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
CUDA - Oh there’s More
Oh I’m not done. Other than PhysX, NVIDIA is stressing CUDA as another huge feature that no other GPU maker on the world has.
For those who aren’t familiar, CUDA is a programming interface to NVIDIA hardware. Modern day GPUs are quite powerful, easily capable of churning out billions if not a trillion instructions per second when working on the right dataset. The problem is that harnessing such power is a bit difficult. NVIDIA put a lot of effort into developing an easy to use interface to the hardware and eventually it evolved into CUDA.
Now CUDA only works on certain NVIDIA GPUs and certainly won’t talk to Larrabee or anything in the ATI camp. Both Intel and ATI have their own alternatives, but let’s get back to CUDA for now.
The one area that GPU computing has had a tremendous impact already is the HPC market. The applications there lent themselves very well to GPU programming and thus we see incredible CUDA penetration there. What NVIDIA wants however is CUDA in the consumer market, and that’s a little more difficult.
The problem is that you need a compelling application and the first major one we looked at was Elemental’s Badaboom. The initial release of Badaboom fell short of the mark but over time it became a nice tool. While it’s not the encoder of choice for people looking to rip Blu-ray movies, it’s a good, fast way of getting your DVDs and other videos onto your iPod, iPhone or other portable media player. It only works on NVIDIA GPUs and is much faster than doing the same conversion on a CPU if you have a fast enough GPU.
The problem with Badaboom was that, like GPU accelerated PhysX, it only works on NVIDIA hardware and NVIDIA isn’t willing to give away NVIDIA GPUs to everyone in the world - thus we have another catch 22 scenario.
Badaboom is nice. If you have a NVIDIA GPU and you want to get DVD quality content onto your iPod, it works very well. But spending $200 - $300 on a GPU to run a single application just doesn’t seem like something most users would be willing to do. NVIDIA wants the equation to work like this:
Badaboom -> You buy a NVIDIA GPU
But the equation really works like this:
Games (or clever marketing) -> You buy a NVIDIA GPU -> You can also run Badaboom
Now if the majority of applications in the world required NVIDIA GPUs to run, then we’d be dealing in a very different environment, but that’s not reality in this dimension.
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SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Well thanks for stomping the red rooster into the ground, definitively, after proving, once again, that what an idiot blabbering pussbag red spews about without a clue should not be swallowed with lust like a loose girl.I mean it's about time the reds just shut their stupid traps - 6 months of bs and lies will piss any decent human being off. Heck, it pissed off NVidia, and they're paid to not get angry. lol
tamalero - Sunday, April 5, 2009 - link
arggh, lots of typoos."Mirrors Edge's PhysX in other hand does show indeed add a lot of graphical feel. " should have been : Mirrors Edge's physx in other hand, does indeed show a lot of new details.
lk7600 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Can you please die? Prefearbly by getting crushed to death, or by getting your face cut to shreds with a
pocketknife.
I hope that you get curb-stomped, f ucking retard
Shut the *beep* up f aggot, before you get your face bashed in and cut
to ribbons, and your throat slit.
papapapapapapapababy - Saturday, April 4, 2009 - link
Yes, i love you too, silly girl.lk7600 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Can you please remove yourself from the gene pool? Preferably in the most painful and agonizing way possible? Retard
magnetar68 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Firstly, I agree with the articles basic premise that lack of convincing titles for PhysX/CUDA means this is not a weighted factor for most people.I am not most people, however, and I enjoy running NVIDIA's PhysX and CUDA SDK samples and learning how they work, so I would sacrifice some performance/quality to have access to these features (even spend a little more for them).
The main point I would like to make, however, is that I like the fact that NVIDIA is out there pushing these capabilities. Yes, until we have cross-platform OpenCL, physics and GPGPU apps will not be ubiquitous; but NVIDIA is working with developers to push these capabilities (and 3D Stereo with 3D VISION) and this is pulling the broader market to head in this direction. I think that vision/leadership is a great thing and therefore I buy NVIDIA GPUs.
I realize that ATI was pushing physics with Havok and GPGPU programming early (I think before NVIDIA), but NVIDIA has done a better job of executing on these technologies (you don't get credit for thinking about it, you get credit for doing it).
The reality is that games will be way cooler when the you extrapolate from Mirror's Edge to what will be around down the road. Without companies like NVIDIA out there making solid progress on executing on delivering these capabilities, we will never get there. That has value to me I am willing to pay a little for. Having said that, performance has to be reasonable close for this to be true.
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Games will be better when we get better effects, and PhysX has some potential to do that. However, the past is a clear indication that developers aren't going to fully support PhysX until it works on every mainstream card out there. Pretty much it means NVIDIA pays people to add PhysX support (either in hardware or other ways), and OpenCL is what will really create an installed user base for that sort of functionality.If you're a dev, what would you rather do: work on separate code paths for CUDA and PhysX and forget about all other GPUs, or wait for OpenCL and support all GPUs with one code path? Look at the number of "DX10.1" titles for a good indication.
josh6079 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Agreed.NVidia has certainly received credit for getting accelerated physics moving, but its momentum stops when they couple it to CUDA when offering it to discrete graphics cards outside of the GeForce family.
Hrel - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Still no 3D Mark scores, STILL no low-med resolutions.Thanks for including the HD4850, where's the GTS250??? Or do you guys still not have one? Well, you could always use a 9800GTX+ instead, and actually label it correctly this time. Anyway, thanks for the review and all the info on CUDA and PhysX; pretty much just confirmed what I already knew; none of it matters until it's cross-platform.
7Enigma - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
3DMark can be found in just about every other review. I personally don't care, but realize people compete on the Orb, and since it's just a simple benchmark to run it probably could be included without much work. The only problem I see (and agree with) is the highly optimized nature both Nvidia and ATI put on the PCVantage/3DMark benchmarks. They don't really tell you much about anything IMO. I'd argue they not only don't tell you about future games (since to my knowledge no (one?) games have ever used an engine from the benchmarks), nor do they tell you much between cards from different brands since they look for every opportunity to tweak them for the highest score, regardless of whether it has any effect in realworld performance.What low-med resolution are you asking for? 1280X1024 is the only one I'd like to see (as that's what I and probably 25-50% of all gamers are still using), but I can see why in most cases they don't test it (you have to go to low end cards to have an issue with playable framerates on anything 4850 and above at that resolution). Xbitlabs' review did include 1280X1024, but as you'll see, unless you are playing Crysis:Warhead, and to a lesser extent Farcry2 with max graphics settings and high levels of AA you are normally in the high double to triple digits in terms of framerate. Any resolution lower than that, you've got to be on integrated video to care about!