ATI vs. NVIDIA, Part 3

Introduction

I've already written twice before about the great video card wars, the first time explaining that the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro beat the tar out NVIDIA and the second time taking NVIDIA to task for their awful benchmark cheating. Round three in the saga comes after a recent upgrade experience. My ATI Radeon 9700 Pro has given me a lot of good gaming over the last couple of years, but it was starting to get pretty long in the tooth.

I say that because it just couldn't cope with games like Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (SC:PT), Battlefield Vietnam, and especially Far Cry. Oh, I could run them moderately well at 800 x 600 with high details or at 1024 x 768 with medium/low details, but that's not how I want to play video games. If I'm going to spend my precious time on a game I want the full experience; i.e., I want all the goodies without the "jaggies". It was becoming more and more obvious to me that it was time to upgrade, especially with the imminent release of DOOM 3 and supposedly Half-Life 2 as well, though I'll believe the latter only when it's on store shelves.

So I did the research, read all the reviews, combed through various forums, and arrived at a conclusion: the ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition was the card for me. My reasoning was pretty simple. I always buy the biggest and baddest video card around so it will last me for a few years. With that in mind, the only thing NVIDIA's newest offerings supply beyond ATI's is support for the pixel shader model 3.0 (PS3) specification. Virtually every piece of information available to me shows that ATI's top-end cards beat NVIDIA's top-end cards in terms of speed while simultaneously requiring less power and offering somewhat better image quality. It wasn't a simple decision, but the choice seemed pretty clear to me.

ATI Shoots Itself in the Foot

Or at least it did until ATI shot itself squarely in the foot. When they announced that their X800 Pro cards would be available in May, with the X800 XT PE cards shipping shortly thereafter in June, gamers around the world rejoiced. Not only did it seem like ATI had the better technology, their cards would also hit the shelves first! Like so many others I placed an order; CDW told me at the time that they had a couple shipments of the card due, and that mine would likely ship out on June 30. But that date came and went. Then I was told July 9 was the day it would ship. That soon became July 15. A few days later ATI admitted that they wouldn't be selling the X800 XT PE cards on their own site until October, and CDW told me that I would have to wait another 30 - 60 days (at a minimum) for my card.

So what's a few weeks, right? Maybe if I hadn't been waiting in earnest to upgrade my system since March they wouldn't have meant so much to me. But I had already waited a couple of months for the cards to be released, and had then waited a couple more months after placing my order with no end to the waiting in sight. Frankly, I got tired of the whole affair. Here's a word of advice, ATI: don't get customers hyped about your new technology and then give them false release dates. Maybe your X800 XT PE cards will be the coolest thing on Earth in a few months, but I've already waited two months for an order that you were supposed to have filled. ATI has let a lot of customers down this time around.

So NVIDIA Gets My Business

So back to NVIDIA I went. Oh, it wasn't that simple, mind you, for I had to call all over the place just to find a card available for purchase. Whereas I couldn't find a single X800 XT PE card in stock anywhere, except on EBay where some jerks are gouging their fellow gamers for almost twice the market price, I could find a few of NVIDIA's offerings here and there. To be clear, I don't have any problem with the entrepreneurial mind set, but when one guy buys up dozens of the card that hundreds of people are waiting for, with the sole purpose in mind of gouging them on an auction site, he needs an enema—preferably one delivered with broken glass.

Anyway, I managed to find a single BFG GeForce 6800 GT in stock at a Fry's Electronics store not so far from me, so I got them to set it aside and headed on my merry way. I paid a reasonable $399 for the card (not including the ridiculous California sales tax) and got a pretty nice package for my money. True, it doesn't include any bundled games, but it does include a driver CD, a CD of game demos, and the promise of lifetime, free, 24/7 technical support via a handy toll-free number. It's not often that vendors provide anything resembling that kind of support these days, and BFG deserves big praise for doing so. Besides, I'd much rather buy games separately, for the OEM versions typically bundled are like bastard children: easily forgotten and nobody wants to support them.

In short, NVIDIA got my business this time around, not because they made the best product (about which more in a moment) but because they actually followed through. NVIDIA didn't jerk me around like ATI did with product availability, and that counts for a lot. No doubt some folk will smugly point out that they'll be enjoying a somewhat faster video card within a couple of months, and I don't doubt they're right. But you know what? I've been having a great time for the last couple of weeks while they're still waiting, and they're going to be waiting for some time to come. That's a tangible benefit in my book, or as the old saying goes: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

And the Card is a Real Screamer

It's been a couple of years since I last had an NVIDIA video card in my system, and I must say I've been pleasantly surprised at the differences I've noticed. For example, it used to be the case that ATI obviously trumped NVIDIA in terms of image quality, but these days the differences are much subtler. I obviously haven't seen how well the X800 XT PE cards render images, but my 6800 GT does a surprisingly good job. Even the quality of NVIDIA's anti-aliasing, which has long been a sore spot of comparison in my experience, is significantly improved. Their new 2x Quincux algorithm is particularly impressive because it provides near-4x quality with an almost nonexistent performance cost. That's amazing. The card is also just plain fast, as the following benchmarks illustrate.

The above compares my somewhat-overclocked 9700 Pro with the new 6800 GT running at its stock settings, though for sake of fairness it should be observed that the latter comes overclocked straight out of the box. The Quake III Arena (Q3A) and Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2k4) numbers are expressed in frames per second (FPS). The Q3A score was taken by running the DEMO001 demo, included with the demo version of the game, running at 1600 x 1200 with all graphical options maxed out, whereas the UT2k4 score was taken by running the flyby test on the Inferno map at 1280 x 1024 with all the graphics options also maxed. The quick summary is that the new card at stock settings is almost twice as fast as the tweaked-out old card in synthetic benchmarks and is significantly faster in actual games.

And those numbers don't tell the whole story either. The 6800 GT card is so much faster that my system is now clearly CPU bound. I can enable anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) without changing the gaming numbers much at all. The card itself has a fair amount of horsepower to spare, but my Athlon 3000 XP CPU is having trouble keeping up with it. I've heard of people scoring 12,000+ 3D Marks with an overclocked 6800 GT card and a fast CPU, with a corresponding performance increase in games, and I'm inclined to believe it from what I've seen thus far. The 6800 GT is a beast of a card; it's not as fast as the X800 XT PE probably will be (if it ever actually ships in quantity), but it's mighty darned fast.

It's Also More Compatible

Beyond the pure speed, though, I've been still more pleased with the card's seemingly broader compatibility than my old 9700 Pro. A number of problems have simply disappeared after installing the 6800 GT. For example, about half the time I launched SC:PT's multi-player aspect, it would end up running in a window. The game would start up fine, but then after selecting my profile it would change the resolution/refresh rate lots of times. That's neither a speedy process nor very good for the monitor.

While the system sat there with a blank screen I would hear clicks at roughly one to two second intervals until it either (1) managed to get the right resolution/refresh rate, or (2) failed and dropped back to being a window on my desktop. Since installing the new card I hear a quick pair of clicks and that's it; the game gets it right every time. So instead of "click... click... click... click... click... click..." and then having to fuss with a window on my desktop, and suffer through yet more clicking, I now get "clickclick" and I'm ready to play. That's really nice.

It's also nice that I can finally play my all-time-favorite game again, Blade of Darkness (BoD). That game worked just fine with my 9700 Pro when I first bought it, but ATI broke something in their drivers somewhere around Catalyst v3.4 and never fixed it. I could get it to work by using the unsupported, alpha release of the game's OpenGL rasterizer, which was never completed or even improved because the developers went out of business, but it was hardly a good solution. The fog emulation didn't work right, for one thing, and there were a number of strange, visual artifacts at various points in the game as well. With the 6800 GT the game runs unbelievably well, maintaining a smooth framerate even with 4x AA and 8x AF enabled in the drivers.

I'm also happy to report that the refresh rate overrides actually work with the NVIDIA drivers! This was a sore spot with me where the ATI card was concerned from day one. I had to run a third-party utility (Rage3D Tweak) just to be able to override the refresh rates in the first place, and then they would still fail to be enforced in some circumstances. The only way to make them work all the time was to run PowerStrip as well, but I hated having to run two additional pieces of software just to make sure my games would start with the proper refresh rates. I shouldn't have to do that, and with the NVIDIA drivers I don't have to. I can set the overrides in the NVIDIA driver panel and they work, period. That's a wonderful change.

I could list a number of other minor improvements I've noticed as well (e.g., fewer pops and clicks with both WDM and ASIO audio devices, much better looking in-game shadows, etc.), but suffice it to say I've been reminded of late why so many people stick with NVIDIA despite their performance woes and benchmark cheating scandals. For all their faults, and despite all of ATI's efforts to improve, NVIDIA still makes the best video drivers available. The gap has closed a lot, thanks to the Catalyst program, but there clearly remains some work for ATI to do to meet or exceed NVIDIA's standards in several basic respects.

Some Minor Warts

To be fair, I should also note that I've encountered a few warts along the way, the most irritating of which is that the latest ForceWare drivers (builds 6176 and 6177) have broken my ability to use AA with my favorite multi-player game, Raven Shield (RS). With AA enabled, the map-loading screen stays up for roughly quadruple the time it should, has a black square where the animated logo should be, and stays there indefinitely if anything happens to send the player back to that screen after making it into a game. That makes it impractical to use AA at all with the game, and that's unacceptable after shelling out so much money for a video card.

I've reported the bug to NVIDIA, and their telephone representative, Immanuel, seemed very professional and concerned in his handling of my call. One can only hope that it's fixed soon for I'm not the only one suffering from it. Thankfully, the problem doesn't exist with the older drivers (build 6121) that came with my card, so I'm sticking with those until it's fixed. They have their own problems (e.g., not letting me create or modify any application profiles), but at least they let me use AA.

I could also complain about the relatively limited color profile features of the 6800 GT compared to the 9700 Pro. To wit, ATI's drivers provide far more power and control through keybinds than do NVIDIA's. Both allow the user to create multiple color profiles, but only ATI allows the user to bind keys to switch, update, and restore color profiles on the fly. NVIDIA's offerings are limited simply to changing the current settings or restoring the defaults. It would also be nice if NVIDIA's color profiles were divided between full-screen 3D applications and the 2D desktop, as ATI's are, but that's a more minor complaint.

Finally, I have to say that ATI seems somewhat more accessible to its customers, at least at first. I was always able to report driver bugs to ATI simply by going to the Catalyst Crew Program web site for driver feedback. What's more, I could always post in the Rage3D forums where at least one of the honchos in charge of driver development hangs out from time to time. It took me some digging, but I've finally found a web site where I can report bugs with NVIDIA's stuff. Unfortunately, I haven't found any comparable forum resource for users in need of help. Perhaps I will with time. I don't know. My initial impressions are that ATI is working harder to establish a rapport with their customers, for whatever those initial impressions are worth.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm one happy camper. I was going to pay roughly $500 for an X800 XT PE, and I would gladly have parted with that kind of cash for such a great card. But the simple truth is that ATI has left an overwhelming number of vendors and customers high and dry. After failing to ship their best-in-the-world card as promised in June, they welched on further promises to ship in July, and then followed that mess up with a few more months of delays. I got tired of waiting, as I'm sure many other gamers did. It doesn't matter, ATI, if you have the best products in the world if you're not actually shipping them!

So, this round in the graphics wars goes to NVIDIA as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not a fanboy; I really couldn't care less what video card I buy, as long as it gives me a good experience with the applications and games I want to run. The 6800 GT is one heck of a card at a substantively lower price than the X800 XT PE, so I'm going to stick with NVIDIA this time around. Maybe I'll be going back to ATI in a couple of years, but only if they get their ducks in a row and actually deliver products as promised. That's what lost you my business this time, ATI. I hope I won't have to say the same in the future.

07/27/2004