epicstruggle said:
Natoma, in his conclusion he clearly states that he would be weary of recommending an NV card:
We?re quite weary of recommending any of the current NVIDIA cards at this point
Taking into context exactly what he's saying, that statement from him doesn't really mean all that much imo.
Anandtech said:
We’re quite weary of recommending any of the current NVIDIA cards at this point, for two major reasons. First, with NV38 coming right around the corner any FX 5900 Ultra purchases wouldn’t be wise investments. Also, given the marginal performance improvements you can expect out of a 5% core clock increase, don’t have incredibly high expectations for the NV38. We can’t recommend the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra because NVIDIA has already indicated that NV36 (the 5600 Ultra’s successor) will be here shortly to replace it and should offer significantly greater performance. So if you’re looking to buy a video card right now, ATI is the way to go.
It sounds more like to me that he's saying "Well, NV38 and NV36 are just around the corner so we can't recommend the 5900 Ultra or the 5600. If you want a card
right now, get ATI." Not that Anand is weary of recommending Nvidia because of all the malfeasance that has occurred in the past year.
Anandtech said:
Looking at the stats, ATI clearly wins in 6 games, NVIDIA wins in 4 games and the two come very close in 5 games. Games such as Command & Conquer Generals: Ground Zero and Simcity 4: Rush Hour are examples where ATI clearly has the lead over NVIDIA and the argument could be made that ATI holds the lead because they optimize for all games, while NVIDIA just optimizes for benchmark titles. However, looking at games like Homeworld 2 and Neverwinter Nights you could make the exact opposite argument.
No mention of Image Quality in this conclusion, despite it being littered throughout the review that there were IQ problems in most of the games and that it seemed AA/AF weren't even being applied, or applied correctly, by the 52.xx drivers.
In fact, there was no mention of IQ in the entire conclusion. I thought that was a little odd when talking about which company "won" which particular benchmark.
Anandtech said:
What’s clear is that both manufacturers optimize for the more popular games and the focus of optimizations is obviously greater on more visible games. With that said, we’re hoping that by expanding our test suite we will be able to encourage optimizations to make more games run better. We’ll see how the picture we’ve depicted here today changes as time goes on.
No mention whatsoever of any of the "optimizations" Nvidia has been found guilty of over the past year. Just a simple lumping together of both companies who "optimize" for games. I'm sorry, but that's misleading. There's a difference between legitimate optimizations and illegitimate ones, and Anand/DWilson make no distinction between the two.
If a review is being made, that should be part of the review itself if any conclusions are to be done, not looked into "later on", which usually never happens in the anandtech world. "Later on" means "We usually wait until the article disappears from the main page and then we dump a whole other bunch of shit up and never follow through". I've seen it happen before unfortunately at AT.
The image quality problems Lars Wienand found at THG in the new 52.xx drivers should immediately throw up the red flags to
any reviewer that something is wrong. Not to mention benchmarking unreleased hardware (and who knows if it's ever going to come out, or come out in quantity *cough* shades of NV30 *cough*) using unreleased and known-to-be-low-quality-IQ drivers.
I just have a problem with the overall review. I'm able to articulate this more since I'm actually awake now.
Anandtech said:
Although we did provide some insight into the “next generation†of games with scores from Halo, the real question on everyone’s mind is still Half Life 2 as well as Doom3. The performance crown under Doom3 is still in NVIDIA’s camp apparently, and although the latest drivers have closed the gap significantly, ATI is still ahead in Half Life 2. The numbers we’ve seen indicate that in most tests ATI only holds single digit percentage leads (< 5%), although in some cases ATI manages to pull ahead by double digits.
Oh lord here we go again with the "Just wait for Doom3! It'll be the r0x0r!" He hears through the grapevine that Doom3 is still faster on the Nvidia cards which imo is to be expected. However, he then goes on to state that the performance gap between the ATI cards and the Nvidia cards has dwindled to the single digits in Half Life 2.
No mention of mixed mode precision. No mention of any potential image quality problems to actually
get to such a performance level, etc etc etc. Personally, I fail to see how driver "magic" can make up a 100% performance deficiency so easily given the architectural shortcomings of the NV3x for a game like HL2. Not even a mention of "take this with a grain of salt until we see for ourselves what the image quality is like and what steps had to be taken to get the performance of the NV3x cards up to par with the R3x0 cards."
Frankly I was disappointed overall with this review.
epicstruggle said:
Im suprised thought that ati performed so poorly in NWN and Homeworld2. Are they TWIMTBP titles?
later,
epic
ATI has documentation for poor performance with these games. They've been working on fixes for them. Check out some threads over at R3D.
