How long untill ATI is on the same leve as Nvidia again

jdc0589

We all know the reasons why ATI has fallen behind in the gaming GPU market, though only very very slightly; but the question is how long will it be until they are right back up there with Nvidia, especially after loosing a good many employees to Nvidia when AMD purchased them.

A few years ago when I purchased my last system, the 9800xt was the best ati card out, and was just as good as any of Nvidias offerings so far as I can tell. It has served me REALLY well. Yea, its loud when stressed, and it runs insanely hot even when not oc'd,but Oblivion was the first game I ever played with it that would not perform at an acceptable level while at the same time the image quality was acceptable (yes, I know how ridiculously demanding Oblivion is). Others may argue that it will run oblivion just fine, but I personally found it was not acceptable.

I recently selected an EVGA 8800GTX for my build, but would have much rather gone with an ATI equivalently, had there truly been one.

So, when will ATI catch up? Will it be within the next 6 months with improved cards of similar architecture, or will it take more time, for instance until the next generation multicore units become available (assuming thats what they end up being)?

**On a side note, on paper ATI's crossfire sounds superior to Nvidia's SLi; is it falling behind simply due to integration/driver problems, or is there more to be seen?

Tipstaff

The way I see it, ATI shouldn't try to compete with nVidia in the high end market. They would make more money if they stuck with the low, and mid/mid-high range. Put it this way: how many high end cards get sold versus low to mid range? Over the lifetime of a series of cards you will sell way more mid range cards than high end cards. Almost a 3 to 1 ratio. I've lost count of how many 6200, 6600, 7600, X700, X800, X1950 Pro cards I've sold over the last 2 years, but I can count on all my digits the amount of high end cards I've sold.

Thing is there are 3 distinct types of computer users: everyday office/internet users who don't do any sort of 3D gaming, the average user who does the occasional gaming or is looking for the best bang for the buck card to do gaming with, and hard core gamers. If AMD were to stick with the low and mid range crowd they would be set for a long, long time. As I see it now, with AMD not releasing anything above the 2900XT, but releasing cards below that, this is what they've determined also.

Mind you.. I've yet to sell one 2XXX series card.

As for Crossfire.. this is one area nVidia still has AMD beat. Not because of speed.. not because it doesn't work (cuz it does), it's because we, the users, have to wait for AMD to come out with a driver that supports a game properly within the CCC. How do we get around it? By renaming the exe to something else that is supported by the CCC. nVidia, on the other hand, it's so damn easy for a user to go into the control panel, and create a profile for a game, and that's it. I mean, after all this time, why the hell hasn't AMD just allowed us to do the same thing? Is it that hard to create something that facilitates this?

jdc0589

I really had not thought about it that way. From a financial standpoint it makes perfect sense, but it doesn't seem like they would simply surrender the high end market totally. But when you look at it more closely, they made a run at some of the high end Nvidia cards, didn't quite get there, crossfire wasn't as successful as Sli, and now they do seem to be focusing on mid range cards more.

Isnt the entire point of the checkerboard crossfire to REDUCE the need for specific setting for different games (in addition to equalizing gpu loads).

I am a total novice in this area, but I dont understand why its so dificult to divide pixel rendering between two separate cards. The only thing I can think of is that its combining the output from each card into a single signal from the monitor that is the real challenge, in which case it seems like it would be most efficient to have a totaly seperate card for that, which would have the monitor connections.

Tipstaff

From what I remember there are 3 Crossifre modes: Super Tiling (which is the checkerboard mode you mentioned), Scissor (or split frame where each frame is split into 2, and each card does one of the 2 halves), and Alternate Frame Rendering (one card does one frame, the other card does the next frame, and so on). If a game isn't directly supported by the CCC, then that game will run in one of 2 default Crossfire modes depending on if it's a DirectX or OpenGL game. If it's DirectX it will render in Super Tiling, while if the game is OpenGL it will render in Scissors. You can, however, force AFR mode regardless if there is or is not support for the game by moving the Catalyst AI slider to 'Advanced', but this only works for DirectX games, and not OpenGL ones. In a later Catalyst release AMD would, or rather might add support for that game directly, and have it run in whatever mode of the 3 they have determined is the best. Since AFR is the fastest of the modes this would normally be the supported mode they would add, however, it depends on how the game renders textures as some games will crash if run in AFR mode.

With SLI, however, you can create a profile for any application to run in any of the modes you want if that profile doesn't exist, and it doesn't matter if it's DirectX or OpenGL. Later nVidia will add it's own profile which will have their recommended settings, but you can create a new profile to do whatever mode you want regardless if their's is there or not. Why AMD can't add something as simple as this to the CCC is beyond me.

jdc0589

Only thing I Can think of is that something about their crossfire architecture actually requires more specific programming and tweaking from game to game that SLi, and therefore ATI is afraid if they added an option similar to the user created profile for SLI there would be too many bugs, and therefore bad ratings/complaints. But, thats a long shot/wild guess