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NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590: Duking It Out For The Single Card Kingby Ryan Smith on 3/24/2011 9:00 AM EST
123 Comments
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Cali3350 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkLast Page you have a seeming paragraph that says "Quickly, let's also..." and then stops. Reply
tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkAlso "Unlike AMD isn't using an exotic phase change thermal compound here" on the meet the card page Reply
tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkAnother one "This doesn't the game in any meaningful manner, but it's an example of how SLI/CF aren't always the right tool for the job." on the computation page. Reply
ahar - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkPage 2
"...NVIDIA's advice about SLI mirror's AMD's advice..."
mirrors Reply
beepboy - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link"Quickly, let's also"
Nice review. Reply
slickr - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkFor $700 I'd rather buy a whole new PC.
Whats the point of playing games at larger resolutions than 1600x1050.
In fact I'd say that 720p resolution is probably the best to play games at, because it tends to be easier to follow since pixels kind of move faster and you have more precision and smoother gameplay experience.
I'd be keeping my AMD 6870 that is for sure! Reply
HangFire - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI've once heard that the secret to happiness is learning to like the taste of cheap beer. Reply
nyran125 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkdid you know thats actually true lol. If you can have your coffee black, then if milk runs out you still get to enjoy life...... Reply
cjl - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThat depends entirely on your GPU. Several can push high resolutions at >60fps, and it's just as smooth. Gaming at 2560x1600 is just an awesome experience. Reply
Azethoth - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - linkExactly, some of us have panels with native 2560x1600. I _could_ game at some miserable 1600x1050 resolution, or I could play at my native resolution. I choose 2560x1600 and ignore all review results at inferior resolutions. Damn you Crysis, damn you! Reply
Ruger22C - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkDon't spew nonsense to the people reading this! Write a disclaimer if you're going to do that. Reply
The Finale of Seem - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - linkUm...no. For one, HUD elements tend to shrink in physical size as resolution rises, meaning that games with a lot of HUD (WoW comes to mind) benefit by letting you see more of what's going on, which means that 720p is pretty friggin' awful. For two, 1920x1080 has become the standard for most monitors over 21" or so, and a lot of gamers get 1920x1080 displays, especially if they're also watching 1080p video or doing significant multitasking. Non-native resolutions look like ass, and as such, 1600x1050 is right out as you won't want to play at anything but 1920x1080.
Now, you can say that there isn't much point going above that, and right now, that may be so as cost is pretty prohibitive, but that may not always be the case. Reply
rav55 - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - linkWhat good is it if you can't buy it? Nvidia cherry picked the gpu's to work on this card and they could only release a little over 1000 units. It is now sold out in the US and available in limited amounts in Europe.
Basically the GTX 590 is vapourware!!! What a joke! Reply
wellortech - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkReviews seem to still agree that 6950CF or 570 SLI are just as powerful, and much less expensive. Guess I'll be keeping my pair of 6950s while continuing to enjoy 30" 2550x1600 heaven. Reply
DanNeely - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYeah, these only really make sense if you're going for a 4GPU setup in an ATX box, or have a larger mATX case and want to 2 GPUs and some other card. Reply
jfelano - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYou go boy. I'll continue to have a life. Reply
The_Comfy_Chair - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkGet over yourself.
YOU are trolling on a forum about a video card on a tech-geek site on the internet. You have no more of a life than wellortech or anyone else here - self included. Reply
ShumOSU - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYou're 16,000 pixels short. :-) Reply
egandt - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkWould have been better to see what these cards did with 3x 1920x1200 displays, as obviously they are overkill for any single display. Reply
Dudler - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkCouldn't agree more, but since we know from the 1,5 GB 580 that the nVida card do poorly in higher resolutions, AnandTech is probably never test any such setup. Expect 12x10 instead, as nVidia tends to do better in low resolutions than Amd. 19x12 is already irrelevant with these cards. Reply
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkOne way or another we will be including multi-monitor stuff. The problem right now is getting ahold of a set of matching monitors, which will take some time to resolve. Reply
fausto412 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkalso would be nice to test 1680x1050 on at least a couple of demanding games. illustrate to people who have 22" screens that these cards are a waste of money at their resolution. Reply
bigboxes - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkIt has been a waste for that low resolution since two generations ago. But you knew that. Troll... Reply
tynopik - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkmatching monitors might matter for image quality or something, but for straight benchmarking, who cares?
surely you have 3 monitors capable of 1920x1080
it's not like the card cares if one is 20" and another is 24" Reply
7Enigma - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI don't understand this either. There is no need for anything fancy, heck you don't even need to have them actually outputting anything, just fool the drivers into THINKING they are driving multiple monitors! Reply
DanNeely - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI don't entirely agree. While it doesn't matter much for simple average FPS benches like Anandtech is currently doing, they fall well short of the maximum playable settings testing done by sites like HardOCP. Reply
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkRemember, the AT editors are spread all over. So while between them they certainly have at least 3 1920x1080/1200 monitors, Ryan (doing the testing) probably doesn't.
Plus with different monitors wouldn't response times possibly be different? I'd imagine that would be odd in gaming. Reply
tynopik - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link> Remember, the AT editors are spread all over. So while between them they certainly have at least 3 1920x1080/1200 monitors, Ryan (doing the testing) probably doesn't.
This has been a need for a while, and it's not like this review was completely unexpected, so not sure why they don't have a multi-monitor setup yet
> Plus with different monitors wouldn't response times possibly be different? I'd imagine that would be odd in gaming.
Well that's sort of the point, they wouldn't actually be gaming, so who cares? Reply
Martin Schou - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI would have thought that the marketing departments of companies like Asus, Benq, Dell, Eizo, Fujitzu, HP, LaCie, LG, NEC, Philips, Samsung and ViewSonic would cream their pants at what is really very cheap PR.
Supply sets of 3 or 5 1920x1080/1920x1200 displays and 3 or 5 2560x1440/2560x1600 displays in exchange for at least a full year's advertisement on a prominent tech website.
If we use Dell as an example, they could supply a set of five U2211H and three U3011 monitors for a total cost of less than 5,900 USD per set. The 5,900 USD is what us regular people would have to pay, but in a marketing campaign it's really just a blip on the radar.
Now, excuse me while I go dream of a setup that could pull games at 9,600x1080/5,400x1920 or 7,680x1600/4,800x2560 :D Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkI'd just like to note that advertising is handled separately from editorial content. The two are completely compartmentalized so that ad buyers can't influence editorial control. Conversely as an editor I can't sell ad space. Reply
Abot13 - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - linkWell there is advertising and advertising. Asking multiple monitor manufacturers to supply sets of screens in order to test them for multi monitor setups, where the best sets will be used for a longer test period to see how they keep up over time, doesnt interfere with your journalistic integrity, bit for the manufacturers the cost can be written of as PR/advertising costs.
in the end your readers will get the information they want, your integrety will be intact and we also will find out what the best monitors are for multi monitor setups.
Shouldnt be that hard now should it? Reply
PrinceGaz - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkOnce you are dealing with framerates above about 80fps at the highest resolutions and quality settings, multi-monitor is one option, or it is time to start cranking up the anti-aliasing as the results are otherwise irrelevant.
With one card doing 100fps and another managing 140fps in a game, the best card for that game is the one which is cheapest even if only slightly, unless you can do something to bring the framerates down in a useful way, and higher AA than 4x is the way to go. Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkAs a general principle I agree, however 8x AA really doesn't do anything for IQ. I'd rather turn on SSAA/TrAA/MLAA, however AMD and NVIDIA do not have a common AA mode beyond DX9 SSAA. So for DX10/11 titles, MSAA is still the lowest common denominator. Reply
DarknRahl - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI agree. Anandtech always seems to have a nvidia bias to their video card reviews.
It sticks in the craw as I dig all their other reviews for other products but video card wise I go elsewhere. Reply
B3an - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkNo they dont. It just that for some reason AMD attracts more morons that like to moan about these non-existent things. And i own AMD cards before you say anything else stupid. Reply
softdrinkviking - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - link100% agree. i own an AMD card too, and i felt like anandtech was extremely positive about the 5800 series when i bought that card.
it also looks like they are leaning towards the 6990 vs the 590 in this very article. to paraphrase... the 6990 is going to be better for current new games and future games, but the 590 seems to do a bit better with older titles and new games played at lower resolutions.
i don't understand how anyone could think that makes them nvidia biased. it boggles the mind. Reply
compvter - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkFinnish site called muropaketti did some 3x display tests with these new cards
and for your question i would like to answer with other question: Why buy faster cpu if you won't need faster at the moment? Granted there is no limitations like dx compatability, but still you can use your gfx card quite a while. Im still using 3870x2 card (3 years), mainly because there are so few dx11 games. Reply
VoraciousGorak - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkFor the "hype" they were throwing out with that video preview, I thought they were going to pull a fast one and launch a GeForce 6-series. But a teaser video for a super-enthusiast GPU using existing tech that'll be so rare I'll probably never physically look at one in my lifetime?
Color me disappointed. Reply
fausto412 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkyeah.
those 700 dollar cards are only to be bought by a rich few.
Improve the $400 price range...that's as high as i'll go these days. Reply
Red Storm - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link... are you guys not testing these cards at multi-monitor resolutions? You said yourself in the review that these are marketed towards the high end. Well, the high end isn't just 30" monitors. Multi monitors boast a higher resolution and I think it's important to know how well these dual GPU monsters perform at the level they are marketed towards. Reply
tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkSo was the WU count close to exactly double the single chip score of 360? Reply
tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkWhen using both chips with two WU's, I mean. Reply
alent1234 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linki can buy an x-box and with the price of a lot of good older games a few years worth of gaming for that Reply
MrBungle123 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThats like someone watching NASCAR, seeing the price of a car and saying they could buy a honda civic and a decades worth of gas for the same money. Reply
alent1234 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linki got sick of buying the latest video card when they hit $399 years ago. around 60fps you really don't notice any difference in speed so getting 100fps or some other number doesn't do it for me anymore Reply
tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkTBH, in the land of console ports, very few games (on a single monitor) justify a card above 200. Reply
Targon - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThat just goes to show that you play the wrong games then. The new top of the line games really can push the $400 cards fairly well at 1920x1080 and full details. With DirectX 11 support, these new games really push the limit. Then you have things like Eyefinity, driving 5860x1080, and you want more than a $200 card. Reply
cmdrdredd - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkNot really...This card isn't a one off race car. It's a production part, limited maybe but you can buy it at retail. A stock car is not stock... Reply
Azethoth - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - linkWhat!? Next you are gonna claim wrastling isn't real. Reply
medi01 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkPuzzled by the cryptic color scheme on the graphs?
Could you stick to red + shades of red for AMD and green + shades of green for nVidia (ok, blue for not so relevant cards)?
Or at least color the labels of the cards accordingly? Reply
7Enigma - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYeah I don't get it either. The last review of the 6990 was fantastic with how it was color-coded. Now you have a DIRECT competitor in both price and performance and the 6990 is never highlighted in the charts!?!? It made it a real PITA to always go hunting for the 6990 bars when they should have been labeled from the get-go.
Hopefully this can be remedied easily... Reply
rabidsquirrel - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkRed/Green is horrible for those of us in this world that are colorblind. Blue/Green is equally horrible. I'd like to see textures used instead. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI've changed Ryan's colors. Green is for the stock and EVGA clocks, yellow is for OC 590, red for 6990, and orange for 6990 OC. For the color blind, I apologize but using green/red for the primary cards is pretty standard. Reply
rabidsquirrel - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkCommon colorblindess is between Green/Red and Green/Blue. Red/Blue works great! Reply
Dudler - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link"After talking to several other reviewers, this does not seem to be an isolated case, and many of them have killed their cards with similar testing, which is far from being an extreme test."
"I most strongly advise anyone to stay away from overclocking this product and use extremely conservative settings, maybe up to 650 MHz and no voltage adjustments."
Looks like it is no OC champ.
For high res action, H got their review up. 6990 even beats the 590 at Civ V. Conclusion is damning too:
"We truly thought the GTX 590 was going to make the Radeon 6990 look bad, but the fact of the matter is that NVIDIA made the 6990 look that much better. The GTX 590 is not the "World's Fastest Single Card Solution" as stated on our page 1 slides; the Radeon HD 6990 is very much retaining that title. Hail to the King, baby! "
2x 6950 on water looks to be my next buy. Must buy wider desk though :-) Reply
Dudler - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRo-1VFMcbc&fea...
SweClockers also fried their card.. The blame nVidia quality drivers. Reply
Nfarce - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkFanboy much? Anyone who is an AMD/ATi fanboy shouldn't be crowing about nVidia driver quality. That's one reason I left AMD and went full nVidia-only GPUs after a 4870 purchase. nVidia cards also play a lot nicer on Microsoft FSX, but not everyone cares about that just like not everyone cares about Civ5. Reply
Dudler - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link?? Fanboy? NVidia just released their highest end($700) card with a driver that fries it if you overvolt. Me commenting on that, how come that is fanboyism?
It is nothing short of a disaster. Sweclockers fried 2(two) Gtx590's. Thats $1400 worth of hardware. TPU fried one.
Sure I've had my share of driver issues with ATi, but not any more than with my 8800Gt. Couldn't care less whose name is printed on the sticker. Reply
cmdrdredd - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link"fries it if you overvolt."
YOU overvolted it...not the drivers doing it automatically. Remember the saying "your mileage may vary" or "proceed at your own risk"? Reply
Dudler - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYup. But who doesn't expect voltage tuning today? Read the back of the ASUS box: "50% faster with voltage tuning." Nice way to say: This card can't be oc'ed. It will catch fire. But of course, you are overvolting so it is your own fault.
But, only reason I posted it was to warn ppl who invest $700 in a card and has it fry on them. I'm not arguing who shall take blame.
Be careful, at least 6 cards dead, stay away from oc'ing it. Reply
BreadFan - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkWould this card be better for the P67 platform vs GTX 580's in sli considering you won't get full 16x going the sli route? Reply
Nfarce - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThe 16x vs. 8x issue has been beaten to death for years. Long story short, it's not a measurable difference at or below 1920x1080 resolutions and only barely a difference above that. Reply
BreadFan - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThanks man. Already have one evga 580. Only reason I was considering was for the step up program evga offers (590 for around $200). I have till first part of June to think about it but am leaning towards adding another 580 once the price comes down in a year or two. Reply
wellortech - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYou won't get 16x going the CF route either.....although I agree that it doesn't really matter. Reply
softdrinkviking - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - linki hope your screen name is from the budgie song! Reply
softdrinkviking - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - linkthat comment was to breadfan. Reply
7Enigma - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkComon guys, I would have thought you could have at least had the 6990 and the 590 data points for Crysis 2. Perhaps a short video as well with the new game? :) Reply
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkIt's unlikely we'll be using Crysis 2 in its current state, but that could always change.
However if we were to use it, it won't be until the next benchmark refresh. Reply
YouGotServed - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkCrysis: Warhead will always be the benchmark. Crysis 2 isn't nearly as demanding. It's been dumbed down for consoles, in case you haven't heard. There are no advanced settings available to you through the normal game menu. You have to tweak the CFG file to do so.
I thought like you, originally. I was thinking: Crysis 2 is gonna set a new bar for performance. But in reality, it's not even close to the original in terms of detail level. Reply
mmsmsy - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI know I can be annoying, but I checked it myself and the built in benchmark in Civ V really favours nVidia cards. In the real world scenario the situation is almost upside down. I got a reply from one of the reviewers last time that it provides quite accurate scores, but I thought that just for the heck of it you'd try and see for yourself that it doesn't at all. I know it's just one game and that benchmarking is a slow work, but in order to keep up the good work you're doing you should at least use the advice and confront it with the reality to stay objective and provide the most accurate scores that really mean sth. I don't mean to undermine you, because I find your articles to be mostly accurate and you're doing a great job. Just use the advice to make this site even better. A lot of writing for a comment, but this time maybe you will see what I'm trying to do. Reply
TalonP - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkFirst paragraph:
"It really doesn't seem like it's been all that long, but it's been nearly a year and a half since NVIDIA has had a dual-GPU card on the market. The GeForce GTX 295 was launched in January of 2009, the first card based on the 55nm die shrink of the GT200 GPU."
Well, shit. I thought Jan 2009 was TWO and a half years ago. I MUST GET BACK TO THE FUTURE! Reply
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkIt was on the market after its launch. so if it disappeared somewhere at the end of 09/beginning of 10 that would match the "year and a half since on the market" Reply
RedemptionAD - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkAre there any reviews with such a setup out yet, or is it even supported? Maybe even a 3x or 4x setup? If it was a 4x 6990 setup or 590 setup could it rule the world? Reply
cjl - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYou can't go over 4 GPUs, so you can only SLI/CF two of the dual GPU cards. Reply
Nfarce - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI'll be going with two 570's for the same price, thanks. And I can spread that pain at $350 per purchase over two months instead of one big $700 plunkdown. Reply
buildingblock - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link"....However the noise results are nothing short of remarkable – if NVIDIA can dissipate 350W+ of heat while at the same time making 5-7dB less noise, then it starts to become clear that AMD's design has a serious weakness. The ultimate question is what did NVIDIA do right that AMD did not?...."
I can't see anyone tolerating the noise level of the 6990. But the 590 is barely noisier than a 580. So an easy win for nVidia if you really need/can afford one of these monsters. Reply
cactusdog - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkYa, even the 6970/6950 are hot cards. Very disappointing after a very cool and silent 5870. I think AMD had a problem with the chips and never intended for them to be so hot. Maybe they had to crank up the power to get them to run right? idk........... Reply
Romulous - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThis card might be good for those people out there who love to cram as many GPUs into one box as they can and run folding at home. Reply
smigs22 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkMajor bias with the OC listing in the charts... the OC version is not enough... but a 20+% OC is included versus the other standard configs... and the lousy flip switch OC mode of 6990... not around 940/1400+ that other sites have attained.... that offers 6970CF+ performance :s ...Why dont they show 5870/6950/6970 CF & 470/480/570/580 SLI etc with appropriate 20%+ overclocks to put these cards in their place... especially with price vs performance.... the 2gb 6950s also having the ability to be flashed into 6970s too... not bad CF for price...
The second fastest single card out there.... but still a beast and its kept its idle power within reason... i think its time for 28nm tech asap... as the carbon taxes on these bad boys will be horrendous...lol Reply
BrightCandle - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkWhen you do the 3x monitor review can you please include last generations top end card (5970) for comparisons. Eyefinity and co is really where it is at with this monster graphics cards and in my experience the 5970 just doesn't have the horse power to play well at 5760x1200. I would really like to see how much difference these new cards and their increased RAM actually makes.
50% performance compared to last generation at 2560 is OK, but do they get even more distance with the higher resolution? Reply
valenti - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkRyan, I commented last week on the 550 review. Just to echo that comment here: how are you getting the "nodes per day" numbers? Have you considered switching to a points per day metric? Very few people can explain what nodes per day are, and they aren't a very good measure for real world folding performance.
(also, it seems like you should double the number for this review, since I'm guessing it was just ignoring the second GPU) Reply
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkLast year NVIDIA worked with the F@H group to provide a special version of the client for benchmark purposes. Nodes per day is how the client reports its results. Since points are arbitrary based on how the F@H group is scoring things, I can't really make a conversion. Reply
poohbear - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkGood to see that a $700 finally has a decent cooler! Why would somebody spend $700 & then go and hafta spend another $40 for an aftermarket cooler??? nvidia & AMD really need to just charge $750 and hve an ultra quiet card, these people in this price range are'nt gonna squabble over an extra $50 for petes sake!!!! it makes no sense that they skimp on the cooler at this price range! this is the top of the line where money isnt the issue! Reply
Guspaz - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkLet's get this straight, nVidia. Slapping two of your existing GPUs together does not make this a "next-generation card". Saying that you've been working on it for two years is also misleading; I doubt it took two years just to lay out the PCB to get two GPUs on a single board.
SLI and Crossfire still feel like kludges. Take Crysis 2 for example. The game comes out, and I try to play it on my 295. It runs, but only on one GPU. So I go looking online; it turns out that there's an SLI profile update for the game, but only for the latest beta drivers. If you install those drivers *and* the profile update, you'll get the speed boost, but also various graphical corruption issues involving flickering of certain types of effects (that seem universal rather than isolated).
After two goes at SLI (first dual 285s, next a 295), I've come to the conclusion that SLI is just not worth the headache. You'll end up dealing with constant compatibility issues. Reply
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkAnd that is why people still buy the 6970/580, rather than having 2 cheaper cards in SLI like so many recommend. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkFor the record, I've had three goes at CrossFire (2 x 3870, 4870X2, and now 2 x 5850). I'm equally disappointed with day-of-release gaming results. But, if you stick to titles that are 2-3 months old, it's a lot better. (Yeah, spend $600 on GPUs just so you can wait two months after a game release before buying....) Reply
Guspaz - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkI don't know about that, the original Crysis still has a lot of issues with SLI. Reply
Nentor - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link"For the GTX 590 launch, NVIDIA once again sampled partner cards rather than sampling reference cards directly to the press. Even with this, all of the cards launching today are more-or-less reference with a few cosmetic changes, so everything we're describing here applies to all other GTX 590 cards unless otherwise noted.
With that out of the way, the card we were sampled is the EVGA GeForce GTX 590 Classified, a premium GTX 590 offering from EVGA. The important difference from the reference GTX 590 is that GTX 590 Classified ships at slightly higher clocks—630/864 vs. 607/853.5—and comes with a premium package, which we will get into later. The GTX 590 Classified also commands a premium price of $729."
Are we calling overclocked cards "more-or-less reference" cards now? That's a nice way to put it, I'll use it the next time I get stopped by a police officer. Sir, I was going more or less 100mph.
Reference is ONE THING. It is the basis and does not waver. Anything that is not it is either overclocked or underclocked. Reply
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkBad example, as in the US at least your speedometer is only required to be accurate within 10%, meaning you can't get ticketed at less than 10% over the speed limit. This card is only overclocked by 4%. More importantly, they a) weren't sent a reference card, and b) included full tests at stock clocks. Would you rather they not review it since it isn't a reference card? Reply
Nentor - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThat is a good point actually, I didn't think of that.
Maybe reject the card yes, but that is not going to happen. Nvidia is just showing who is boss by sending a non reference card. AT will have to swallow whatever Nvidia feeds them if they want to keep bringing the news. Reply
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkThere are only 2 reasons this card isn't reference.
1) Factory overclock, which we can and will nullify for testing
2) The EVGA backplate. Admittedly I don't have the reference backplate, but the NV backplates shouldn't cause any of our results to differ - the difference is mostly cosmetic.
For this reason, it's "more-or-less" reference. Technically it's not reference, but once we change the clocks it's quite identical in performance. Reply
mariush - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkCan you explain how can you nullify the modified / improved cooling system of the eVGA compared to reference cards?
A reference card with stock voltages/frequencies may still run worse than this eVGA when downclocked, for example because on the reference card the voltage regulators may heat more and throttle the card more often.
Otherwise.... not an ATI fan but it's painfully obvious you're not focusing on this review on things that make this card look bad, like playing on 2 x 1920x1080 monitors or something like that. Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkThe cooling on the EVGA isn't any different. With such a mild overclock, they're basically just clocking it up a bit; the voltage and the cooling is no difference from reference. Reply
etamin - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkWhere do you get the MSRPs for all the cards on the first page? I'm never able to find any of them at those prices. Reply
etamin - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkbtw I'm looking at the 6850, 6870, and 6970. They start at $170, $210, and $340 on newegg. Reply
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI factor in Mail In Rebates. if you don't, that's probably why you see prices differently. Reply
Ramon Zarat - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkReview title:
''NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590: Duking It Out For The Single Card King''
Comments in conclusion:
''...and as a result there is no one card that can be crowned king.''
LMAO... How to pretend to say someting and actually mean the complete oppsite!
Now, performance, cost and power ratio is STILL best with the 6990. And that's without even considering multi screen gaming setup. At 1.5Gb Vram, the 590 WILL come up short at 5760 X 1200.
Ramon Reply
Silent_Scone - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkBut none the less, I think I'll stick with my 580GTX SLi thanks ;) Reply
krumme - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkREALLY FAST AT 1080 ON HAWX
OVERCLOCK YOURS NOW !!! Reply
freedomsbeat212 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkI hate coming to anandtech sometimes because so many of the comments are from wannabe editors. It's annoying and takes away from the excellent content..
Why not have an "email correction" button vs taking it out in the comment section? It's weird, I don't see this anywhere else - you guys must be a particularly anal group...
To go back O/T, I miss the days of powerful sub-$250 graphics cards. There's a market for it but all the action's on the high-end. Remember when the affordable TNT2 would play every recent game at playable framerates? Reply
RaistlinZ - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkWhat about the 6950 2GB? It can be had for $245.00 after rebate and it's plenty powerful. Reply
the_elvino - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkIs it so hard to admit that the 6990's performance is better across the board? Multi-monitor setups were left out in order to make NVidia look good.
Remember when the GTX 580 SLI review was published, AT didn't include a 5970 crossfire setup, because they sadly only had one 5970.
Yes, the GTX 590 is less noisy, but then again you can underclock the 6990 to GTX 590 performance levels and it will be quieter too, not really an argument.
The GTX 590 is slower (especially at super high resolutions) and draws more power than the 6990 at the same price, AMD wins! Simple! Reply
softdrinkviking - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkIf the 590 can only drive 2 displays, is the reason it has 3 DVI ports is only for people who buy 2 cards and then you can run all three off of one card? Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkThe individual GPUs can only drive 2 monitors each. NVIDIA is using the display capabilities of both GPUs together in order to drive 4 monitors. Reply
softdrinkviking - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkah, got it. i should read more carefully.
thanks for answering. :) Reply
The Jedi - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkSurely if each GPU can run two displays, two GPUs on one card can run four displays? Reply
Soulkeeper - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - linkWow that is massive
I wouldn't put that in my pc if someone else bought it for me. Reply
hab82 - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkFor me the gaming differences between AMD Nividia at this level would not get me to change allegiance. In my case I bought two EVGA classifieds but they may never see a game. I use them as low cost replacements to the Telsa cards. For Parallel processing I held off until we had powers of two ie 256 512 1024 cores. I did not like 240 432 480 alternatives. Just easier to work with powers of 2. The lower noise and lower power were big winners. Evan if the power supplies can handle them you still have to get the heat out of the room. My 4 nodes of 1024 cuda cores each are a pain to air condition in my den.
I really love you gamers, you buy enough GPU's to keep the competition going and lowering the price for impressive computation power.
Thanks all!
Hubert Reply
Calin - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkUSA manages to stay just south of Canada Reply
rs2 - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkI thought you guys learned your lesson the last time you pitted a factory-overclocked reference nVidia card against a stock AMD card. If you're going to use an overclocked card in an article that's meant to establish the performance baseline for a series of graphics cards (as this one does for the GTX 590 series), then you really should do at least one of:
1. Downclock the overclocked "reference" card to stock levels.
2. Overclock the competing AMD card by a comparable amount (or use a factory overclocked AMD card as the reference point)
3. Publish a review using a card that runs at reference clocks, and then afterwards publish a separate review for the overclocked card.
4. Overclock both cards to their maximum stable levels, and use that as the comparison point.
Come on now, this is supposed to be Anandtech. It shouldn't be up to the readers to lecture you about journalistic integrity or the importance of providing proper "apples to apples" comparisons. Using a factory overclocked card to establish a performance baseline for a new series of GPU's is biased, no matter how small and insignificant the overclock may seem. Cut it out. Reply
buhusky - Friday, March 25, 2011 - linkanybody else remember back in the era when pentiums just kept getting bigger & hotter every year? i wonder when they'll start making gpus smaller, cooler, quieter like they finally ended up doing with CPUs Reply
krumme - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - linkYeaa, then this card is on of the first Pentium3 1Ghz Reply
ryan1e - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - linkno offense anandtech, but this card is aimed squarely at the bleeding edge consumers much like the amd 6990 is. to that extent, any video card can only add performance to a system with respect to how much the system can deliver on the cpu side. as for the base system itself, it's a basic rig, nothing spectacular now. the gtx 590 and the amd 6990 restively would both perform better, and your results would prove more the limitations and capabilities of those cards if they were being run on the platforms they were targeted for. an example of what i mean: tom's hardware used a test platform based on an intel i7-990x OC to 4ghz paired to an asus rampage III formula mb vs. anandtech's older i7-920 clocked at 3.33 ghz paired to an asus rampage II extreme mb. the review from toms hardware nvidia's gtx 590 and amd's 6990 both performed far better than on anand's rig, but still similar overall. personally, i think i'll stick with my sli gtx 580 oc water cooled setup for performanceand get an upgrade for my cpu, neither the 6990 or 590 in any configuration is worth the expense for the miniscule gain in performance on the graphics side. Reply
mino - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - linkOne word: comparability. Reply
mino - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - linkAnother important review from AT, another biased review from AT. GRRR.
- AT chooses NOT TO overclock HD6990 BUT presents un-overclocked results as HD6990 OC
Yeah, it could embarrass our masters if AMD's built-to-overclock card was presented deemed overclockable
- "The GTX 590 simply embarrasses the 6990 here; it's not even a contest."
Yeah, 4dB is no contest, embarrassment, of course. It is AMD's card after all. (it is louder, no question there)
PR mercenaries at their best. Lets brace ourselves for another round of PR warfare when BD and Llano launch ... Reply
nitrousoxide - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - linkDon't you know that noise level goes by factor of 10 with 10dB increase? Do the math, and you will find 6990 2 times louder than 590. Indeed it's no contest. You can check out Linus Tech Tips' video review you Youtube. 6990 is definitely much, much louder than 590.
The article itself isn't biased. 6990 and 590 have similar win-some-lose-some situation just like most cards at similar price range (570 vs. 6970, 560 vs. 6950, 460 vs. 6850 etc.) Darn it's impossible to have a real card king these days when both NV and AMD are paying developers for optimization. Reply
OblivionLord - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - linkAnyone know what case was used in this test because if different cases were used then that could affect the temp chart. Reply
ryedizzel - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - linkanother excellent and incredibly thorough article. this is why i come back to Anandtech time and time again for the "real" story. thank you and please keep up the good work! :) Reply
trogthefirst - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - linkActually if i wanted near the top gaming performance i would just fork out for 2 x HD 6950s, crossfire and possibly unlock them as a bonus :P Tadaa! Reply
rav55 - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - linkWhat good is it if you can't buy it? Nvidia cherry picked the gpu's to work on this card and they could only release a little over 1000 units. It is now sold out in the US and available in limited amounts in Europe.
Basically the GTX 590 is vapourware!!! What a joke! Reply
WhatsTheDifference - Monday, April 04, 2011 - linkhow many years has it been since *any* 4890 has been represented in the charts..? why is it this way? come on. exclude nV's earlier gen top dog and maybe no one will notice. Reply
Scandalman - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - linkInteresting article, however it would be useful to know what power supplies you recommend.
I am interested in using a pair of these cards for running an OpenCL application flat out and I want to know if my Tagan 1100W supply is sufficient; It's running a GA890-GPA-UD3H/Phenom x4 955 with two unlocked 6950's at the moment.
Looks like it might just do it with a whisker to spare, but I'd like to avoid expensive pyrotechnics. Reply
nyran125 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkim not really into giving all my money to the same manufactorer every year just to buy a new video card that does nothing else accept increase FPS by 3-10 fps. Sometimes it doesnt increase it at all. If what you have already owns everything out there, i dont see the point. I only see the point if what you have DOESNT do what you want it to do. AMD 6870 is running every game iver played so far on max withotu issue at highest resolution. We are in the console era.
Unless your playing Arma 2 and Shogun total war 2, but even then thats more CPU related adn an amd 6870 combined with a high end cpu prety much gets the job done at high res. NOT 30" though. Bu my eyes are screwed up enough from staring at a montier, than even want to go to 30 ". Reply


text:
Susan Witt is the executive director of the EF Schumacher Society. The society is dedicated to finding practical applications for the ideas Schumacher expressed in his well-known book, Small is Beautiful. Witt will speak at 7 pm, Oct. 24, on "linking land, people, communities and local economies" at the La Montañita Co-op's annual membership meeting. The meeting is open to the public and takes place at SITE Santa Fe.
SFR: Give me the nutshell pitch—how does building a local economy link people, land and community?
SW: Schumacher was an economist and he argued that to really build sustaining economies—economies that sustain people and land and community—local economies were in fact the most vibrant basis. When the goods consumed in a region are the goods produced there, the economy is not dependent on shipping and is socially responsible because citizen consumers know the conditions that workers labor under. In today's dominant economy, we have a separation of what we're buying from our knowledge of the process of manufacture. When we know the whole history of the products we use in our daily lives, then those products are no longer just 'stuff.' To be more engaged citizens, we need to feel empowered in the shaping of our economy, rather than wringing our hands and wondering what a government or a big bank is going to do—and we can do that through activating our local economies.
Small is Beautiful published in '73. Has it taken this long for its principles to go mainstream?
Well, let's put it this way. The society was incorporated in 1980, and we've been building on those ideas steadily since then. We've been the epicenter for the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, and the microcredit and local currency movements have flourished out of this organization. We've been consistently working on citizen-based implementation of these ideas for 29 years, and we've been seen as a boutique organization. We have lovely ideas but they're not practical because the global economy is where all the action is. Suddenly, we have a global economy that has failed us…so now people are taking a look at what we've been saying and they're taking it seriously.
There's already backlash against local food economies, though. Even Mother Jones published a skeptical article earlier this year.
It's not going to come without serious effort and without serious change. We've been sucked into the belief that paying online or paying with credit cards and working through electronic systems is convenient. It saves time. Do you know that book The Little Prince? He's offered a pill that will keep him from being thirsty. He asks why he would want that and is told that it will save him time. And he says, 'But if I had extra time, there's nothing I'd rather do than walk to a well and pull some fresh water.'
But realistically you're talking about networks of regional economies—everything can't come from down the street.
Absolutely. Schumacher actually said if everyone were for small, he'd be for big. That wasn't just to be contrarian but to point out that it's a question of balance. We're so weighted at the moment toward fractionalization. The real estate collapse came about from the increasing fractionalization of mortgages that were divided and redivided. The end investor had no thread back to a real home with people in it. That thread is an imaginative thread, a moral thread that we've lost. It will be hard to adjust to something different, but how many of us have been hurt by this economy of convenience?
Why do local currencies struggle to get off the ground?
Because flipping out a credit card has become a habit. We've been lulled to sleep by big corporations that say, 'Don't worry about that; we'll handle it.' Instead of managing all of our financial transactions consciously, we've kind of gone to sleep around it. And it's hard work to be awake and taking responsibility. We've got years of patterning to undo, and we have to recognize that it's going to take a continuing education effort. We've been trained by corporate welfare money.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The millions of photographs in the Museum's collections compose a vast mosaic of the nation's history. Photographs accompany most artifact collections. Thousands of images document engineering projects, for example, and more record the steel, petroleum, and railroad industries.
Some 150,000 images capture the history, art, and science of photography. Nineteenth-century photography, from its initial development by W. H. F. Talbot and Louis Daguerre, is especially well represented and includes cased images, paper photographs, and apparatus. Glass stereographs and news-service negatives by the Underwood & Underwood firm document life in America between the 1890s and the 1930s. The history of amateur photography and photojournalism are preserved here, along with the work of 20th-century masters such as Richard Avedon and Edward Weston. Thousands of cameras and other equipment represent the technical and business side of the field.


text:
Real World DirectX 10 Performance: It Ain't Prettyby Derek Wilson on 7/5/2007 9:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- GPUs
59 Comments
Back to Article
slickr - Monday, July 09, 2007 - linkGreat review, thats what we all need to get Nvidia and ATI stop bitchin around and stealing our money with slow hardware that can't even outperform last generations hardware. If you ask me the 8800Ultra should be the middle 150$ class here and top end should be some graphic card with 320 stream processors 1GB GDDR4 clocked at 2.4GHZ and 1000MHz core clock, same from amd they need the X2900XT to be middle 150$ class and top of the line should be some graphic card with 640stream processors 1GB GDDR4 2.4GHz and 1000MHz core clock!
More of this kind of reviews please so we can put to ATI and Nvidia we won't buy their hardware if its not good!!!!!!!!
ielmox - Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - linkI really enjoyed this review. I have been agonizing over selecting an affordable graphics card that will give me the kind of value I enjoyed for years from my trusty and cheap GF5900xt (which runs Prey, Oblivion, and EQ2 at decent quality and frame rates) and I am just not seeing it.
I'm avoiding ATI until they bring their power use under control and generally get their act together. I'm avoiding nVidia because they're gouging the hell out of the market. And the previous generation nVidia hardware is still quite costly because nVidia know very well that they've not provided much of an upgrade with the 8xxx family, unless you are willing to pay the high prices for the 8800 series (what possessed them to use a 128bit bus on everything below the 8800?? Did they WANT their hardware to be crippled?).
As a gamer who doesn't want to be a victim of the "latest and greatest" trends, I want affordable performance and quality and I don't really see that many viable options. I believe we have this half-baked DX10 and Vista introduction to thank for it - system requirements keep rocketing upwards unreasonably but the hardware economics do not seem to be keeping pace.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, July 07, 2007 - linkThanks Derek for the great review. I appreciate the "%DX10 performance of DX9" charts, too. Reply
Aberforth - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkThis article is ridiculous. Why would Nvidia and other dx10 developers want gamers to buy G80 card for high dx10 performance? DX10 is all about optimization, the performance factor depends on how well it is implemented and not by blindly using API's. Vista's driver model is different and dx10 is different. The present state of Nvidia drivers are horrible, we can't even think of dx10 performance at this stage.
the dx10 version of lost planet runs horribly eventhough it is not graphically different from dx9 version. So this isn't dx10 or GPU's fault, it's all about the code and the drivers. Also the CEO of Crytek has confirmed that Nvidia 8800 (possibly 8800GTS) and E6600 CPU can max Crysis in Dx10 mode.
Long back when dx9 came out I remember reading an article about how it sucked badly. So I'm definetly not gonna buy this one. Reply
titan7 - Thursday, July 12, 2007 - linkNo, it's not about sucky code or sucky drivers. It's about shaders. Look at how much faster cards with more shader power are in d3d9. Now in d3d10 longer, richer, prettier shaders are used that take more power to process.
It's not about optimization this time as the IHVs have already figured out how to write optimized drivers, it's about raw FLOPS for shader performance. Reply
DerekWilson - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkDX9 performance did (and does) "suck badly" on early DX9 hardware.
DX10 is a good thing, and pushing the limits of hardware is a good thing.
Yes drivers and game code can be rocky right now, but the 162 from NVIDIA are quite stable and NV is confident in their performance. Lost planet shows that NV's drivers are at least getting close to parity with DX9.
This isn't an article about DX10 not being good, it's an article about early DX10 hardware not being capable of delivering all that DX10 has to offer.
Which is as true now as it was about early DX9 hardware. Reply
piroroadkill - Friday, July 06, 2007 - linkWait, performance on the Radeon 9700 Pro sucked? I seem to remember games several years later that were DirectX 9 still being playable... Reply
DerekWilson - Saturday, July 07, 2007 - linkyeah, 9700 pro sucks ... when actually running real world DX9 code.
Try running BF2 at any playable setting (100% view distance, high shadows and lighting). This is really where games started using DX9 (to my knowledge, BF2 was actually the first game to require DX9 support to run).
But many other games still include the ability to run 1.x shaders rather 2.0 ... Like Oblivion can turn the detail way down to the point where there aren't any DX9 heavy features running. But if you try to enable them on a 9700 Pro it will not run well at all. I actually haven't tested Oblivion at the lowest quality so I don't know if it can be playable on a 9700 Pro, but if it is, it wouldn't even be the same game (visually). Reply
DerekWilson - Saturday, July 07, 2007 - linkBTW, BF2 was released less than 3 years after the 9700 Pro ... (aug 02 to june 05) ... Reply
Aberforth - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkFine...
Just want to know why a DX10 game called Crysis was running at 2048x1536 res with 60+ FPS equipped with Geforce 8800 GTX.
crysis-online.com/?id=172 Reply
titan7 - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - linkCoH also got 59.9fps on the GTX Ultra. Today's d3d10 games can run at full frame rates on today's hardware. Just ensure you're using the latest drivers and you have the most expensive card money can buy ;) Reply
BigDDesign - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI'm with Derek here. I liked your article. We need much more powerful hardware and time for DX10, Drivers, Developers & Vista to get it together. A couple of years from now, all should be good with DX10. Not any sooner methinks. Reply
WaltC - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkThis article, I thought, was extremely poor for several reasons:
(1) DX10 in terms of developer support presently is just about exactly where DX9 was when Microsoft first released it. At the time, people were swearing up & down that DX8.1 was "great" and wondering what all of the fuss about DX9 really meant. Then we saw the protracted "shader model wars" in which nVidia kept defending pre-SM2.0 modes while ATi's 9700 Pro pushed nVidia all the way back to the drawing boards, as its SM2.0 support, specific to DX9, created both image quality and performance that it took nVidia a couple of years to catch.
AnandTech did indeed mention almost in passing that DX10 was still early yet, and that much would undoubtedly improve dramatically in the coming months, but I think that unfortunately AT created the impression that DX10 and DX9 were exactly *alike* except for the fact that DX10 framerates were about half as fast on average as DX9 framerates. A cardinal sin of omission, no doubt about it, because...
(2) DX10 is primarily if not exclusively about improvements in Image Quality. It is *not* about maintaining DX9-levels of IQ while outperforming DX9. It is about creating DX10 levels of Image Quality--period. AnandTech does not seem to understand this at all.
(3)First lesson in Image Quality analysis that even newbies can readily understand is this: if the performance is not where you want it, but the IQ is where you want it, then you do the following to improve performance *without* sacrificing Image Quality (This is a lesson that AnandTech truly seems to have completely forgotten):
Instead of talking about how sorry the performance was in DX10 titles (those very few early attempts that AT looked at), AT should have seen what AT could have done to increase performance while maintaining DX10-levels of Image Quality. That is, AT should have *lowered* test resolutions and raised the level of FSAA employed to get the best balance of Image quality and performance. AnandTech did not even try to do this--which in my view is inexcusable and fairly unforgivable. It is a very bad mistake. I'm sorry--but many, many people, including me, do not use 1280x1024 *exclusively* while playing 3d games. My DX9 resolution of choice is 1152x864, for instance.
The point to be made about DX10 is *not* frame rates locked in at 1280x1024. Sorry AT--you really screwed the pooch on this one. The whole point of DX10 is *better image quality* which everyone who ever graduated from the 3d-school-of-hard-knocks is *supposed* to know!
So, just what does a bunch of *bar charts* detailing absolutely nothing except frame rates tell us about DX10? Not much, if anything at all. Gee, it does tell us that with the reduced image quality that DX9 is capable of providing contrasted with DX10, that DX9 runs faster in terms of frames per second on DX10 hardware! Gosh, who might ever have guessed....<sarcasm>
IMO, the fact that DX10 software even early on is running slower than DX9 on DX10-compliant hardware tells *me* nothing except that DX10 is demanding a lot more work out of the hardware than DX9, which means that we can expect the Image Quality of DX10 to be much better than DX9. These early games that AT tested with are merely the tip of the iceburg of what is to come. AnandTech really blew this one.
Jeff7181 - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link"DX10 is *not* frame rates locked in at 1280x1024"
Too bad you didn't say this earlier in your rant, I could have saved myself a few minutes and stopped reading sooner.
Thanks for the laugh though... imagine... someone who thinks 1280x1024 is a frame rate telling AnandTech they screwed the pooch when publishing this article. LOL Reply
titan7 - Thursday, July 12, 2007 - linkThis article was awesome. Too bad reality doesn't match your expectations or you'd like it too.
1) You have no idea what the "shader war" was about. There isn't even a single parallel to be drawn if you *correctly* look back.
2) d3d10 is nothing about image quality. No hardware on the market or rumoured to be coming out next generation can handle running a full length SM2.0b shaders! And forget about even 3.0! Or even 2.0a that the GeForceFX supported for that matter. d3d10 is about one thing-making d3d on the PC more like a console. That means lower CPU (not GPU!) overhead (more performance in CPU limited situations) and making lives easier for developers.
3) AT has CoH at 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, and 1920x1200 (common native LCD resolutions). These days everybody has bigger monitors and playing below 1024x768 is pretty rare. You can extrapolate your 1152x864 resolution from that.
What this shows us is if you increase the image quality (see the screen shots) today's cards don't have enough power to run at full frame rate, with the exception of the 8800 GTX Ultra. AT did a great job showing the world that with simple bar graphs and everything. It's too bad you were too angry to realize that is all it was trying to show. Reply
strikeback03 - Friday, July 06, 2007 - linkumm, they tested Company of Heroes and Call of Juarez at 1024x768, and Lost Planet at 800x600, and some of the cheaper cards could still not maintain playable frame rates. How low on the resolution do you want them to go? Reply
jay401 - Friday, July 06, 2007 - linkI'm not sure how raising FSAA is going to improve performance?
Nor how removing DX10 visuals but lowering screen res will "maintain DX10 level of visuals" either? Reply
anandtech02148 - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkExcellent sincere analysis of the current hardwares situation. Which lead me to some after thoughts,
- Maybe a 600buxs PS3 isn't so bad after all.
-What am i going to do with this 8800gtx and the lack of pc games, quite dry season compare to consoles.
-For those of you who hold out longer than I have, a 8800gts or 2900xt is a decent investment if you have a 1920x1200 monitor to go with it.
kilkennycat - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - link... if you presently have a DX9 system with acceptable performance. Until the NEXT generation of DX10 hardware is released.
Anybody who goes out and buys a current Dx10 card ( or even worse, dual cards ) just because "the Dx10 games are coming" ( and "I want bragging-rights") has a lot more money than sense. Buying a 8600 or 2600 for acceptable HD-decoding in your HTPC (or your mid-range PC with a weak CPU) is the only purchasing action with the current Dx10 offerings that makes total sense. All of the upcoming Dx10-capable game-titles for 2007 will have excellent Dx9/SM3 graphics. The lack of Dx10 hardware will smother "bragging-rights" but will have zero effect on playability.
nVidia has been developing the successor family to the G80-series GPU for almost a year now and the first graphics cards from this new generation are expected by the end of 2007. I would not be at all surprised if the first card out of the chute in the new family will immediately fill the cost-space between 8600GTX and 8800GTS, but with DX9 and Dx10 performance far superior to the 8800GTS. No doubt the GPU will also be 65nm, since the manufacturing/yield cost of the huge 80nm G80 die is the immovable stumbling-block to dropping the price of the 8800GTS. Reply
KeithTalent - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkThat's fine if you game at resolutions below 1680x1050, but some of us game at higher resolutions, and most high-end DX9 cards were struggling mightily to play the latest DX9 games (Oblivion, Supreme Commander, STALKER, etc...).
These new generation cards are not only about DX10, they are also about improved performance (exponentially improved performance actually) over that last generation, and some of us actually need that power.
What you said is all well and good for you if you are still gaming at 800x600 or whatever, but I like my resolution a little higher thank you very much.
KT Reply
misaki - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkSo Nvidia and AMD actually complained about their "mainstream" parts being below par?
It sounds to me like they are seriously out of touch. Media center PCs will get their 8400 and 2400 cards for h264 acceleration. Gamers with lots of money will buy those $400+ cards as usual. But your average gamer in the $200 market is stuck with junk that is unplayable for dx10 games and performs like previous gen hardware that just barely makes the grade for current games already on the market.
What is so hard to understand? Reply
MadBoris - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI'm glad that some of the things that were said in the article, are starting to be said. DX10 reminds me of Physx, great concept but can't possibly succeed due to certain hurdles in the technology being able to actually take off. Unfortunately DX10 also isn't going to be what we all hoped it would be in real performance, video drivers are not the only reason.
There is something real counterintuitive with quality native DX10 rendering support.
There is very little incentive for a developer to produce a good DX10 renderer when developers have DX9 support on Vista along with many of their real current goals of console support for more customer base. With only so many hours a day, console support is much more lucrative with new people having access to buying a title, that will also actually run just fine with only DX9 on a Vista platform, never needing or really benefitting from DX10.
The costs of making DX10 games outweigh the benefits, and the benefits aren't currently that palpable in the first place. Furthermore, actual DX10 performance will rarely ever be all that positive, something that is too early to prove, but rather negative even though apples to apples DX9 to DX10 comparisons cannot be made.
As to the low end parts, it's just marketing, theirs no "real" value DX10 for $100 -$150 for gaming. If people want a good video value purchase for games, $200 is where the good quality/price starts and it's mostly in a previous generation, not some value card for $150. Whether we agree with that price point being 'worth it' is another matter altogether and is purely personal preference. I don't know why Nvidia or ATI even introduced low end DX10 compatible hardware when customers will only get angry at developers or video mfr's for the blunder of underpowered hardware for high end game titles. This low end DX10 hardware mystified me. it was either going to slow down DX10 progress or have to be ignored. It seems obvious that all high end games will have to pretty much ignore the low end parts for achieving acceptable framerates with DX10 for new eye candy titles. They should have left DX10 out entirely in low end, but they had to include it because of competition between AMD/Nvidia, neither wanted to leave the other with a marketing advantage of saying, look we have DX10. DX10 with it's lofty goals of being able to render more in a scene and produce even greater quality eyecandy is at odds with low price. Higher quality rendering will always be at odds with low price, they are mutually exclusive. Low price never is going to give you good performance and quality, people should really start being realistic as to what they are paying for at a $100 - $150 price point, it's a consumer expectations problem. Low end hardware will work fine for games like Sims and those games will target low end hardware, but not high end games for higher resolutions and decent frame rates.
In the end, with future goggles on I think the picture is becoming quite clear that DX10 will become one of the DX API's that becomes mainly skipped (if a decent DX successor becomes available in next few years). The only time it will really make sense to go above DX9 native support is when Vista saturates >%85 gaming market share. In the several years that that will take, DX11 or higher should be available and will be superior to DX10, so DX10 in hindsight will really end up being just a marketing ploy to upgrade to Vista, little more.
Glad the mask is starting to come off and more people are being able to see the picture clearer that making any purchases around DX10 with a GPU or OS is silly and bound to cause frustration. Reply
strafejumper - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linki upgraded recently - but ended up only spending under $300 for a core2duo system
this is why - people were saying get a DX10 card - future proof
i decided to keep my old agp card because i felt real dx10 games and real dx10 hardware were not here yet.
i'm happy i made i feel the right choice and didn't spend money on new psu, sata drives etc. so i could have a $$$ dx10 card only to play call of juarez at 14 fps. Reply
stromgald - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI have to agree. I was considering trying to get an 8600 for my SFF PC, but after looking at this, I'm probably going to hold off until the next generation. HTPC and SFF PCs just can't handle the heat an 8800 series generates, and I want at least playable DX10 performance. Reply
jay401 - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - link
Both NVIDIA and AMD were very upset over how little we thought of their DX10 class mainstream hardware. They both argued that graphics cards are no longer just about 3D, and additional video decode hardware and DX10 support add a lot of value above the previous generation. We certainly don't see it this way. Yes, we can't expect last years high-end performance to trickle down to the low-end segment, but we should at least demand that this generation's $150 part will always outperform last generation's.
Seriously, F them. It's pathetic they're trying to pawn off half-assed hardware as "mid-range enthusiast" parts when they can't even perform as good as the mid-range from the previous generation. Jerks. Reply
jay401 - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkAnother new article showing how DX10 Vista performance propaganda is garbage.
Gotta love people who try to act superior b/c they bought Vista for gaming when all it does is suck up more system resources and uses DX10, the combination of which will easily inhibit performance on equivalent hardware. Reply
BigLan - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - link"They both argued that graphics cards are no longer just about 3D, and additional video decode hardware and DX10 support add a lot of value above the previous generation."
Yeah, I don't buy into this either. I've pretty much given up on 'video decode,' be it avivo or purevideo. You end up stuck with using a specific product, rather than ati or nvidia opening the features for any developer to access. Right now, it's only useful with the latest windvd, powerdvd or nero but you have to hope your driver version is the right one, and doesn't (and probably never will) work for x264 or xvid content.
Purevideo is horribly branded by nvidia - is it card features that everyone has access to, or do you have to buy it from them? And has ati actually released their avivo video converter to the public? Could I use it to compress some of my recorded tv shows from mpeg to xvid?
Maybe this is like the mpeg2 decoder situation was in 98/99, in which case we should just wait for cpu speeds to increase and mean that we don't need video decode acceleration. Reply
titan7 - Thursday, July 12, 2007 - linkI agree. How much quicker would things be if all the video transistors were spent on more shader processors? I want my video card for video games. I want my dvd player for movies. Reply
vailr - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkComparing mid-range DX10 cards:
(lowest prices found via froogle.com; shipping not included)
Radeon 2600XT 256Mb ~$145
nVidia 8600GT 256Mb ~$100 (after $15 MIR)
How is the 2600XT worth the added $45 v. the 8600GT? Reply
Comdrpopnfresh - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI have a 7600gt oc'd to 635/800. I get 30+fps with better than default settings, with AAx2 set @ 1024x768. Why do these cards not seem to do much better (given they are @ 1280x1024)? Reply
SniperWulf - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI would have been nice if you guys could have included numbers with the latest publicly available drivers (beta or not) from ATI and NV, just to get an idea of what type of performance we can expect in the future Reply
DerekWilson - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkActually, the beta drivers will give you a better idea of what to expect than the current WHQL drivers, which is why we used them. Reply
TA152H - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkFirst of all, the whole name of the article is a poor choice of words. DX10 is pretty, but it's not fast. At least I think that was your point.
Next, the choice of processors is too limited. I don't know where you guys get your sales figures from, but Intel's extreme processors aren't their best sellers. Since part of the point of these processors is to do work in the video card in DX10 that was done in the CPU before, you might want another data point with a relatively inexpensive processor and see how DX9 relates to DX10.
Saying there will not be ANY DX10 only games for the next two years is strange. You will have an installed base to overcome, but for gamers it's not so important because they upgrade often, and some of the games don't design for old hardware anyway. Aren't there some games now that weren't made to play on hardware two years ago well? I would guess someone will decide well before then that designing for obsolete software isn't worth the effort and cost, and will ignore the installed base to create a better product that will take less time and cost less. Going only slightly, if you had an exceptionally good DX10 game, there would be enough people to make it profitable if you were the only one that did it. You always have the dorks that like using words like "eye-candy" (which probably means they have insufficient testosterone in their bloodstream) that will go out and buy whatever is prettiest. No DX9 means no wasted developers, means faster development for DX10, and less cost. So, before two years, it's entirely plausible that someone making a cutting edge game will decide it's not worth the effort, or cost, of supporting an obsolete software base.
OK, those charts are horrible. Put a little effort in them, instead of letting everyone know they are an afterthought that you hate doing. The whole purpose of charts is to disseminate information quickly and intuitive, your charts totally fail at this. Top chart, you have the ambiguous "% change from DX9 performance". Now most people, just viewing the chart, would assume something to the right is an enhancement. But, no! Everything is less. The next chart uses the same words, but this time green denotes a gain in performance. Yes, blue is typically what people associate with negatives, green with positives. Ever hear of "in the red", or "in the black"? I have. Most people have. Red for negatives, and black for positives would have been a little more understandable if you simply refuse to put in a guide.
Next you have "perf drop with xxx", which is what the first chart should have read, but you didn't want to go back and fix it. Even then, red would have been a better color for a negative, it's more intuitive and that's what charts are about.
Last, maybe Nvidia and AMD are right, that features are important. I was saying this earlier, and you're comparing apples and oranges when you say performance went down. Did DX10 performance go down? No. So, broadly, performance did not. DX10 performance didn't even exist, nor did some of the other features. I'm not saying everyone should buy these cards at all, they should measure what they need, and certainly some of the older cards with their obsolete feature set are fine for many, many people. At least today. But, by the same token, someone running Vista is probably going to want DX10 hardware, and they may not have massive amounts of money either to spend on it. So, the low end cards make sense too. Someone wanting the best possible visual experience WILL buy a DX10 card, and an expensive one. They have reasons for existing, they aren't broadly failures, but I think what irritates you is they aren't broadly successful either, like previous generations are and you are used to. It's understandable, but I think you're taking this so far you aren't seeing the value in them either. Obviously, since everyone has disappointed you in DX10 performance (Intel, Nvidia and AMD), shouldn't it show it's not an easy implementation, and that maybe they aren't all screwing up? If you give an exam and everyone gets a 10, maybe you need to look at the nature of the grading or test. Reply
NT78stonewobble - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI think the point regarding the low end dx 10 hardware was the following.
" Performance is so low that you will in reality not be able to use DX 10. "
So everyone that cannot afford the high end DX 10 would be better off with a dx 9 card that will be cheaper and performing the same (or maybe even better).
TA152H - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkNot true, the only software that runs DX10 will not be super demanding video games. And you will not be forced to run them at very high settings. For gaming, yes, but that's not the whole thing. Reply
DerekWilson - Friday, July 06, 2007 - linkin these cases, dx10 wouldn't necessarily be a better fit than dx9 -- or (more probably) opengl ... Reply
Martimus - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkWhile you got voted down because your comment was set in an attacking tone, I felt that the comment was very well written and that you had some very valid points. As for the charts, I thought that those were performance increases until I read your comment. I doubt most casual readers will take the time to understand the counterintuitive charts. The charts are what most people look at, so they are really the most important part of the article to get right. Maybe the author will learn from this article and do a better job on the charts in the future. Reply
TA152H - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkYou know, when I see people like him writing things without thinking like that, it really irritates me, because it's so uninformed, so I get angry. I wish I didn't react like that, but let who is without sin cast the first stone. I guess it's better than being passionless. I really don't mind negative votes, I'd be more worried if I got positive ones.
The charts really got under my skin, because he made no effort. It's just half-ass garbage. When you consider how many people read them, it's unsupportable. If I did work like that, I'd be ashamed.
Instead of taking a step back and saying, well, all the DX10 hardware hasn't been what we expected, maybe there is a reason for it, they quickly damn every company that makes it. It's got to be comparitive, because obviously these authors really don't know anything about designing GPUs (nor do I for that matter, so I'm not saying it to be vicious). But, when Intel, AMD and Nvidia all have disappointing DX9 performance with their DX10 cards, and DX10 performance broadly isn't great (although it seems better unless you add features), then maybe you should take a step back and say "Hmmmm, maybe we need to adjust our expectations".
It's kind of funny, because they do this with microprocessors already, because there was a fundemental change that made everyone reevaluate it. The Core 2 would be a complete piece of crap if you judged it by the 1980s and 1990s standard. It was, by those standards, an extremely small improvement over the P7 core, and even worse over the Yonah. But, the way processors are graded are different now, because our expectations were lowered somewhat by the P6 (it was a great processor, but again, it wasn't as good as the P5 was over the P4, or the P4 over the P3), and greatly by the K7 and P7. So, maybe GPUs are hitting that point in maturity where the incredible improvements in performance are a thing of the past, and the pace will slow down. Now, someone will correctly say, well, DX9 performance has decreased in some cases. Well, that's fine, but we also have a precedence in the processor world. Let's go back to the P6. It ran the majority of existing code (Real Mode) WORSE than the P5, because it was designed for 386 protected mode and didn't care much about Real mode. Or how about the 386? It wasn't any better on 16-bit code in terms of performance (it did at the virtual 86 mode though, but it wasn't for performance), but added two new modes the most important of which was (although not at the time) was 386 protected.
Articles like this irritate me because they are so simplistic and have so little thought put in them. They lack perspective. Reply
titan7 - Thursday, July 12, 2007 - linkHere's a bit of info on the cards. Back in the d3d8 era Matrox introduces the first 256bit memory bus for their cards with the Parhelia. All things equal that provides twice the speed of a 128bit bus, but is more expensive to manufacture.
nvidia and ATI still had 128bit buses at the time, but for their high end d3d9 cards (Radeon 9700 and GeForceFX 5900) switched to 256 bit buses because 128 just couldn't keep up.
We're four generations ahead now and both IHVs have used 128bit buses for their mid range d3d10 cards, even though 128bits was becoming bottle neck during the d3d8 era five generations ago!
This article was right on the money, nvidia focused on making their 8600 pin compatible with their old mid range 6600 card which is now three generations old! Intel didn't even leave their p4 compatible with itself! Yay, nvidia allowed Asus, etc to save on R&D costs. Too bad it meant customers have a handy capped chip. This article called them on it.
256bit, 512megabytes is the standard for mid range d3d10. We need to wait a generation to get there. Reply
DerekWilson - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkFirst, the data presented in the graphs does make sense if you take a second to think about what it means.
It shows basically that under DX10 NVIDIA generally performs better relative to AMD than under DX9.
It also shows that under DX10 AMD handles AA better relative to NVIDIA than under DX9.
I will work on altering the graphs to show +/- 100% if people think that would present better. Honestly, I don't think it will be much easier to read with the exception that people tend to think higher is better.
But ... as for the rest of your post, I completely disagree.
When we step back and stop pushing AMD and NVIDIA to live up to specific expectations, we've stopped doing our job.
Justifying poor design choices by looking at the past is no way to advance the industry. A poor design choice is a poor design choice, no matter how you slice it. And it's the customer, not the industry of the company, who is qualified to decide whether or not something was a poor choice or not.
The fundamental problem with engineering is that you are building a device to fit within specific constraints. It is a very difficult job that consists of a great deal of cost/benefit analysis and hard choices. But the bottom line with any engineering project is that it must satisfy the customer's needs or it will not sell and it doesn't matter how much careful planning went into it.
It's when consumers (and hardware review sites who represent the consumers) stop demanding fundamental characteristics that absolutely must be present in the devices we purchase that we subject our selves to sub par hardware.
Having studied computer engineering, with a focus in microprocessor architecture and 3d graphics, I certainly do know a bit about designing GPUs. And, honestly, there are reasons that DX10 hardware hasn't been what people wanted. This is a first generation of hardware that supports a new API using a very new hardware model based on general purpose unified shaders. It was a lot to do in one generation, and no one is damning anyone else for it.
But that doesn't mean we have to pretend that we're happy about it. And our expectations have always been more subdued than that of the general public BTW. We've said for a while not to expect heavy DX10 dependent games for years. It's the same situation we saw with DX9.
And honestly, the problems we are seeing are similar to what we saw with the original GeForce FX -- only not as extreme. Especially because both NVIDIA and AMD do well in the thing they must do well at: DirectX 9 rendering.
Honestly, this supports what we've been saying all along: the most important factor in a 3d graphics purchase today is DirectX 9 performance. Reply
jay401 - Friday, July 06, 2007 - linkThey're right though, the charts need work. They are not intuitive and there are multiple better ways to present 'percent change' data that would make sense on first glance without the reader having to decipher an unintuitive method that is contrary to the readability of the article. Reply
DerekWilson - Friday, July 06, 2007 - linkThe dx9 vs dx10 scaling graphs have been altered to present the data in a different way.
Please let me know if this is still not adequate. Reply
Andyvan - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI had the exact same reaction to the charts. For the Lost Planet chart with the two colors, either pick better (more standard) colors, or make the performance drop bars grow to the left (or down), and the performance increase bars grow to the right (or up).
-- Andyvan Reply
PrinceGaz - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkThe best thing to do with those charts is change them to show relative performance in DX10 compared to DX9, with 100% meaning no change (same performance in DX10 as DX9). Improvements with DX10 give scores above 100%, reduced performance gives a result below 100%.
Doing that would make the graphs much easier to understand than the current mess. Reply
sterlinglittle - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkThis might be a silly question as I can't recall the current status of MultiGPU performance with Vista drivers. Will it be possible to test these games with SLI/CrossFire configurations soon? Reply
gigahertz20 - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkThe results show exactly why I am waiting to buy a DX10 video card, all these people who rushed out to buy a Geforce 8800GTX or AMD 2900XT..hah..especially all those 2900XT fanboys who said the R600 would destroy the 8800GTX in DX10 benchmarks because it has 320 stream processors and a 512-bit memory interface....well guess what, the benchmarks are in and they show the R600 is still the power hunry POS video card it is. Reply
KeithTalent - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI'm not sure how it is a 'hah' to the people that purchased these cards as they still blow everything else out of the water in DX9, I mean it is not even close.
So for those of us running at higher resolutions (1920x1200 or higher), an 8800/2900 or two made perfect sense (and still does). I doubt very many people were expecting great DX10 performance right away anyway, particularly as the games available barely make use of it.
KT Reply
Sceptor - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI agree with your idea, I've always skipped over one generation of hardware to another.
Especially when users are still "testing" Vista gaming for Microsoft, Nvidia and AMD I see no need to part with my money until performance is at least on par with DX9.
Good article...Nice to see some real numbers on DX10 vs DX9 Reply
DerekWilson - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkthere are applications where the 2900 xt does outperform its competition, as is shown by call of juarez.
it really depends on how developers go forward. we'll have to wait and see what happens. judging the future of AMD/NVIDIA competition under dx10 isn't really feasible with only 3 apps to go by.
one thing's for sure though, we'd love to see better performance out of the mainstream parts from both camps. And having some parts to fill in the gap between the lower and higher end hardware would be nice too. Reply
defter - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkI think the point here is that many claimed that "R6xx is designed for DX10, don't judge it based on DX9 performance blah blah blah". Those claims gave the impression, that relative DX10 performance of R6xx series will be much better than their DX9 performance.
Your tests show that on average, R6xx takes a HIGHER performance hit from moving to DX10. Thus, under DX10 R6xx is even SLOWER than it was under DX9. Reply
DerekWilson - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkthis is true -- our current information shows that AMD does relatively worse than NVIDIA when compared under DX10 than under DX9. Reply
rADo2 - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - link"there are applications where the 2900 xt does outperform its competition" - where? 2900XT has 22FPS, 8800GTX 24FPS nad 8800ULTRA 26FPS. Despite "crippled for NVIDIA" / "paid by ATI" I see still green camp to outperform ATI.
And in Lost Planet NVIDIA has 2x (!) better performance.
It is not even worth considering ATI for purchase. Reply
smitty3268 - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkRead the comment again: The point is that the 2900XT does not compete against the 8800GTX, it competes against the 8800GTS, which it did outperform in that test.
It certainly isn't the fastest card available, but I could also make a statement like "The GeForce7300Go outperforms it's competition" without saying it's the fastest thing available. I'm just saying it beats the cards in a similar price range. Reply
KeithTalent - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkUm, what about price? Last time I checked the 8800GTX still costs about $150 more than the 2900XT. I will not even bring up the Ultra which is still way overpriced.
So for $150 less you get a card that competes with the GTX some of the time and is more than capable of playing most games maxed out at high resolution. That is why the 2900XT is worth considering for purchase.
rADo2 - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkProblem is, 2900XT is many times NOT playable. Its performance is sometimes close to NVIDIA, sometimes 2x lower. And this applies for both DX9 and DX10. With 60+ games I own, I can assume ATI would "suck" on 30 of them.
Look at Lost Planet with AA, 22FPS versus 40-50FPS is a huge difference in playability. On 8800GTX/ULTRA you can play even at 1920x1200 (30FPS), with 2900XT even 1280x1024 is giving you problems. Reply
KeithTalent - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkWell I have two of them and they work more than fine on every single game I have tried so far, including demos, betas, and a couple of older games (using Catalyst 7.6).
Lost Planet is a POS port anyway, but when I ran the test benchmark in DX9 with Crossfired 2900XTs I had frames well above 40 with everything maxed at 1920x1200 so I am somewhat confused by the numbers here. I will have to wait until I am home to see my exact numbers, but they were much higher than what was presented here. Maybe there is something wonky with the beta drivers?
I'll post back tonight once I have verified my numbers.
DerekWilson - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkWe didn't use the demo benchmark, and the release version (afaik) does not include an updated version of the benchmark either.
For the Lost Planet test, we had to use FRAPS running through the snow. This will absolutely give lower performance, as the benchmark runs through a couple in door scenes as well with higher framerates.
I mentioned FRAPS on the test page, but I'll add to the Lost Planet section the method we used for testing. Reply
defter - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkDo Intel CPUs outperform currently AMD or not? After all, $200 AMD CPU is about as fast as $200 Intel CPU....
It's natural that slower parts have good price/peformance ratio compared to competition since otherwise nobody would buy them. However, this has nothing to do which one fastest...
KeithTalent - Thursday, July 05, 2007 - linkNot sure what you are getting at, I was responding to this ridiculous statement:
It is not even worth considering ATI for purchase.
Which is completely untrue, because price can be a big consideration.
With respect to CPUs, if you spend an extra $50 - $100 for the better Intel processor, you are getting exponentially better performance (I know this from experience), while if you spend $150 more for a GTX, you are getting only marginally better performance.
KT Reply


text:
Mix enamel powder with decal medium (oil based)
Screen the decal, wait for it to dry.
Apply the covercoat, wait for that to dry.
Apply the decal to the ware, wait for that to dry for twenty four hours.
Fire in the kiln on low for about three hours with the lid cracked, allowing the organic material in the decal to burn off- the decal turns black and eventually goes clear.
Once the images are clear again, close the lid and fire until cone 017 is reached.
Does anyone have experience screening their own decals successfully? I do need to work with food-safe products because my designs contain images that go on the bottom insides of the mug as well.