my friend just got a 6800GT for free..he wont it at a lan party.

It actually makes sense that ATI's old core would perform better than a new one. The reason being is it has very mature drivers. ATI knows how to get the best performance out of it. That's why there haven't been many monumental increases in performance from driver updates on ATI's side. The 6800 core is very young and the true potenual is still be squeezed out of it. Look at preliminary benchmarks of the 6800U with it's original drivers. It sucked, sometimes performing worse than a X800 Pro. Now it's neck and neck with the X800XT-PE.

I didn't mean that HL2 was built for ATI. I meant that ATI spent so much money hyping HL2 saying it would only perform good on their hardware. Remember 'Shader Day'? I think CSS gives you a pretty good idea of HL2's performance. I'm sure the ratios will be similar just at much lower FPS. Chateau is the most shader intensive map in CSS and it performs better on the 6800s.

The xbit article was using the 4.9 cats, ati have since released a hotfix driver that address a bug that elts the ati cards use all their 256 megs of ram.

I think its pretty safe to say we'll see numbers hop about for the coming months depending on driver revisions. I really dont see either side getting a lead that i would say is substantial. Just more driver revisions then people calling out on optomisations etc etc. Who'd be a driver writer huh biggrin:

I don't have a problem with optimizations. If ATI can implement their AI shader replacement dealy with no loss in IQ then by all means do it. I hope nvidia comes out with something similar. dance:

[img]http://www.daplayazclub.com/uploads/jiga.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.daplayazclub.com/uploads/jiga.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.daplayazclub.com/uploads/jiga.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.daplayazclub.com/uploads/jiga.jpg[/img]

rolleyes:

relevance is off the scale.

Im not sure where you get your sources from but the X800 isnt simply an overclocked 9800 like some of you seem to think. It is a compltly new design, no doubt simply advancing ideas from the 9800's but to say its the same thing is assinine. Look at the benchmark compaiisons from first run test between the 9800xt and x800xt and you'll understand that you cant get that type of proformance leap by just overclocking.

As for 6800 vs x800 naturally there going to be neck and neck, you see this every time new cards are released. But does the 6800 still require 2 stand alone power connections? Or did they un fuck themselves and make it 1? Its not just a few FPS that make a card better or worse, its in the features and ease of install. If im still required to hook up two power connecters, shit, id need a new power suppply.


Though i will grant you i have been out of touch with these new cards for a while.

The x800 series has always been known as 9800 on steroids, aside from pixelshader 2b and a higher clock speed its the same as the 9800. The clock speed increase was brought about by the die size shrink. And obviously the ram running at 1120mhz helps with the speed bump. Their new chip is coming in the new year, so new design, have to see what that brings to the table.


6800-ultra is still 2 power connectors but the official word is "one for normal operation and 2 for overclocking". Saying that though i was whoring forums when this was released and seen people getting artifacts with one connector and no overclocking so i dunno if that was ever resolved.

Don't really keep up with the hardware scene as much as i used to =/

[code:12865] NV38 NV40 R360 R420
Transistors 130M 222M 110M 160M
Core clock 475MHz 400MHz 412MHz 500MHz
Mem clock 950MHz 1.1GHz 900MHz 1.12GHz
Memory Bus 256bit 256bit 256bit 256bit
Vertex Pipelines ~4 6 4 6
Pixel Pipelines 4x2 16x1 8x1 16x1
Shader Model 2.0+ 3.0 2.0 2.0+
Fab Process 130nm 130nm 150nm 130nm[/code:12865]

R420 is the new x800, and the R360 is the 9800. So not only did you get more clock speed, and faster memory they upped the vertex and pixel pipelines, dropped the die size and crammed more transisters on.

The nv40 is the 6800, and if i recall the nv38 is the 5950.

Yup, 60 million transistors for the nv-40 are for pixel shader 3.0. Seems to be a far bigger leap for nvidia for similar performance to a "less complicated" chip r-420.

The R420 still has the same exact aritechture as the R300 which was the original 9700 core. ATI added 8 more Pixel pipelines(where most the speed comes from) and 2 more Vertex pipelines. Then overclocked the hell out of it. That's all there is to it. Then pair it with some 1.6ns GDDR3 and you have blazing fast performance with 'old' tech.

Why would you need to buy a new power supply to run a 6800U? It comes with 2 y-splitters and will easily run on any 350W PSU.