sliderider wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea the 6800GT was a beast when it came out. It put Nvidia back into pole position after they struggled a little with the FX series.

Radeon X850 is faster than any 6800 with AA/AF turned on high and at 1600x1200. The 6800 only barely edged out X800 without AA/AF and at resolutions lower than 1600 x1200. nVidia wouldn't truly retake the lead until the 8800 came out.

no OpenGL the 6800 dominated the X series, they fixed opengl in later drivers for the x1k series, but the X remained slower than the 6xxx in OpenGL games. Also Nvidia retook in 2005 with the 7800GT the x1800XT was late, when it arrived Nvidia just released the 7800 GTX 512, ATI got it back in 2006 with the x1900XTX but lost it in October to the 8800GTX

There's another angle to consider for why ATI was slower in OpenGL. There were really just two OpenGL engines used to judge this - idTech4 and Riddick. Both use stencil shadowing. NVIDIA had an advantage on Z fillrate. So was it the OpenGL driver or the fact that ATI was behind on Z fill rate until R600? 😀 There was also an issue with idTech4 not working well with ATI's hierarchical Z buffer occlusion culling and wasting fill rate.

But yes, aside from this academic nonsense, you wanted NVidia for those games.

wouldn't a geforce 4 ti be a good match for an athlon xp pc?

swaaye wrote:

There's another angle to consider for why ATI was slower in OpenGL. There were really just two OpenGL engines used to judge this - idTech4 and Riddick. Both use stencil shadowing. NVIDIA had an advantage on Z fillrate. So was it the OpenGL driver or the fact that ATI was behind on Z fill rate until R600? 😀 There was also an issue with idTech4 not working well with ATI's hierarchical Z buffer occlusion culling and wasting fill rate.

But yes, aside from this academic nonsense, you wanted NVidia for those games.

they tested with Q3A engine games as well and the nv4x was faster also 🤣

I find that the 6600GT AGP is a good match for an Athlon XP machine. 6800 cards aren't that easy to find, but the 6600GT is quite plentiful and has enough performance.

Hey, I used a 4870 on my (last) XP rig!

(but it was a C2Q 9xxx OC'd, 4GB high-perfomance RAM). 😁

The best time-correct card I've used was a X800. Still got mine.

candle_86 wrote:

they tested with Q3A engine games as well and the nv4x was faster also 🤣

🤣

They actually overhauled a lot of the OpenGL driver during 2005-2006. Somewhere in there its performance behavior probably changed. I think toward the end of 2006. It took a long time to get this work completed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080706172448/ht … ws/terryandrew/

Terry Makedon wrote:

We are not re-writing our OpenGL driver from scratch. What we are doing is re-writing certain portions of it to improve stability and performance. There will by no means be massive performance gains after this work is complete. This effort will attempt to improve the quality and speed of our OGL driver as much as possible, but until it is done (which still is a ways away) we cannot speculate on how much of a performance improvement users will see.

I don't recall an X800 running the id Tech4 games poorly.

Also remember in id tech 3 that r_primitives 2 is faster on ATI and the engine doesn't pick the best choice when dealing with that setting at 0. This also applies to modern AMD and Nvidia Geforce hardware

leileilol wrote:

I don't recall an X800 running the id Tech4 games poorly.

Also remember in id tech 3 that r_primitives 2 is faster on ATI and the engine doesn't pick the best choice when dealing with that setting at 0. This also applies to modern AMD and Nvidia Geforce hardware

The idTech4 games don't run particularly poorly but the ATI R300-R500 cards did tend to be disadvantaged compared NV30-G7x.

On the idTech3 thing with r_primitives, you can still see this today probably. Return to Castle Wolfenstein ran terrible on my HD 5770 until I renamed the executable to quake3.exe. I think the driver's app profile works around this r_primitives issue if it recognizes quake3.exe.

leileilol wrote:

I don't recall an X800 running the id Tech4 games poorly.

Also remember in id tech 3 that r_primitives 2 is faster on ATI and the engine doesn't pick the best choice when dealing with that setting at 0. This also applies to modern AMD and Nvidia Geforce hardware

not badly, but Doom 3 on an x800XT was barley faster than doom 3 on a 6600GT at 10x7 and 12x10.

obobskivich wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I've only had issues with ATI cards when it comes to old computers. Tried a Radeon 9800 in my P4 yesterday, the drivers BSOD. Tried a 9550. CTD when running 3dmark 😒

IME the R300 cards had awful longevity (all of mine died years ago 😢), despite being decent performers when brand new. Some folks around here have speculated its because their coolers were usually the bare-minimum for what the chips actually needed (and indeed they're usually pretty flimsy looking). Personally I wouldn't go after another one that was designed to need fan cooling, because of that experience. I don't know if the cards you have may have been "victims" of a similar phenomenon or not.

The R400 series are basically just beefed-up R300s, but they did re-work the cooler for the X850 (with a very loud blower (and yes, I'd put it into the "list of things that are louder than the 5800 Ultra")). I recently tried an X850 out, and same as you reported: BSODs and crashes while running 3DMark (at least it could be returned, right? 😒).

I've had no issues whatsoever with any of my ATi cards, except for my 9800 pro when running it on any nforce 2 motehrboard (and some nforce 3 boards). If they BSODs and crash there's a big chance the cards themselfes are dying. I've experienced the same exact issues on a fx5900xt, a 9800xt, a 6800 and a x1950 pro (all AGP) - all of them worked great after recapping. I do remember back in the day I had some BSOD issues with my then x800 GTO2 witch went away after I sapped the measly little cooler it came with for a Arctic Cooling ATi Silencer 5.