Whos winning the graphics war

[bugzpodder]

I　heard ATI has better support for general purpose graphics, but nVidia excels in games... Andy? you should know this

[md]

I would actually argue that nvidia has better support in general, but that's because I use linux and ATI's linux drivers are less then craptacular. nVidia's drivers are just as good for linux as for windows (if not better).

Also the new nVidia GPUs seem like they would be very easily addapted to stream processing. Since you can do ray tracing as streams, with another generation or two nVidia might be up to real-time ray tracing instead of traditional rendering models, which would be very very cool.

[NikG]

I will say first that I'm not even close to an expert.

But here's my opinion:
I wouldn't doubt that either card is better at something than the other.
But that doesn't mean that that company will win the "graphics war."
It won't take long for the other company to come up with a card that can do the same thing.

So, I'm not voting.

[rdrake]

Whoever offers the best bang for the buck. Also, Linux/*BSD support is a must. Without proper drivers I might as well stick to the Intel "Extreme" graphics.

[wtd]

Who's winning? Ask again in five minutes and you'll get a different answer.

That's the point. No one will ever win, except consumers.

[bugzpodder]

md wrote:

I would actually argue that nvidia has better support in general, but that's because I use linux and ATI's linux drivers are less then craptacular.

Well it might be because Andy was tasked to write some of the drivers

[Mazer]

What are "general purpose graphics" supposed to be, anyways?

[Andy]

wow bugz, you sure know how to make me giddy!

as of a month ago, nvidia is handsdown number 1 for discreet graphics. In general, nvidia drivers are faster and more efficient than ATI's, but lack in stability due to the numerous hacks and tweaks implemented during the time of the FX series.

About a year and half ago, ATI hired a third party company to do a stability benchmark between ATI drivers and NV ones. ATI smoked Nvidia by about 20%. However, in the current market, speed is considered more important than stability.

After the merging of ATI and AMD, it's clear that ATI will start to move towards integrated graphics. Intel currently has about 50% of the grahpics market because most people do not have the need to run graphics intensive software. If AMD could steal even 15% of the market away from Intel, they could make more profit than ATI beating nvidia in the next gen GPU war.

Nvidia's recently launch of G80 has proved to be nothing short of spectacular. It single handedly beat 2x 7900 on SLI's 3dmark score by 10%

ATI's planning to launch their R600 in February, however nvidia's GT200 would likely to be out by then. it's rumored to have close to 1billion transistors.

I've worked at both companies for a term, and the engineers i've met at nvidia are far smarter than the ones at ATI. Last quarter alone, Nvidia's revenue increased by about 25%, so in the long run, i think Nvidia will be the king of discreet graphics processors. In fact, if i had any money, i'd invest it in NV stocks.

[bugzpodder]

lol...

GeForce 8800 does kick serious ass... but only the GTS model is semi-affordable.. too high end for my taste

[Andy]

nvidia now has gpu compute enabled for consumer cards, so if you're looking for a card to do gpgpu, NV is way ahead of ATI

[TokenHerbz]

i got a Gforce 6800