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new PC, gfx card: nvidea or ATI?

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
This is not such much a technical issue or problem rather than a dilemma.
My current pc is 6-7 years old and has now reached its limit of feasible upgrades, as the mainboard only has a single core pentium 4 and is still AGP based.

I am planning to take STO's release as an opportunity to build a new pc that is meant to serve my gaming needs again for the coming ~6-7 years (with the one or the other upgrade during that time). So it is not meant to only be for STO but also for other games in the future which means a little more power than is actually needed for STO wouldn't be a bad thing.

The question: what gfx card to go for? Essentially I have been looking at 4 options.
2 from ATI:
HD 5870 and HD 5970

and 2 from nvidia
GTX 285 and GTX 295

Does dual GPU actually make sense at this time? Even when not limiting the use to STO, might it be cheaper to simply upgrade/replace a now bought single GPU card with a dual later on when it is actually being used by a wider range of games?
Having read that STO does not (yet?) support dual GPUs and only utilizes one processor might I even end up with less performance (in STO) using a dual GPU card rather than one of the two older models in the list above?

And the main dilemma: nvidea or ATI? I don't really like ATI very much. Over the past I almost always used them but the vast majority of games seem to be optimized for nvidia with ATI chips causing some difficulties and/or having some disadvantage.
Especially considering the no-antialiasing for ATI issue STO does not seem to be an exception here.
I heard that champions online with its same gfx engine as STO has been having this no-AA issue for months already without a fix (correct me if I am wrong) which suggests that ATI users won't see antialiasing any time soon at all.

So would it be smarter to chose an nvidia card? Or are there any news on the ATI issue that I have missed indicating an incoming fix?

Final notes:
Costs: the initial price is not as much of an issue as the actual "lifetime costs". The main question is what is cheaper: getting the stronger version now and not having to upgrade later on, or getting a somewhat less powerful component now, paying less and instead upgrading later on.

For reference: I am planning to build the system around an intel core i7 975 with either 6GB or 12 GB of ram (not sure yet if 12 GB ram would make any sense at this time)

Any constructive input would be appreciated.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    I have very good experience with ATI as their drivers are quite stable for as far as I can tell.

    There for I would advise you to get the 5970 if you have the cash otherwise you can go for the 5870.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    Having been using ATI cards almost exclusively during the last years I have to admit that their drivers do seem fairly stable with only a few exceptions. My concern however is the general compatibility with most games, as these usually seem to be optimized for nvidia chipsets.

    Especially the current antialiasing issue that STO players using ATI cards are facing is a major concern.
    Granted, this might get fixed at some point. It might remain in place as well though considering that the same, or very similar, issues can be found in other games in combination with ATI cards too, including champions online.

    That brings up the question if there is actually an advantage when choosing ATI over nvidia that is significant enough to offset the mentioned disadvantage(s).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    I'm running a couple of 4770's Crossfired, and have yet to see the computer struggle even once. I've been slowly turning up the detail from the initial install to see when it begins to choke. I suspect that when they fix the AA bug with ATI then I'll see some performance degradation @ high detail levels. Now my wife runs a couple of GTS250 in SLI, and she keeps telling me "You got to see this!" So I begrudgingly go check STO out on her 28" screen. Truthfully I can't see the difference, but then my vision is not what it used to be so I guess the beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    The (single) GTX 285 seems like an excellent choice for STO. Great performance at an acceptable price. I'm thinking of picking one up myself, actually. The 12 GB of RAM seem like a bit of overkill, as well.

    i7 , 6GB of RAM, GTX 285... throw in a decent motherboard and you'll have a pretty solid system, with plenty of room for future upgrades, without spending a fortune.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    Lol never go ATI. There just like busses, they're big, red and have bad drivers :P In all seriousness i would w8 untill march for the 1st gtx 300's.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    Very well. Thanks for the input guys.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    I am starting to lean towards the GTX285 now.
    Granted, I won't have directX 11 support as only the ATI cards seem to offer that at this time, but still.

    Waiting for the 300 series of nvidia is somewhat tempting but the problem is even if they are released in the US in march, it will be months before they are available here.
    Don't ask me why but even trying to find a retailer that actually offers the GTX295 (or the ATI HD 5970 for that matter) is extremely difficult and so far I only managed to locate one that might be capable of ordering the 295... but at a considerable price (roughly 600$, compared to the more widely available 285 which comes in at a bit over 350$).

    So from my previously outlined "livetime costs" perspective the GTX285 does seem to be the better choice for me, on the nvidia side.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    I am starting to lean towards the GTX285 now.
    Granted, I won't have directX 11 support as only the ATI cards seem to offer that at this time, but still.

    Waiting for the 300 series of nvidia is somewhat tempting but the problem is even if they are released in the US in march, it will be months before they are available here.
    Don't ask me why but even trying to find a retailer that actually offers the GTX295 (or the ATI HD 5970 for that matter) is extremely difficult and so far I only managed to locate one that might be capable of ordering the 295... but at a considerable price (roughly 600$, compared to the more widely available 285 which comes in at a bit over 350$).

    So from my previously outlined "livetime costs" perspective the GTX285 does seem to be the better choice for me, on the nvidia side.

    I would say it's a mistake to buy a GTX285 right now, especially in light of Ati's offering's. Ati's cards outperform Nvidia's by such a margin, that they essentially render them irrelevant, in addition to offering DX11. Did I mention they also have a vastly lower TDP, and so will run cooler and consume much less power? Have you noticed how most people complaining about GPU temps in STO are Geforce G200 series owners? 100C? My Crossfired Radeon HD 5770s don't even get out of the 50s!

    Now, the Radeon HD 5850 doesn't exactly make the Geforce GTX 285 look like an SiS integrated chip, but it certainly beats it hands down (again, that's in addition to the better feature set). Here is Tom's Hardware's take; the 5850 beats the GTX285 in every single test aside from HAWX without anti-aliasing, and then it beats it down extra hard when AA is enabled; and who plays without AA anyways?. I'd suggest you give it a readover before you buy a $400 card that gets its TRIBBLE kicked by a $300 card ;) Hell, if you're really gonna spend $400 anyways, get a Radeon HD 5870 instead, and then you'll have a card that not only makes the GTX285 look like a VGA adapter from the 80s, but will just about match the 295.

    I wouldn't let the "horror stories" alleged by one Nvidia fanboy here sway you. I've been using both Ati and Nvidia cards for the past decade, and while Nvidia once had a huge edge in drivers, that hasn't been the case for some time, and I've had great luck with cards from both companies. In fact, my Radeon HD 4870 actually solved a few driver problems that my 8800gts was having (here's an irony on the STO forums: anti-aliasing wouldn't work on the 8800, at least not in Battlefield 2142 after driver 169.xx).

    I also wouldn't hold your breath over Fermi (the G300), because Nvidia is still having huge production problems, to the extent that they couldn't even get real chips unveiled at CES 2010, and apparently had to use mockup cards. The simple fact is that Ati is killing Nvidia right now. This is hardly always the case, as it was quite the reverse a mere three or four years ago, but it is certainly the case now, and consumers would do wise to take advantage of it. I only hope that Nvidia's G300 problems are not indicative of financial trouble over the failure of the G200 series (which had to be sold with basically no profit margin just to compete with the Radeon HD 4000 series). I like Ati, and I think their cards are great, but I'd hate to see them get lazy because of lack of good competition. The last time that happened with a company, it was Intel thinking they could skate by with the miserable Netburst architecture (aka MOAR clockspeed; *shudder*).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    That hardware test was an interesting read and it sure draws a rather clear picture.
    Unfortunately I am now scratching my head even more than before.

    As favorable as ATI might be in terms of raw performance, in the end compatibility with the actual game(s) being played is where nvidia definitely shines, or rather thats where ATI fails.

    Both due to raw performance levels as well as general availability and favorable pricing I have been using ATI myself for several years now. Driver per se have not been an issue for myself on more than a few isolated cases (which I presume you will get at some point no matter what chip set you have). However, looking at a wider range of games the picture darkens quite a bit for ATI, seeing that in so many cases it is nvidia for which the they are primarily coded, only being made compatible with ATI in a secondary step. Hell that prominent ATI issue of having black spots/black texture failures on several objects in a game has become so normal to me it took me over a week until I conciously realized that in STO I am actually experiencing this as well.

    Don't get me wrong, this is not to bash ATI. These are just my reasons for heavily leaning towards nvidia at this point. I certainly recognize the performance power of their cards and in fact I would love to get one (securing directx 11 support would be yet an other bonus on top of that). But especially considering the ongoing no-antialiasing issue confirms my suspicion that STO is/will be amongst the presumably numerous future games that are simply more tailored towards nvidia rather than ATI.

    If this issue was out of the way I could almost guarantee, availability permitting, that my new computer was going to get an ATI card. But with how things look at this point in terms of game-development direction, I am not totally convinced thatt superiority in raw performance is enough benefit to outweight potentially not being able to properly play future games to their full extent, STO included.

    Either way, I guess it is "back to the drawing board" for me as I can't deny that the last post did swing my opinion back into at least an equal position between ATI vs. nvidia.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    I'd go with ATI at the moment. The reason nVidia cards generally have fewer issues with games is that they generally offer fewer features, plain and simple, hence there's fewer things to go wrong. Even then their margin is slim, nVidia cards have just as many problems as ATI with games in my experience of both manufacturer's cards over many years. They've both had good and bad models (the ATI 2 and 3 series weren't great, for example) but the 4s and 5s are both VERY good.

    A year or two ago, nVidia had games manufacturer's behind them, but that's changed and a LOT of new games were developed with ATI hardware in mind, ESPECIALLY directx 11 titles, which have all been developed on ATI hardware. I would NOT but anything that doesn't support it, since it's not just a few new bells and whistles you get with dx 11 but a complete rethink of what graphic cards can do (e.g. future titles will use them for mass AI, physics calculations, etc), not to mention the graphical advantages of things like tesselation are MASSIVE.

    I wouldn't buy the 5770 or 5670 because these aren't very good value for money, esp. the 5670. If you want an easy ride regarding compatibility I'd steer clear of the 5970 or any dual GPU solution (nVidia 295, SLI or crossfire set ups, for example) and stick with either a single 5850 or the 5870. Personally I'd go with a 5850, the 5870 is a bit faster but at a heavy price (in $).

    Put it like this, I wouldn't want to see videos of a game like Alien vs Predator or any of the other forthcoming beauties, and a months after buying a dx 10 card, think, "Why did i waste my money?".

    For what it's worth, I wouldn't wait for nVidia's new card, it may never happen (seriously). nVidia have made noises several times in the last year that they might be moving away from game oriented graphics and towards massively parallel general purpose computing, they've also hinted that their new cards may not (I say MAY not, since who really knows) be able to keep up with current ATI offerings. Whilst this is super and dandy, it may not produce what you're wanting.

    Though they try to compete on a price basis with ATI, their cards cost much more to make, it is rumoured they aren't currently makign profit on the 285 series cards or below. This might also cast doubt on their future, with losing the rights to produce both AMD and Intel motherboard chipsets they currently aren't making money at all ... But AMD/ATI have had their financial difficulties in the past and they pulled through, so fingers crossed!

    Even then, I wouldn't want to bet on the new nVidia cards being available before May, no one's even sure if they have a working chip yet. They've demoed the GF-100 under carefully controlled conditions, but they've faked demos before....
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    A lot of what Dave says is true. Nvidia actually hasn't made a profit for some time on most of their G200 GPUs, because Ati just creamed them with better GPU design. Now, with the HD 5000 series, G200 GPUs aren't even being purchased, and according to Semi Accurate (amusing name for a news outlet :)), they might even be getting ready to pull their high end GPUs off the market completely. Is it any wonder? Geforce GTX285, last purcahse, 8/14/09. The rest of Newegg's GTX285 stock has had a whole dozen or so sales in the past month (this is for all of Newegg, mind you), and aside from Three GPUs, Newegg's entire line of GTX285s is out of stock :eek: That's 75% of their 285 stock, not in stock. You can even look through the purchases and see that many have maybe one purchase for the past month or two, and then the next purchase after that is usually seven or eight months back.

    Add all that to the fact that Nvidia can't get the G300 out for anything, and couldn't even muster up enough good GPUs from that line to unveil real GPUs are CES 2010 (they brought mockups), and what we see if a company that's in big trouble. Nvidia is a sinking ship; do you want to board a sinking ship? If their GPU line goes under, how long will it be before they stop caring about new driver releases?

    Of course, looking at why Nvidia is going under reveals as much as the situation itself. Ati survived through power of innovation. They've always been smaller and had less to work with, but they've also always been more groundbreaking. Ati was the first company to support DX10.1, and is the first to support DX11, both by a mile. They basically wrote the book on modern GPU design with their last few generations of cards, replacing gigantic monolithic GPUs with the power of scalability. Rather than trying to continually stay a step ahead of the market like Ati, Nvidia has instead taken the approach of trying to control the market to keep it held back to their level. They've worked using their co-marketing arrangements to make DX10/DX10.1 completely useless on account of not being able to support DX10.1 (for two years). Rather than progress, they held the market back to their standards. They also push to corner the market with proprietary technologies like CUDA and Physx, and compete making sure that only they can use these technologies while shoving them down developers' throats to make sure they're on the market. It's likely the only reason Nvidia hasn't been slapped with an anti-competitive practices suit is because everything they've done has backfired so badly on them that as a company, they appear to be on the verge of collapse, with compounding failures on the GPU market including an inability to get a next-gen part released.

    Does this sound like the sort of company that anyone wants to invest in? If we're talking about the non-tangible side of a video card, and concern for things beyond flat performance, then Nvidia is the last company you want to buy a card from right now, because as things are going, they might very well withdraw from the market. At best, things are looking worse for them right now then they looked for Ati prior to their purchase by AMD, and that's saying a lot. At least Ati still had viable production, sales, and development going. Nvidia doesn't have any of those three, and again, a pullout from the market would mean little in the way of further drive development, as it would take a backseat to whatever other venture they pursued and would mean that games would no longer be designed with their GPUs in mind at all anyways.

    Ati's driver problems are also blown way out of proportion. Ati releases driver fixes very often, so problems that do crop up are extremely short lived, and not even an issue to end users unless they buy every game the exact second its released, and then might have a rare issue here or there until Ati takes a few days to come out with a fix. Of course, let's not confuse the Batman: Arkum Asylum title with Ati driver issues; that debacle is anything but a reason to buy from Nvidia. Nvidia essentially used their influence over the company to write a "No-Ati" flag into the anti-aliasing routines of the game. To repeat myself, if Nvidia already wasn't getting ready to start pushing up daisies with its GPU department, they would be after the lawsuits that would be hitting them for non-competitive practices. That one case aside though, and barring the occasional problem like the Race Driver: GRID issues, I've owned Ati cards in at least some machine since the Radeon 9000 came out, and in the past five or six years, have never had a serious issue, with only extremely minor issues cropping up on extremely rare occasions (like the short-live STO AA bug, which wasn't even in CB, and so, will actually be short-lived).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    @Catamount: WOW, I thought I was in for a right flaming there! ;)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    A lot of good inputs there , and certainly a whole lot of effort.

    Thanks a lot everyone for taking the time to write up all the info, I certainly appreciate it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    I went from an 8800 GT to an HD 5770 a couple months ago. I'm happy with the card, but irritated on the AA issues. I got AA to mostly work in Champions Online after tweaking some settings. I hope Cryptic can fix those issues for STO soon. I've got the settings pretty high but I see a lot of jagged lines.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    i use 7950gt but for now i take it off and use the internal ati hd3200 graphics... i try it and change the settings in drivers and game to lowest and i can play without any issue :) plus to Cryptic :) (i did it becouse all passive people out there who have a graphic card with no fan) but i will change it back to my old 7950gt
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    Have just built a new machine which has dual 5870s for my new home near my businesses in Macedonia. However in the UK my machine has a 295. I can honestly say the 5870s are way way faster but then again they damn well should be. I have had the 295 for a long time. 2 x 5870s are faster than a 5970 but they are both good choices. If you prefer the simplicity get a 5970.

    Do not get 2x5870s if you are going to put the 2 cards right next to each other. You can do it but one obscures the fan of the other meaning you have to put the fan speed to annoying levels to compensate. If you have a tri or quad board you can seat them a bit apart and its no problem at all even overclocked.

    Of course if your going for waterblocks then your fine whatever you do. 2x 5870s is faster but personally if the 5970 had been out when I decided to buy then I might have gone for a 5970 instead for the simplicity of a single card. You can always add another 5970 or 5870 later if you want too.

    Dunno whats going on with Nvidia these days. I am on my second 295 in London as some problem with the memory they used caused a warranty issue on mine making the first one fail after only 5 months use. Having said that when they release a new card I will still objectively make a choice when the time comes. Personally I want the best available at the time and I dont really give a damn who I buy it from as long as its the best.

    Oh btw. While I like the simplicity of Duel GPU cards, like the 5970 4870x2 and Nvidia 295. I still get problems occasionally with some titles even on my relatively old 295. Steam/Valve engine based games are often a pain in the backside for this. There are issues even now with L4D2 with both my 295 and even with my 5870 crossfire but the 295 machine was doing the same thing. Fortunately a single 5870 is more than capable of playing L4D2 with all eye candy on so its not so bad here. Will have to force off a GPU on the 295 too if I want to play it when I get back to London. Which will annoy the hell out of me as I suspect it wont run it well in this scenario.

    The bug preventing Anti Aliasing in STO is really annoying but given the performance and quality of the images in most other games its not the card I blame for that. Hey its beta, I am sure it will be fixed shortly.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2010
    Nvidia is like Intel...always trying to monopolize the damn market.
    Look at AMD and ATI...there products are much cheaper and are on par to what Nvidia and Intel has on the market.

    Im not a fan boy of any sort...I just go with the BANG FOR THE BUCK.
    And with that I have purchased a 5850...
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