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If ATI Won a Round, Would Anyone Notice?

@ 2007/07/04

The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT gives the GeForce 8800GTX a run for its money in high end applications? It would probably come as no surprise to even the most casual PC hardware enthusiast that NVIDIA has been dominating the high end graphics card market for going on two years now. What was the years-running battle of ATI and NVIDIA, each leapfrogging the other with a faster card every six months, seems to be a thing of the past. The R600, ATI’s long awaited DirectX10 card, was ATI’s last hope for remaining an option on the high-end enthusiast’s shopping list. Seriously delayed, when the R600 finally arrived last month (as the officially named ATI Radeon HD 2900XT) the press was… less than kind.

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/07/05

I'd say their driver support is pitiful. But Intel turned things about with their CPUs... I would at least expect they would attempt to do the same with their drivers when releasing a discrete GPU for the 2nd time.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/05

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kougar

perhaps Intel will be able to shake them a bit to sharpen them back up?

Intel GFX driver support is average at best.

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/07/05

While that is true, to be fair is Nvidia's approach of hard launches with poor (And even no) driver support really any better? It seems like half of the 7xxx series AGP cards launched without even a driver that will install because the cards are not recognized.

Both camps have their faults, perhaps Intel will be able to shake them a bit to sharpen them back up? I suppose I can dream on anyway...

Comment from goingpostale1 @ 2007/07/04

ATI lost my support in the x800 days, paper launches and $500 cards that took 3 weeks to ship. Its going to take some serious domination on ATIs part to get my buisness back.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/04

yup, SLI/CF is definitely not for the "masses"

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/07/04

Performance may on average be better than the GTS now, but it is still not a good value. 640mb GTS cards are still quite a bit cheaper, and offer better performance in the newer games like Supreme Commander. And then there is the >8800Ultra power and heat... so I beg to differ about R600 being a good value.

I think Steam's survey sums it up. 8446 of 650583 users run dual GPU configurations, that is only 1.3% of those surveyed. For a game engine that is ATI friendly and designed on ATI hardware, of that meager 1.3% or 8446 users, only 346 used any kind of Crossfire configuration at all.

Comment from HitenMitsurugi @ 2007/07/04

It's also factually incorrect. ATi had the better card during the 9 months reign of the R580. 7900GTX was slower, not by much, but slower nonetheless.

Recent driver updates put the performance of the R600 between the GTS 640mb and the GTX, so quite good value actually

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/04

What this finding boils down to is that Crossfire under Windows Vista works better than SLI under Vista.

With 99% of people out there using Windows XP, this article is catering to a very small crowd

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