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7900 series performance over 7800 series

Soldato
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Well for me its not compelling enough at the limited 1280x1024 resolution I play at. I'll stick with my 7800GT.

I'm guessing it's too early for performance comparisons against ATI's lineup with the new 6.3 Cat, but I'm guessing those with an X1800XT are sitting smugly in there chairs about now.....
 
Soldato
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17 Jul 2005
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Well I am happy with my X1800XT 512.

It plays everything I want to play on it maxed out which is what is important for me (not a huge benchmark fan).

The X1800XT 512 seems to beat the 7900GT at the res I play at (1280x1024) and its still cheaper.
 

kbc

kbc

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I'm on a 7800GT and probably will stick to it, the only worthy performance increase I will get is if I upgrade to ATi's 1900 series or a 7900GTX, the 7900GT is although cheaper - only as good as the GeForce 7800GTX.
 
Soldato
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Very happy, although I was never really expecting the 7900's to blow the ATI's out the water. Looks like, as expected, it takes the win in some things and losses in another. Overall the 7900 seem slightly better performance wise, but a few reviews have mentioned IQ issues, especially shimmering.

At 1280x1024 I will be siting smuggly until either company increases IQ drastically or add new features....
 
Associate
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Looks to me like the X1900 series benefits from two things over the 7900 :-

More features which may show benefits in the future and much better value.

PowerColor ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI 269.95+VAT

BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) 369.95+VAT ...

Given the two are much of a muchness in performance terms it's uterly pointless going for a 7900.
 
Caporegime
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After reading the various 7900 series benchmarks/reviews (and knowing my system outperforms stock 7800GTX SLI setups), im confident and happy enough with my current system (2x7800GT 512MB cards) to last me till Vista/DX10/G80.

The performance increase is nowhere near what the hype had people believe, ATI owners are in a very nice position performance wise, as the benchmarks seem to show (as usual) that directx is dominated by ATI, and OGL by Nvidia.

As tempting as new hardware usually is to myself, upgrading now would be both unjustified, and majoritavely pointless.
 
Soldato
Joined
8 Dec 2005
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10,535
Only looks to be 5% more for 7900GTX512 vs 7800GTX512. If you extreme OC a 7800GTX512 it will probably beat 7900GTX512 as it appears to have slightly faster DDR3 @ stock by 100Mhz (although core clock on 7900GTX is 100-150Mhz faster).

If you already have either X1800/X1900,7800GTX256,7800GTX512, SLI or Xfire little point in upgrading until DX10 cards came out later this year and already nowhere near enough games to even take advantage of DX9+SM3 so not much point getting another DX9 card when they will be upgraded to DX10 in Q4 06.

Best to wait until Conroe arrives as that looks like it can keep up with SLI/Xfire so by then 60FPS + full AA + full AF + HDR + SM4.0 + 1600x1200 or higher should be reality.
 

kdd

kdd

Soldato
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The new 7900's are just a refresh, they're not meant to be groundbreaking. The 7900gt will end up being very good value i think, especially when some 3rd party cooler are available for it.
 
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Soldato
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18 Oct 2002
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England
Yeap guess the estimates of 10% increase were right, ill stick with my 512 GTX, dont reckon its worth many people upgrading especially if u got a GTX/X1800XT+ either.

Its better to wait this summer/fall for ATI/Nvidias next gen beast should fit in perfectly for DX10-Vista brigade.
 
Caporegime
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32,615
The main thing with the 7900s is that they are a lot smaller the ccores, only 278million trannies vs ATis 364million and only 196mm^2- smaller than the R430 core! This means that they are very cheap to make with very high yields, they don't need much much and so run very cool, and therefore are very quite when properly cooled. Because they are cheaperto make and have high yields Nvidia can charge less and still make more profit. Yes, we may be suffering from rip-off e-vendor hype rpices but when prices settle down ATI cannot match Nvidia's pricing without loose a lrage profit margin. In a price war, ATI just wouldn't keep up.

Hence Nvidia's tactic.
The real deal with these card is the affordable SLI. When the 7900GT SLI appear for $600 that card will massacre ATI's sales really.


At the very least any ATI fanboyrs can thank Nvidia to be the first to realise that prices needed to be lowered and also that quite and cool chips are important. One thing rings clear from all reviews, the X1900 runs very hot, uses lots of power and is very noisey. Not seen a single review that says anything other than that (albet I've only seen 4-5).


In the end you have a card that is cooler, quiter, less power hungary, faster and ultimitely cheaper.
 
Caporegime
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oweneades said:
Well I am happy with my X1800XT 512.

It plays everything I want to play on it maxed out which is what is important for me (not a huge benchmark fan).
The X1800XT 512 seems to beat the 7900GT at the res I play at (1280x1024) and its still cheaper.


I think the point here is that the 7900GT will be super overclockable by looking at the other cards in the range.

And with an after market cooler and some heatsinks on the ram run at super speeds.

After all they are the same card the 7900 GT and GTX just the GT has 256mb ram.

The XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition running at 560MHz
256MB GDDR3 Extreme Memory running at 1650MHz this has faster memory that some of the 7900 GTX's

So I would think that the other GT's would be overclockable to those speeds.And if they do would offer massive bang for buck.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
32,615
IQ is always talked about,
here is a review which backs up what I have said all along with regards to AA quality:
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?page=6&articleid=777&cid=2

As you can see, the "No AA" screen shots look quite similar on both cards, as do the 2X AA screen shots. In the 4X AA screen shots though, you can pick out some subtle differences. The cables at the top of the screen are softer and more realistic looking on the X1900, but the tree loses some detail. In contrast, NVIDIA seems to do a better job with the antennas on the top of the buildings. The ATI 6XAA vs. NVIDIA 8xS AA shots reveal similar differences, with NVIDIA having a clear edge in detail, especially in the trees where ATI's multi-sample only algorithm has minimal impact.

In these specific tests, NVIDIA clearly has an advantage, because fine detail just seems to disappear on the Radeon X1900. Hopefully a future driver update will resolve this issue on the Radeon X1900.

Pretty clear win for Nvidia IQ wise!
 
Soldato
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5 Mar 2003
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Nottingham
D.P. said:
Pretty clear win for Nvidia IQ wise!
Shimmering, Oh My!


There you go, yes, I said it, “shimmering.” Specifically “texture crawling,” caused by either aggressing filtering or really bad LOD. I notice it using the Dell 2405FPW LCD. I believe the brighter contrast and crisper image coupled with the fact that the screen is just physically larger at a higher resolution all amplifies the problem and makes it extremely visible. I don’t notice it in all games, but there are a couple games in which it did negatively impact my overall level of gaming immersion. While this is another raging Green Vs. Red argument found many places on the Net, we have never specifically addressed it as we have never truly seen it impact our gameplay, but that is simply not the case with our 24” widescreen display.


We found in World of Warcraft there was horrible texture crawling on the ground as you walk through the game. It is most notable on coble stone or dirt paths through forests. Comparatively, texture crawling is much worse on NVIDIA GPUs than on ATI GPUs from our experience, but rest assured this is a problem that is present in both teams’ technologies. I noticed distinctly that moving from a NVIDIA-based GPU to the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX or XL very much reduced this “shimmering” problem in World of Warcraft as textures had less crawling. However, there was still some noticeable. Texture crawling is definitely worse on the GeForce 7800/7900 GPUs though. We were using the default driver settings for both NVIDIA and ATI.


We also noticed texture crawling in EverQuest II. Again on the ground, though this game wasn’t as bad as World of Warcraft. I didn’t really notice it or find anything distracting in games other than those mentioned above. It seems that World of Warcraft is the worst of them all when it comes to shimmering, and it was quite distracting on the large widescreen LCD.


What do we think about this texture crawling issue? We don’t like it and we hope NVIDIA makes some improvements with their filtering quality in their drivers soon. We are aware that you can force a higher mode of texture filtering by turning off some of their optimizations, but honestly we’d like the default filtering quality to simply be better without having to turn off optimizations by hand in their driver control panel. Be aware that some folks are much more alert to this shimmering issue than others, so if you have not seen it, I suggest you don’t go out and look for it.


Do understand that the reason NVIDIA leaves these harsh filtering optimizations on is two-fold. First, on smaller displays, it simply does not make a difference to the vast majority of gamers out there. Second, it gives NVIDIA based GPUs better benchmark numbers. And in the land of video card marketing, where the size of your ePenis score is king, you don’t want to give up a few benchmark points lest you have the other team waving their ePenis back at you.


If NVIDIA is going to leave these optimizations on by default in the driver, and they are well aware that these optimizations negatively impact your gaming experience on larger displays, that is the ruler we are going to judge them by. We will continue to point out filtering issues where we see them impacting our gameplay.
Clear as mud...
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
14,044
Location
West Midlands
Just picked up a nice spanking new XFX 7900GT XXX edition card, 560MHz core, 1650MHz RAM, at the low low cost of £205.34 + VAT :D

Will install it when I get home, run some benches against my X850XT and my BFG 7800GT OC see how it compares, also very interested in how this will overclock by the look of things I think the memory will go to 1800MHz, need to check the part code but it looks to be 1.1ns RAM :D Now I have a Zalman VF770 Fata1ty so I'll bench it and OC it with the stock HSF and no Ramsinks then OC It, change over the HSF for the Zalman and do the same see how cool these cores run really.

Will get some screenies uploaded at some point tomorrow.
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Dec 2003
Posts
25,666
D.P. said:
One thing rings clear from all reviews, the X1900 runs very hot, uses lots of power and is very noisey. Not seen a single review that says anything other than that (albet I've only seen 4-5).

I have owned one and can confirm this, it's a really high pitched whine which just gets louder and louder as the GPU gets hotter and hotter, even idle in windows there is a definite high pitched whine.

After a few hours use I couldn't go back to my previous 7800GTX256 quick enough (which i was planning to sell).
 
Associate
Joined
27 Sep 2004
Posts
488
D.P. said:
The main thing with the 7900s is that they are a lot smaller the ccores, only 278million trannies vs ATis 364million and only 196mm^2- smaller than the R430 core! This means that they are very cheap to make with very high yields, they don't need much much and so run very cool, and therefore are very quite when properly cooled. Because they are cheaperto make and have high yields Nvidia can charge less and still make more profit. Yes, we may be suffering from rip-off e-vendor hype rpices but when prices settle down ATI cannot match Nvidia's pricing without loose a lrage profit margin. In a price war, ATI just wouldn't keep up.

Hence Nvidia's tactic.
The real deal with these card is the affordable SLI. When the 7900GT SLI appear for $600 that card will massacre ATI's sales really.


At the very least any ATI fanboyrs can thank Nvidia to be the first to realise that prices needed to be lowered and also that quite and cool chips are important. One thing rings clear from all reviews, the X1900 runs very hot, uses lots of power and is very noisey. Not seen a single review that says anything other than that (albet I've only seen 4-5).


In the end you have a card that is cooler, quiter, less power hungary, faster and ultimitely cheaper.

can hardly charge more for a card that doesn't beat the current batch can they???

would be a different story if they were convincingly thrashing the ati 1900xtx £550 anyone :rolleyes:
 

egt

egt

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4 Jul 2004
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D.P. said:
Pretty clear win for Nvidia IQ wise!

Absolutely! I've just seen that article and the Nvidia's IQ is definitely superior to ati's. Astounding evidence really :)
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Dec 2004
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Location
London/Kent
egt said:
Absolutely! I've just seen that article and the Nvidia's IQ is definitely superior to ati's. Astounding evidence really :)
egt, do nV actually pay you? If not, then why do you persist? One game cannot prove anything astoundingly - nor does any user opinion - it's entirely subjective.
 
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