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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Snarks - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link
One is an open, one is not.Jesus christ.
The fact you have to pay extra on top of the card prices to use these features is a no go. You start to lose value, thus negating the effect these "features" have.
p.s ATI have similar features to nvidia, what they have is nothing new.
SiliconDoc - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link
Did you see a charge for ambient occlusion ?Here you are "clucky clucky cluck cluck !"
Red rooster, the LIARS crew.
SiliconDoc - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link
One ? I count for or five. I never had to pay extra outside card cost for PhysX, did you ?You see, you people will just lie your yappers off.
Yeah ati has PhysX - it's own. ROFLMAO
Look, just jump around and cluck and flap the rooster wings and eat some chickseed, you all can believe eachothers LIES. Have a happy lie fest, dude.
bill3 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Personally while you bring up good points I'd much, much, MUCH rather have the thorough explanation of CUDA and PHYSX and the relevance thereof, they gave us than power, heat and overclocking numbers you can get at dozens of other reviews. The former is insight, the latter just legwork.joos2000 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
I really like to soft shadows you get in the corners with the new AO features in nVidia's drivers. Very neat.dryloch - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
I had a 4850 that I bought at launch. I was very excited when ATI released their Video Convertor app. I spent days trying to make that produce watchable video. Then I realized that every website that tested it had the same result. They released a broken POS and have yet to fix it. I did not appreciate them treating me like that so when I replaced the card I switched out to Nvidia. I have gone back and forth but this time I think I will stick with Nvidia for a while.duploxxx - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
and by buying Nvidia you already knew that you didn't have POS so in the end you have the same result, except for the fact that the 48xx series really had a true performance advantage with that price range so your rebranded replacement just gave you 1) additional cost and 2) really 0 added value, so your grass is a bit to green.....Exar3342 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
"0 added value"? Really? He didn't have a GPU video converter that worked on his ATI card, and now he DOES have a working program with his Nvidia card. Sounds like added value to me. He gets the same performance, pretty much the same price, and working software. Not a bad deal...z3R0C00L - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
The GPU converted that comes with nVIDIA is horrible (better than ATi's though).I use Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 Ultra which supports both CUDA and Stream. Worth mentioning that Stream is faster.
Spoelie - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Is the 30$ pricetag of badaboom included in the "pretty much the same price"? If it isn't, then actually there is no added value. You have a converter (value, well only if your goal is to put video's on your ipod and it's worth 30$ to you to do it faster) but you have to pay for it extra. The only thing the nvidia card provides is the ability to accelerate that program, you don't actually get the program.