G71 / 7900 GTX news?

[Fx-Overlord]

Those who are saying that Ati have better AA, are just wrong. SLi SSAA is clearly the winner, hehe.

But in all honesty for MSAA, i prefer ati's implementation. Also their AA doesn't seem to drain the perfomance as much as nvidia.

 

[Goksly]

Also thngs like ATI's cat A.I. thing will have to be switched off because of the detrimental IQ effects such as lower precision blending.

With identical features and identical IQ then the only difference between IHVs will be speed, price, availability, heatsink, warranty, and extra features such as Nvidias Purevideo dedicated harwdare.

Firstly I like to see you have backtracked on your previously unsupported comment of "You can’t turn off AI". Unfortunately you've replaced this untrue comment with a greatly exaggerated comment I’ve quoted above.
Detrimental? Seriously have you ever used an ATI product in your life? I run AI on standard and comparing images vs. it without, I cannot tell the difference. On advance, then yes the IQ difference is slightly noticeable, but the CCC defaults the selection to standard.
Without the aid of a comparison program that looks at all the pixels individually you will not noticed the difference, so detrimental it is not... intelligent it is.
Its comments like this that makes most of the stuff you type worthless.

 

[Goksly]

Also to back my comments up, although disprove them slightly as well (the screen shots below are using AI on full and AI disabled, and I cant tell the difference!):
Screenshots:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1649808,00.asp
Conclusion:

The good news is that the ATI's new Catalyst AI feature works. The texture filtering optimizations result in a very modest across-the-board performance boost, without making the game look any worse to the naked eye. Their application detection and optimization features are minimal now, with the only big gun being the Doom 3 shader replacement. But it's hard to see it as a bad thing when the game looks just as it always has and runs a whole lot faster.

Detrimental? Nu uh.

edit:
http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/atiop/

Looking at the IQ shots this certainly seems to be the case, there is no difference in IQ seen by the end user between off and standard yet you get some excellent tweaks – like the improved calculations (and therefore performance increases) in Doom3.

 

[Sumanji]

The first company to come out with an offical product name of "E-Peen Edition" I will purchase regardless of speed and IQ

I'm betting on eVGA for this one... only seems natural given their naming conventions

Buy our new eVGA eGeForce e7900GTX ePenis eEdition NOW!!

Suman

 

[megatron]

With identical features and identical IQ then the only difference between IHVs will be speed, price, availability, heatsink, warranty, and extra features such as Nvidias Purevideo dedicated harwdare.

Not heard of purevideo but I have heard of ATI AVIVO and gpu accelerated h.254 encoding, that NV dont do atm.

 

[Humey]

Purevideo was here 1st in April 2004 and was buggy as hell, but its mostly sorted now and overall Ive seen reviews put it ahead of ati's method, but correct ati do do H246 but only on flagship card (think its the X1900 top model only not 100% sure), nvidia are to release a new driver soon to let all 6000/7000 cards do it.

Cant say for ati here but for nvidia you need buy their dvd decoder, its rated best quality you get but cost money esp after you have paid for a card so thats downside for some.

P.S Once its installed and set up, you dont need use WMP to view your movies, it still works in powerdvd or nero showtime, and I imagine all others too.

 

[D.P.]

Not heard of purevideo but I have heard of ATI AVIVO and gpu accelerated h.254 encoding, that NV dont do atm.

ATI hardware does not provide dedicated H.254 decoding and relies on the pixel shaders. hence the quality and performance is not great. Only the X1800 and X1900 GPUs have enough power to do do H.254 decoding at full HD resolution in real time, the lower cards cannot do this.

All Nvidia cards from the 6200 up can do full HD resolution H.264 decoding fully realtime. The driver support hasn't been swicthed on though but has existed since july 2005. You'll need to ask why Nvidia have switched it on, probalby waiting for Cebit.


http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29053
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25000
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2551

 

[Naffa]

wow, all this is so relivant the OP.. is there actually anymore news on the G71?
people are saying that the 7900 is basically going to be a speed bumped 7800.. well isnt that basically what the X1900 is? even with twice as many pixel shaders, a higher core clock speed its only slightly faster than the 512MB GTX.. i would think that with nvidia using a 90nm core, as oposed to 130nm i think? that it would be aparent that this maybe slightly more than a speed bump. im not saying im right because i dont know. but i just think that to me the X1900 looks to be a speed bump, more so than the 7900 maybe.

 

[Humey]

It wasnt/isnt 130nm now its 110nm on 6000/7800gtx's, but correct its going to be 90nm on the 7900's

BTW, the new 7300 range of card(s) are 90nm, and I assume it will be same on the 7600 range.

 

[D.P.]

yeah, b3d as a new article upabout the 90nm NV cards with the 7300, 7600 and the 7900 mentioned.

Interesttingly they repeat the message about 'competitive pricing'. Dave bauman knows a lot abou the industry from the inside. If he knew it was non-sense I don't think he would have put that in. But you casn't really draw any conclusions.

 

[Naffa]

oh yeah, the 7300GS that must be good because it has 512MB memory..

anyone know what the spec is of the 7600? i would reckon it would be about on par with an X800 series card or 6800 maybe.

 

[Humey]

What if a 7300 card is all a peep can afford, they might be well interested unlike yourself, topic is about 7900 not 7600 BTW, if you want to be fair.
And I'd hope a new 7600 aint on par with X800 as you commented on cause a X800 is dx9b old school. , so why is peeps still trying to compair 6000/7000 series cards to the X800/X850's ?, FPS is nothing IMO to do with it.

 

[Sumanji]

Yay, he got permabanned amen to that!

 

[D.P.]

ATI hardware does not provide dedicated H.254 decoding and relies on the pixel shaders. hence the quality and performance is not great. Only the X1800 and X1900 GPUs have enough power to do do H.254 decoding at full HD resolution in real time, the lower cards cannot do this.

All Nvidia cards from the 6200 up can do full HD resolution H.264 decoding fully realtime. The driver support hasn't been swicthed on though but has existed since july 2005. You'll need to ask why Nvidia have switched it on, probalby waiting for Cebit.


http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29053
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25000
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2551

As an update, I found some newr reviews and it looks like things a more even quality wise. But the fact that prett much all of Nvidias hardware can do H.264 at Full 1080P resolution while with ATI only the X1800 and up can do it is quite important.

If someone wanted a gcard that can do H.264 you can go as cheap as a GF6200 with Nvidia, but with ATI you will need an X1800, but these aren't made any more with production stopped back in December so really the only cards that ATI can do full H.264 on are the X1900 cards.

That to me is a big difference.


I still haven't found a reason why Nvidia drivers haven't got H.264 enabled though. The feature has been in the drivers since the very first 80 dets and was talked about back in july. Recent news about it in January but still no release date. Adds to my suspicsion of Nvidia doing something pretty awesome soemtime soon, e.g. Cebit. Nvidia have been amazingly quite over the last couple of months. What happened to the 85 drivers?

 

[Goksly]

Maybe something is detrimentally wrong with the drivers

 

[Overlag]

As an update, I found some newer reviews and it looks like things a more even quality wise. But the fact that pretty much all of Nvidias hardware can do H.264 at Full 1080P resolution while with ATI only the X1800 and up can do it is quite important.

If someone wanted a gfx card that can do H.264 you can go as cheap as a GF6200 with Nvidia, but with ATI you will need an X1800, but these aren't made any more with production stopped back in December so really the only cards that ATI can do full H.264 on are the X1900 cards.

That to me is a big difference.


I still haven't found a reason why Nvidia drivers haven't got H.264 enabled though. The feature has been in the drivers since the very first 80 dets and was talked about back in july. Recent news about it in January but still no release date. Adds to my suspicion of Nvidia doing something pretty awesome sometime soon, e.g. Cebit. Nvidia have been amazingly quite over the last couple of months. What happened to the 85 drivers?

i thought it was because of a hardware bug in the early revision cores of the 6x00 series, so it was disabled...

However its still disabled today... which makes no sense at all???

Maybe something is detrimentally wrong with the drivers

maybe...i mean apparently ATI drivers suck, and Nvidias rule, however ATI release drivers monthly, and are constantly getting speed bumps or bug fixes out. However Nvidia you have to wait MONTHS for official drivers, and bugs that was there in august 05, are STILL there today. There last official driver is from late november also (81.98 was updated for new card support, but nothing else added since the original from november)... Why so few updates?

 

[ACESHIGH]

As an update, I found some newr reviews and it looks like things a more even quality wise. But the fact that prett much all of Nvidias hardware can do H.264 at Full 1080P resolution while with ATI only the X1800 and up can do it is quite important.

If someone wanted a gcard that can do H.264 you can go as cheap as a GF6200 with Nvidia, but with ATI you will need an X1800, but these aren't made any more with production stopped back in December so really the only cards that ATI can do full H.264 on are the X1900 cards.

That to me is a big difference.


I still haven't found a reason why Nvidia drivers haven't got H.264 enabled though. The feature has been in the drivers since the very first 80 dets and was talked about back in july. Recent news about it in January but still no release date. Adds to my suspicsion of Nvidia doing something pretty awesome soemtime soon, e.g. Cebit. Nvidia have been amazingly quite over the last couple of months. What happened to the 85 drivers?

So there ARE current ATI cards that can do H.264 - X1800, X1900 series.
There ARE NO current Nvidia cards that can do H.264.

thanks for clearing that up.

 

[ACESHIGH]

oh yeah, the 7300GS that must be good because it has 512MB memory..

anyone know what the spec is of the 7600? i would reckon it would be about on par with an X800 series card or 6800 maybe.

7600 will be a 6600GT replacement, so yeah likely about X800 or 6800 speeds.

 

[Nixeh]

Anyone know if it will support HDCP.... well actually be able to do it unlike the current cards.

 

[D.P.]

So there ARE current ATI cards that can do H.264 - X1800, X1900 series.
There ARE NO current Nvidia cards that can do H.264.

thanks for clearing that up.

No, only a couple of ATI cards can do full H.264 decoding, every Nvidia card from the 6200 and up can do it at 1080P.