here, its just a new pr line to fit with the multi-threaded future. Math is math regardless of what runs it. But there is no way on earth that these cards are both gpu and ppu. Now sure just like cg you could make a language+compiler. But that is in no way any better then doign the same operations on any other gpu. This ati launch is bad not only for them but for us. Except for on the low end. ATI needed to raise the bar, and thus far the only bar they have raised with this release is with AF. I compliment them on that, but in damn near all modern 'next gen games' AF isn't as important as it once was because of all the new lighting tricks, and DOF tricks. The last 5 years of af/aa are the next 5 years of hdr/radiosity, and raytracing.

BTW get ready for quake 3 on a cellphone near you.

[Raje]

No Dr Kirk wanted to put an actual ppu combination w/ their gpu. Not say, "here our secondaries can be used for 'some' general purpose stuff."

I'm refering to the following quote, which is old, but it's all I've found along these lines:

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Features/geforce6800/10.html

David Kirk: As we go forward with GPU evolution, we will continue to make GPUs more powerful, more programmable, and more flexible. GPUs are already the most "bang for the buck" in terms of floating point computation per dollar, but we can do a lot better. We want to make GPUs useful for producing game geometry, and calculating game physics and AI/behavior as well.

By the sound of that they will make it so that the GPU will work on physics, they will add a PPU to their PCBs, or they will enbed an NVIDIA PPU type processor into their GPUs like they did with their video processors.

Still he said there "We want to make GPUs useful for .... calculating game physics...".

Do you have other information about what Dr. Kirk and NVIDIA are planning? If so I would appreciate a link. I like to try to keep up to date about it all.

[deimos47ca]

Who? Who has said that? You act like this thread is filled with ATI fan boys.

So many people here want ATI's product to fail and so they believe every negitive rumor they read. Now *that* is being a fanboy. :rolleyes:

The problem with forums like these is that a lot of seemingly similar yet separate ideas get muddled together as one. I dont think anybody wants ATI to fail, not even nVidia stock holders :D

I also doubt anybody here questions the new technology brought forth in their X1800 cards, or the actual performance or image quality (aka AF/AA algorithms used).

If you carefully cut your way through all the useless defamitory remarks or extreme loyalism, you will notice a lot of people have consenus on various particular aspects of the product launch. Some common criticisms:

1. Way over-hyped.. check out any fanboy thread ala www.rage3d.com and you see how ATI supporters were trying to steer people clear of nVidia products. Initially they said R500/R520 would come out very early 2005. Then they warned against getting 7800GTX because X1800 was going to come out "any day now", and supposed to be 2-3x faster - at least (and harnes zero-point energy in the form of a synthetic quantum singularity... he he.. the list goes on and on). Trying to deflate the hype bubble with *reality* got me banned from www.rage3d.com ;)
Even now, many ATI loyalists are convinced this is NOT the *real* R520, and that its actually R580 now.. which will have 48 pixel pipelines :rolleyes:
Somehow since all their predictions that R520 was 32pp wasn't true, their R580 predictions must be right... right?

2. Product launch.. what launch? Remember how excited you were when X800's came out. All the cool videos. The developers were there. There were many game demos. They had a real show.
X1800's similar name to X800 doesnt really do it justice.. already SO MANY ATI fans make comparisons to X800's, in everything from tranistor count to #pipelines... in reality the architectures are very different (this isn't like the 9800 vs 9700, or X850 vs X800). And ofcourse there was a clear peformance distinction from ~400Mhz 8 pipeline 9800XT to ~500Mhz 16 pipeline X800XTPE. Even the X800PRO was *substantially* faster than the previous high-end.
Ofcourse it also doesnt help that many of the features are "we-can-do-it-too" king, and fail to really add anything new. H264,HDR+AA, and physics, are on long list of things on the "to-do" list. No wonder, the non-naive aren't taken in.

3. Mixed signals. ATI really didn't help itself for the product launch of X1000 cards - many months earlier they promote X800 Crossfire, and finally launch with X1800.. ofcourse no X1800 Crossfire present... problem is current Crossfire competes with X1800's.
ATI spent the better part of 2004 and 2005 with anti-SM3 propaganda... what else would you expect when they have no SM3 cards. So they teach everyone that their SM2.0b can do everything just as well. Now suddenly they expect their legions of sheep to turn 180 degrees and forget all that mantra. -_- I dont baaaahhhh that way.
It clearly also doesn't help things when just weeks before launching your new fabulous mainstream you launch faster cheaper X800GT/X800GTO. Now, instead of reviewers and consumers comparing against say ATI's old X700pro and finding X1600XT to be amazingly faster, instead consumers finds performance is similar or lower than their existing cards... sure making it unnecessarily difficult for yourself to sell these new cards.

4. Finally ofcourse, the biggest concern... price and availability. Everybody expected with all the numerous delays, and all the "just one more month", that by now there would be massive stockpiles of cards ready. There would be millions everywhere... a trickle of X1800XL's came out instead... X1800XT and X1600's, were one and two months more waiting. It also doesnt that pricing is out of whack (and that's ignoring the competition). X1800XT is much faster than X1800XL, but only $50 more. Which in turn is very similar in performance to X850XT in many cases. X1600's would be ok, if it wasn't for <$240 X800XL, or as previously mentioned, the X800GT, X800GTO and even X800pro.

It would be wonderful to put up a list of pro's for ATI now, but unfortunately, there is little that would fit the stringent criteria of "existence". But its not all gloom and doom. ATI might just have finally got their heads around OpenGL - something that has been haunting them since Quake days. And although it would have been fantastic to have fancy games with extensive use of dynamic branching showcase R520's performance prowess at launch, they will inevidably come out eventually.. I guess its just more waiting - something many are either getting used to or getting fed up with.