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
New Drivers From NVIDIA Change The Landscape
Today, NVIDIA will release it's new 185 series driver. This driver not only enables support for the GTX 275, but affects performance in parts across NVIDIA's lineup in a good number of games. We retested our NVIDIA cards with the 185 driver and saw some very interesting results. For example, take a look at before and after performance with Race Driver: GRID.
As we can clearly see, in the cards we tested, performance decreased at lower resolutions and increased at 2560x1600. This seemed to be the biggest example, but we saw flattened resolution scaling in most of the games we tested. This definitely could affect the competitiveness of the part depending on whether we are looking at low or high resolutions.
Some trade off was made to improve performance at ultra high resolutions at the expense of performance at lower resolutions. It could be a simple thing like creating more driver overhead (and more CPU limitation) to something much more complex. We haven't been told exactly what creates this situation though. With higher end hardware, this decision makes sense as resolutions lower than 2560x1600 tend to perform fine. 2560x1600 is more GPU limited and could benefit from a boost in most games.
Significantly different resolution scaling characteristics can be appealing to different users. An AMD card might look better at one resolution, while the NVIDIA card could come out on top with another. In general, we think these changes make sense, but it might be nicer if the driver automatically figured out what approach was best based on the hardware and resolution running (and thus didn't degrade performance at lower resolutions).
In addition to the performance changes, we see the addition of a new feature. In the past we've seen the addition of filtering techniques, optimizations, and even dynamic manipulation of geometry to the driver. Some features have stuck and some just faded away. One of the most popular additions to the driver was the ability to force Full Screen Antialiasing (FSAA) enabling smoother edges in games. This features was more important at a time when most games didn't have an in-game way to enable AA. The driver took over and implemented AA even on games that didn't offer an option to adjust it. Today the opposite is true and most games allow us to enable and adjust AA.
Now we have the ability to enable a feature, which isn't available natively in many games, that could either be loved or hated. You tell us which.
Introducing driver enabled Ambient Occlusion.
What is Ambient Occlusion you ask? Well, look into a corner or around trim or anywhere that looks concave in general. These areas will be a bit darker than the surrounding areas (depending on the depth and other factors), and NVIDIA has included a way to simulate this effect in it's 185 series driver. Here is an example of what AO can do:
Here's an example of what AO generally looks like in games:
This, as with other driver enabled features, significantly impacts performance and might not be able to run on all games or at all resolutions. Ambient Occlusion may be something some gamers like and some do not depending on the visual impact it has on a specific game or if performance remains acceptable. There are already games that make use of ambient occlusion, and some games that NVIDIA hasn't been able to implement AO on.
There are different methods to enable the rendering of an ambient occlusion effect, and NVIDIA implements a technique called Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO for short). The advantage is that this method is likely very highly optimized to run well on NVIDIA hardware, but on the down side, developers limit the ultimate quality and technique used for AO if they leave it to NVIDIA to handle. On top of that, if a developer wants to guarantee that the feature work for everyone, they would need implement it themselves as AMD doesn't offer a parallel solution in their drivers (in spite of the fact that they are easily capable of running AO shaders).
We haven't done extensive testing with this feature yet, either looking for quality or performance. Only time will tell if this addition ends up being gimmicky or really hits home with gamers. And if more developers create games that natively support the feature we wouldn't even need the option. But it is always nice to have something new and unique to play around with, and we are happy to see NVIDIA pushing effects in games forward by all means possible even to the point of including effects like this in their driver.
In our opinion, lighting effects like this belong in engine and game code rather than the driver, but until that happens it's always great to have an alternative. We wouldn't think it a bad idea if AMD picked up on this and did it too, but whether it is more worth it to do this or spend that energy encouraging developers to adopt this and comparable techniques for more complex writing is totally up to AMD. And we wouldn't fault them either way.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
294 Comments
View All Comments
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!