Mac vs PC. Microsoft vs Google. Intel vs AMD. There's no shortage of monumental rivalries in the tech industry. But the royal rumble between ATI and Nvidia for dominance of 3D graphics is one of the roughest of the lot.
The contest is really AMD vs Nvidia. After all, AMD snapped up Canadian graphics outfit ATI back in 2006.
More importantly, however you slice it the histories of ATI and Nvidia have been very closely intertwined. Both started out as specialists in PC graphics and have since branched out into non-PC platforms such as games consoles, mobile devices and set-top boxes.
More recently, ATI's acquisition by AMD seems to have set it on a very different path for the future from Nvidia. But let's start by reminiscing on a few of our favourite ATI vs Nvidia fisticuffs from yesteryear before taking a look at their current offerings.
AMD vs Nvidia: RIVA and Rage
The early days of graphics on the PC saw 3D cards like Nvidia's RIVA 128 and TNT2 take on ATI's Rage and Rage 128. But it was Nvidia who presaged the modern GPU or Graphics Processing Unit with the mighty GeForce 256 in 1999. It was the first graphics chip with hardware transform and lighting capabilities. And it was fast. Damned fast.
ATI responded in 2000 with the Radeon graphics card. Ever since, successive generations of GeForce and Radeon GPUs have been leapfrogging each other in the race for graphics supremacy. Nvidia had the early advantage with the GeForce, GeForce 2, GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 series arguably having the edge over ATI's Radeon, Radeon 7500 and Radeon 8500.
But in 2002 ATI turned the tables with the awesome Radeon 9700 Pro. The first GPU with fully programmable shaders, the 9700 Pro was massively more powerful than any graphics chip before. It took until early 2003 for Nvidia to respond with the ill-fated GeForce 5800 Ultra, a GPU that never lived up to expectations.
Nvidia was back on form a year later with the GeForce 6800 series. A tit for tat ensued with neither ATI nor Nvidia achieving a clear advantage. It was during this period that Nvidia introduced its revolutionary multi-GPU SLI technology and ATI responded with the copycat Crossfire platform. There really was nothing to separate them.
AMD vs Nvidia: Radeon rethink
At least, there wasn't until ATI released the underperforming Radeon HD 2900 XT. Like Nvidia's calamitous GeForce FX series, the 2900 arrived late, ran hot, underperformed and couldn't match its opposition, the GeForce 8800 Ultra.
But unlike the GeForce FX, it lead to a fundamental strategic rethink. AMD decided that in future ATI would no longer chase ultimate performance with its top GPU. Instead it would aim for maximum bang for buck and introduce dual-GPU boards to cater for enthusiasts demanding ultra-high performance.
The culmination of this rethink was the Radeon HD 4870. Launched in mid 2008, it was half the price of Nvidia's competing GeForce GTX 280 but delivered at least 80 per cent of the performance. It was a winning combination.
AMD vs Nvidia: The DX11 era
Of course, graphics technology waits for no man and much has changed since the Radeon HD 4000 series and GeForce GTX 200 hit the market in 2008. Late last year AMD unleashed the Radeon HD 5000 series, the world's first family of graphics chips with support for the latest DirectX 11 multimedia API from Microsoft, as seen in Windows 7 but also available as an update for Windows Vista.
It took a little longer for Nvidia to respond in kind with the GeForce GTX 400 family. It eventually turned up earlier this year and since then its been these two pixel pumping graphics architectures fighting it out for top DX11 honours.
Topping the current single-GPU tables, therefore, are the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Nvidia Geforce GTX 480. Thanks to AMD's greater emphasis on value, the GTX 480 weighs in around £100 more expensive at £430 or so.
For the money Nvidia gives you an extra billion transistors for a faintly ridiculous total of three billion. You also get a little more memory as standard, 1.5GB to the 5870's 1GB. However, it's worth noting that 2GB variants of the 5870 are now available for less than the 1.5GB GTX 480.
Anyway, what you don't get from the 480 is a huge performance advantage. Yes it's a little quicker than the 5870. But not nearly as much as it needs to be given the extra cost and complexity.
AMD vs Nvidia: Cut-down cards
It's a similar story further at the next rung down the graphics ladder. Both AMD and Nvidia offer slightly cut down versions of their top GPUs. The Radeon HD 5850 is yours for £225 and retains 1,440 of the 5870's 1,600 stream shaders. Meanwhile, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 470 weighs in around £295 and packs 448 of Nvidia's mighty CUDA cores. The GTX 480, for the record, has 480 cores.
Once again, the 470 is a little quicker than its AMD equivalent, but it's also much more expensive. From there, things get a little more complicated. AMD does a silly-money dual-GPU Radeon HD 5000 board, the 5970. In most tests of pixel pumping prowess, it's the quickest thing out there (NVIDIA has yet to wheel out a dual-GPU take on the GTX 400 series). But just occasionally its dual-GPU architecture and split-memory set up gets the better of it.
Move into mid-range territory and direct comparisons between ATI and Nvidia are currently a bit tricky. That's because Nvidia has yet to release more affordable chips based on Fermi, the new DX11 architecture that underpins the GTX 480 and 470 GPUs.
Consequently, the Radeon HD 5770 (£125), Radeon HD 5670 (£85) and Radeon HD 5570 (£72) are lording it without any DX11 competition.
Instead, Nvidia makes do with older chipsets based on DX10 tech, such as the GeForce GTS 250 (£125) and GeForce GT 240 (£72).
Advantage Nvidia?
That said, Nvidia has recently released an even more cut-down version of the Fermi chip in the new GeForce GTX 465, on sale now from around £230. But what it really needs is some pukka mid-range DX11 chips to take the fight to AMD. And it needs them soon. AMD has already released its family of second-generation DirectX 11 GPUs.
Read ourAMD Radeon HD 6870 review
In the meantime, it's not all bad news for Nvidia. Arguably, it has an edge in at least one important DX11 feature, the hardware tessellator. Designed to spew out huge numbers of polygons and therefore give games more geometric detail and realism than ever before, the tessellator could prove to be the killer feature in DX11. Early tests suggest Nvidia's chips have more tessellation power than ATI's.
Nvidia is also way ahead of ATI when it comes to stereoscopic 3D. Nvidia's 3D Vision technology is the best way to get 3D on your PC today. It works with a large number of games and is also compatible with certain formats of 3D movies including Blu-ray 3D. But like most other 3D display technologies, wearing a pair of geeky goggles is the price of participation.
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Your comments (5) Click to add a new comment
mombasa1969
July 11th 2010
5. Both companies make fantastic cards, I prefer Nvidia, just what I like =)
Phenom II Quad 955 (OC 4.7ghz)
8GB DDR2 1066
M4N82 Deluxe Tri-Sli MB
X2 Zoltac 470 Amp! Super-clocked, SLI.
x2 1TB HDD (1 External)
x1 300GB HDD (aux)
DVD DL
Blu-ray External Recorder
24" LG
HAF tower
And lots of pretty lights
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xympa
July 7th 2010
4. I disagree with you, i think enormous advancements have been done, if you ask me, i believe the fault is in software engineers these days, i am a software developer myself, and i see many youngsters creating software thats is heavy, without even considering optimizing their code, i ask them why?
Their answers is:
"It runs fine on my system."
Sure, but you don't know how it will run on the system of client. Same goes for games, why shouldn't i try to make a game run better, just because it runs on a 4gb computer with ram? The hardware makers do their best, developers design sloppy games (code-wise) and expect companys like NVIDIA and ATi so come up the drivers optimized for their software, which NVIDIA does... (not so much ATi), well that's my two cents...
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bwrlane
June 30th 2010
3. Yep! Far cry 2. I play with all settings maxed and with 4xAA at 1920x1080. It does run beautifully but am just surprised to see the frame rate sometimes dropping below 40fps in the more complex scenes.
I've not tried a 5970. It does sound an awesome card. But I think the degree of improvement over the 295 is not sufficient to justify the outlay. One thing that does seem clear: those of us who were pc gamers 5-10 years ago saw an extraordinary rate of advance. There seems no denying that this rate has slowed somewhat.
Perhaps it's best to skip a generation or two. I also do a lot of video encoding and find hardware assisted encoding theoretically attractive but find the quality of the software out there quite poor.
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duke
June 30th 2010
2. @bwrland
I don't think either manufacturer will have very many surprises in the pipeline in the near future, certainly not Nvidia - they've just released a new Fermi architecture, they're likely to try to reduce the noise / temperature of the card and improve production yields to get all 512 cores working. ATI I'm not so sure about, the 5970 might not have much further to go.
As for complaining about the performance of games on a GTX295. Crysis is a notoriously demanding game, it stretched everybody's systems to the max and very little could run it well when it was released. The GTX295 only came out a couple of months later, Crysis looked so much better than anything else out there at the time I'm not surprised it couldn't keep up. I assume you mean Far Cry 2 - this runs fine for me on a 8800 GTS 512 SLI with no problems and that's a really old pair of cards. If you're talking about FarCry then you have a problem with the rest of your system...
As for the latest range of cards - ever played with a 5970? It's superb, yes it doesn't offer anything particularly revolutionary but it doesn't half chew through frames like there's no tomorrow. Nvidia on the other hand have produced an expensive noisy radiator... I used to be an Nvidia fanboy but I think ATI have it at the moment.
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bwrlane
June 30th 2010
1. I'd be more interested to know what Nvidia and ATI have in the pipeline. To be honest I am very underwhelmed with the current crop of supposedly flagship cards.
I've been incrementally less impressed each time a new generation has been launched. I love huge games with beautiful 3d graphics, I like to play with all the settings maxed out and 4xAA. but being honest, the overall look and feel of a 3d game hasn't changed much at all in the past 5 years. Just higher resolutions and a bit more detail, that's all - nothing really game changing.
My current card is a GTX295 - supposedly the flagship of the previous generation and was surprised to discover that it still delivers choppy frame rates in Crysis with 4xAA, 1920x1080 and all settings maxed. Same in Far Cry.
We've been told that DX11 features are game changing and reading the theory, it's probably true. But what's also clear is that the current flagship cards from NVIDIA and ATI are nowhere near powerful enough to run them. Look at how even mild effects bring them to a crawl in Metro 2033. Even with SLI/Crossfire.
CUDA/OpenCL has the potential to do great things but with so little software supporting it (and that which does, doing so badly and unreliably), there's little reason to get excited about what's out there today.
It'll be at least 2-3 generations, I think, before we see anything that really moves things along.
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