ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on April 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Putting this PhysX Business to Rest
Let me put things in perspective. Remember our Radeon HD 4870/4850 article that went up last year? It was a straight crown-robbing on ATI’s part, NVIDIA had no competitively priced response at the time.
About two hours before the NDA lifted on the Radeon HD 4800 series we got an urgent call from NVIDIA. The purpose of the call? To attempt to persuade us to weigh PhysX and CUDA support as major benefits of GeForce GPUs. A performance win by ATI shouldn’t matter, ATI can’t accelerate PhysX in hardware and can’t run CUDA applications.
The argument NVIDIA gave us was preposterous. The global economy was weakening and NVIDIA cautioned us against recommending a card that in 12 months would not be the right choice because new titles supporting PhysX and new CUDA applications would be coming right around the corner.
The tactics didn’t work obviously, and history showed us that despite NVIDIA’s doomsday warnings - Radeon HD 4800 series owners didn’t live to regret their purchases. Yes, the global economy did take a turn for the worst, but no - NVIDIA’s PhysX and CUDA support hadn’t done anything to incite buyer’s remorse for anyone who has purchased a 4800 series card. The only thing those users got were higher frame rates. (Note that if you did buy a Radeon HD 4870/4850 and severely regretted your purchase due to a lack of PhysX/CUDA support, please post in the comments).
This wasn’t a one time thing. NVIDIA has delivered the same tired message at every single opportunity. NVIDIA’s latest attempt was to punish those reviewers who haven’t been sold on the PhysX/CUDA messages by not sending them GeForce GTS 250 cards for review. The plan seemed to backfire thanks to one vigilant Inquirer reporter.
More recently we had our briefing for the GeForce GTX 275. The presentation for the briefing was 53 slides long, now the length wasn’t bothersome, but let’s look at the content of the slides:
| Slides About... | Number of Slides in NVIDIA's GTX 275 Presentation |
| The GeForce GTX 275 | 8 |
| PhysX/CUDA | 34 |
| Miscellaneous (DX11, Title Slides, etc...) | 11 |
You could argue that NVIDIA truly believes that PhysX and CUDA support are the strongest features of its GPUs. You could also argue that NVIDIA is trying to justify a premium for its much larger GPUs rather than having to sell them as cheap as possible to stand up to an unusually competitive ATI.
NVIDIA’s stance is that when you buy a GeForce GPU, it’s more than just how well it runs games. It’s about everything else you can run on it, whether that means in-game GPU accelerated PhysX or CUDA applications.
Maybe we’ve been wrong this entire time. Maybe instead of just presenting you with bar charts of which GPU is faster we should be penalizing ATI GPUs for not being able to run CUDA code or accelerate PhysX. Self reflection is a very important human trait, let’s see if NVIDIA is truly right about the value of PhysX and CUDA today.
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7Enigma - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
And just go and disregard everything I typed (minus the different driver versions). Xbit apparently underclocked the 4890 to stock speeds. So I have no clue how the heck their numbers are so significantly different, except they have this posted on system settings:ATI Catalyst:
Smoothvision HD: Anti-Aliasing: Use application settings/Box Filter
Catalyst A.I.: Standard
Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off
Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality
Other settings: default
Nvidia GeForce:
Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
Vertical sync: Force off
Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
Multi-display mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
Set PhysX GPU acceleration: Enabled
Other settings: default
If those are set differently in Anand's review I'm sure you could get some weird results.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
LOL - set PhysX gpu accelleration enabled.roflmao
Yeah man, I'm gonna get me that red card... ( if you didn't detect sarcasm, forget it)
tamalero - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
good to know you blame everyone for "bad reading understanding"let's see
ATI Catalyst:
Smoothvision HD: Anti-Aliasing: Use application settings/Box Filter
Catalyst A.I.: Standard
Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off
Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality
Other settings: default
Nvidia GeForce:
Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
you see the big "NVIDIA GEFORCE:" right below "other settings"?
that means the physX was ENABLED on the GEFORCE CARD.
you sir, are a nvidia fanboy and a big douché
SiliconDoc - Thursday, April 23, 2009 - link
More personal attacks, when YOU are the one who can't read, you IDIOT.Here are my first two lines: LOL - set PhysX gpu accelleration enabled.
roflmao
_____
Then you tell me it says PhySx is enabled - which is what I pointed out. You probably did not go see the linked test results at the other site, and put two and two together.
Look in the mirror and see who can't read, YOU FOOL.
Better luck next time crowing barnyard animal.
"Cluckle red 'el doo ! Cluckle red 'ell doo !"
Let's see, I say PhySx is enabled, and you scream at me to point out it says PhysX is enabled, and call me an nvidia fan because of it - which would make you an nvidia fan as well - according to you, IF you knew what the heck you were doing, which YOU DON'T.
That makes you - likely a red rooster... I may check on that - hopefully you're not a noob poster, too, as that would reduce my probabilities in the discovery phase. Good luck, you'll likely need it after what I've seen so far.
7Enigma - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Looked even closer and the drivers used were different.ATI Drivers:
Anand-9.4 beta
Xbit-9.3
Nvidia:
Anand-185
Xbit-182.08
ancient46 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
I don't see the fun in shooting cloth and unrealistic non impact resistant windows in high rise buildings. The video with the cloth was distracting, it made me wonder why it was there. What was its purpose? My senior eyes did not see much of an improvement in the videos in the CUDA application.SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Maybe someday you'll lose you're raging red fanboy bias, brakdown entirely, toss out your life religion, and buy an nvidia card. At that point perhaps Mirror's Edge will come with it, and after digging it out of the trash can (second thoughts you had), you'll try it, and like anand, really like it - turn it off, notice what you've been missing, turn it back on, and enjoy. Then after all that, you can crow "meh".I suppose after that you can revert to red rooster raging fanboy - you'll have to have your best red bud rip you from your Mirror's Edge addiction, but that's ok, he's a red and will probably smack you for trying it out - and have a clean shot with ow absorbed you'll be.
Well, that should rap it up.
poohbear - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
are the driver issues for AMD that significant that it needs to be mentioned in a review article? im asking in all honesty as i dont know. Also, this close developer relationship nvidia has w/ developers. does that show up in any games to significantly give a performance edge for nvidia vid cards? is there an example game out there for this? thanks.7Enigma - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Look no further than this article. :) Here's the quote:"The first thing about Warmonger is that it runs horribly slow on ATI hardware, even with GPU accelerated PhysX disabled. I’m guessing ATI’s developer relations team hasn’t done much to optimize the shaders for Radeon HD hardware. Go figure."
But ATI also has some relations with developers that show an unusually high advantage as well (Race Driver G.R.I.D. for example). All in all, as long as no one is cheating by disabling effects or screwing with draw distances, it only benefits the consumer for the games to be optimized. The more one side pushes for optimizations, the more the other side is forced, or risk losing the benchmark wars (which ultimately decides purchases for most people).
SkullOne - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
In the conclusion mentions Nvidia's partners releasing OC boards but nothing about AMD. There is already two versions of the XFX HD4890 on Newegg. One is 850 core and the other is 875 core.The HD4890 is geared to open that SKU of "OC" cards for AMD. People with stock cooling and stock voltage can already push the card to 950+MHz. On the ASUS card you boost voltage to the GPU which has allowed people to get over 1GHz on their GPU. As the card matures seeing 1GHz cores on stock cooling and voltage will become a reality.
It seems like these facts are being ignored.