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New 2900XT (new drivers) vs 8800 GTS Review

bigboi86

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Let's just say you have to be open minded to like Kyle's review methods. I can clearly see which card is the better card in his review though, that's all that matters.
 

newtekie1

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It doesn't matter how long the card has been in the wild. If you are going to make consumers wait 6+ months for a product to compete it better damn well actually be able to compete when it is released.
 

Wile E

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It doesn't matter how long the card has been in the wild. If you are going to make consumers wait 6+ months for a product to compete it better damn well actually be able to compete when it is released.
It does compete. Look at other reviews. It sometimes even competes with a GTX.

And the amount of time a product is on the market has everything to do with driver quality.
 

HellasVagabond

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To compete with a GTX in Games such as Half Life 2 and in 3dmark isnt exactly fair since the first is ATI optimised and the second isnt really a game.
And like i said before the X2900XT was delayed 1,2 months ( dont remember exactly ) because ATI had driver issues with it so their drivers should be quite complete.
Anyways this round is won by the Green guys so lets wait and see what the red team brings into the ring next.
 
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"driver issues".. dude, nvidia required months of user feedback to get their drivers working, allow that for ATI plz ^^
 

Wile E

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To compete with a GTX in Games such as Half Life 2 and in 3dmark isnt exactly fair since the first is ATI optimised and the second isnt really a game.
And like i said before the X2900XT was delayed 1,2 months ( dont remember exactly ) because ATI had driver issues with it so their drivers should be quite complete.
Anyways this round is won by the Green guys so lets wait and see what the red team brings into the ring next.
No, this round hasn't been won by the green team. You definitely can't call that without fully fledged DX10 games to test on.

And for the last time, the driver cannot be completed without user feedback. It is impossible to release a fully optimized driver without feedback from customers. ATI would've had to test the driver on every possible combination of hardware and software in order for it to be optimized upon release. Just not possible.

nVidia can't do it either. They also rely on customer feedback to improve their drivers. Why do you think the performance of the 8800 is so much better now, compared to when it released? They haven't changed the hardware, so the performance improvement could only attributed to the drivers.


ATI is only on the first update, since release of the 2900. How many updates did nVidia take before the performance really started to improve on the 8800?

Give it a couple more driver revisions and some DX10 games before you try to call a winner.
 

HellasVagabond

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By the time DX10 come in numbers both companies will have new GPUs to show off thats why im saying this round is won by the Green team.
As for the drivers i cant say i have ever see a huge or even a big improvement in FPS between drivers. Only perhaps in certain games where some drivers wont work as planned but in the Benchmarks we see around the internet we dont see 1,2,3 games but many times more and in almost all we see the same results so i cant really say that a driver can be that bad in every game.
 

Wile E

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By the time DX10 come in numbers both companies will have new GPUs to show off thats why im saying this round is won by the Green team.
As for the drivers i cant say i have ever see a huge or even a big improvement in FPS between drivers. Only perhaps in certain games where some drivers wont work as planned but in the Benchmarks we see around the internet we dont see 1,2,3 games but many times more and in almost all we see the same results so i cant really say that a driver can be that bad in every game.
But it isn't that bad in every game. That's the point everyone is missing here. They trade blows, depending on the game.

As far as not seeing an improvement in your fps with new drivers, how long have you owned the card? Ask someone that bought an 8800 at it's release how big the improvement was.
 

HellasVagabond

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Perhaps the 8800 had problems when it launched ( I got the 640mb version 3 months after ) but i never heard of a delay of the card due to driver problems so perhaps Nvidia prefered to let the customers feedback help them fix the drivers rather than doing it on their own. However i did hear ATI delayed the X2900XT launch due to driver problems so i think they did tune them even a bit and then released the card to the public.
Besides even the Nvidia drivers can be tweaked more and so can the ATI ones but i doubt we can see any major differences just based on drivers since both companies will tweak them and tweak them until they release new GPUs.
 

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Perhaps the 8800 had problems when it launched ( I got the 640mb version 3 months after ) but i never heard of a delay of the card due to driver problems so perhaps Nvidia prefered to let the customers feedback help them fix the drivers rather than doing it on their own. However i did hear ATI delayed the X2900XT launch due to driver problems so i think they did tune them even a bit and then released the card to the public.
Besides even the Nvidia drivers can be tweaked more and so can the ATI ones but i doubt we can see any major differences just based on drivers since both companies will tweak them and tweak them until they release new GPUs.
We're obviously not going to change each other's minds. I say we just agree to disagree. :toast:
 
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I don't personally like that review either... They didn't give any real information, they didn't standardize anything...

And for all the better at least 2 of those games are directly written for NVIDIA...
Well what good is that for performance?

If I made hardware that worked directly with my ATI card and didn't require a driver and then wrote software to work directly with the hardware... hmmm

Not going to hate on either card by any and all means... But a poorly controlled and written review.
 

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"driver issues".. dude, nvidia required months of user feedback to get their drivers working, allow that for ATI plz ^^

Correction slightly if I may......to get their Vista drivers working, whilst that is unacceptable vista was pretty damn new when the 8800 series was released.
 
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