Human_Being

That depends on how much money you have and how much you value your sanity and hearing. In operation, reviewers describe the sound coming from dual-chip boards as "uncomfortable". If you've got the money to watercool the board or are someone who never plays without headphones on, that could be different.

Thing is though, ATI is now the official graphics partner for Paragon Studios, rather than Nvidia. The only hesitance I have in recommending someone go with an ATI board is that we don't yet have confirmation that the regular graphics engine (the standard one, not the Ultra Mode) will have the ATI-bugs in it fixed with GR.

If those remain in the regular version, you have the possibility of someone "upgrading" to an ATI board on a budget and chancing to put themselves just below what they personally consider playable for Ultra Mode and stuck with ATI graphical oddities in regular mode.

If you have the money to spend on a GTX 295 you're shopping for something in the class well above that grey area. I'd go with a Radeon HD 5850 or 5870, depending on your preference.

As to waiting, the most reliable estimates I've seen of Fermi/G300 hitting actual market shelves is April/May of 2010. Assuming Fermi turns out to be a competent offering, then ATI boards might drop a bit in price. I don't see a reason for them to do so any earlier than that.

You've got PhysX (assuming the drivers and software engine are installed, which they should be), it's just running off of the CPU instead of offloaded to the Graphics Card.

I don't know that a PPU would actually gain you anything either; at least not without some fiddling. When Nvidia disabled their drivers to prevent people from using an Nvidia card for dedicated PhysX while an ATI card is being used as main GPU, they also disabled legacy Ageia PPU PCI support. The inference being: "buy one of our new cards, fanboy!"

Have I mentioned I think this is a counterproductive business strategy they are following?

Yes, that was me. I'm not quite ready to order a funerary floral arrangement for Nvidia, but they are in a very nasty position.


Financially, Nvidia actually isn't in too bad a shape. According to the most recent numbers I saw, the company had a few hundred million in debt and a billion or two cash-on-hand. So Nvidia isn't in danger of immediate monetary collapse. It's problem, is that the outlook for any new sources of revenue is increasingly bleak.

Ironically (and I love ironies) ATI and Nvidia essentially have mirror-image predicaments. ATI is carrying about $5 billion (with a "B") of debt. They are very deeply in the hole. However, they have a winning solution on the Graphics Card market right now and AMD recently settled all their lawsuits with Intel for a $1.25 billion payout (and a promise to "play nice" from now on). The same agreement also allows AMD to sell its 30% stake in Global Foundries microchip manufacturing. Liabilities from Global Foundries caused AMD to take a loss rather than turning a profit last year. So they should lose the most draining portion of their business while gaining several billion dollars in cash. That cash on hand isn't important for getting rid of their debt, but because they will have their own funding (without searching for more credit) to research and develop new microchips. The R&D + manufacturing workup for a new chip can easily cost several billion dollars.

And that multi-billion dollar price tag is what may ruin Nvidia.

As I said earlier, Nvidia has basically had two core products over the last years: the G92 and the G200. Their other recent chips have derived from the architectures and research of these two.

The G92 was quite successful when it debuted, and Nvidia decided to elaborate the design into something larger during development of G200. The thinking was that ATI would fill its "traditional role" and produce something that was decent-and-low-priced-but-never-high-performance. If Nvidia built something impressively large, they would certainly dominate the high-end market.


Unfortunately ATI surprised and outflanked them badly with their 4xxx series of cards late last year. To begin with, the 4xxxs were much more powerful than Nvidia had expected. Compounding that strength was the fact that ATI had jumped to a 55 nm manufacturing process for the chips, rather than Nvidia's 65 nm resolution; the chips were smaller and cheaper per batch of silicon. Furthermore, ATI opted for "more expensive" and twice-as-fast GDDR5 memory instead of Nvidia's GDDR3...but with half the memory controllers Nvidia was using. The price for memory controllers turned out to be the greater factor and that made ATI's boards cheaper to construct. With half the memory components to power and a smaller chip, the boards needed less power-regulatory elements as well. The final result was products that could equal or outpace the equivalent Nvidia board at 20-50% lower price.

Nvidia scrambled to transfer to 55 nm process (GTX 280 -> GTX 285, etc), but they were still stuck with a larger chip than ATI was working with. Physical production costs per unit were simply higher for Nvidia. So their potential profit per board at each performance price-point was lower. ATI took full advantage of this and dragged prices down to the point where Nvidia essentially had to "pay people" to take their cards; selling them at a loss.

Buying market share that way is okay for a while; so long as you can transfer to a new product. That new product was supposed to be the G300 chip (aka "Fermi"). But Fermi was supposed to arrive this Fall. It is now delayed until at least late-spring/early-summer. A year and a half of selling their products for less than the price they get them from the factory at is *not* okay. So rather than continue to throw good money after bad with the commercially-failed G200 line, they are shutting it down and leaving the high end graphics market to ATI for now.


So what else does Nvidia have to survive on? je_saist already went over the problems with Nvidia's future as an integrated/mobile graphics chip provider. I'd add that laptop manufaturers may actually be *looking* for an opportunity to wash their hands of Nvidia due to a series of faulty chips Nvidia had been selling them up to August of last year.

The "new" thing that Nvidia is trying to do is make money from the academic "Compute" market. If you have some sort of massive computational task that requires a supercomputer, it's more efficient to have a number of small, specialized processors rather than a few generalized ones. Well, that's exactly what a modern GPU is. Following the logic of this, Nvidia recently started shopping their graphics cards around to universities and research institutes. Nvidia sees this as a huge and untapped market of applications. However, the idea is just beginning to move around and these are not the kinds of customers who make snap buying decisions or decide to be "early-adopters". Compute application sales were a tiny fraction of Nvidia's revenues last year.

Nvidia does make the graphics core of the Sony PS3, but ATI turns out to supply the graphics in the Xbox 360.

Nvidia basically has no product that it can rely on for a solid revenue stream in the coming year. The G92 and its derivatives have been a tremendous workhorse, but they're really showing their age now. The G200 essentially resulted in Nvidia flushing their billion dollar research costs down the toilet; its a dead end. Nvidia needs a new flagship product to maintain their business. And that brings us back to the G300/Fermi.


In response to the shockingly effective ATI 4xxxs, Nvidia decided to bring as much firepower as they could to bear on the next generational competition with its rival. Furthermore, they couldn't get caught with an older manufacturing process than ATI either. They also decided that they needed to incorporate capabilities for robust double precision calculation and memory error correction to accommodate academic Compute customers.

The G200 was massive. The G300 is monstrous. Fermi consists of 3 billion (yes, with a "B") transistors in a die that is larger than 500 mm^2. The ATI "Cypress" chip in the 5xxxs consists of only 2 billion transistors in a 334 mm^2 die. Remember what I said about the ATI 4xxxs costing less to produce than the G200s? Nvidia is once again in the exact....same....situation. Nvidia needs to unveil a G300 chip that turns out to eat Global Warming and poop unicorns. The only way Fermi will be able to compete with Cypress and recoup its development costs is if it completely blows the ATI chip out of the water in performance.


And that's where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's bungling becomes important... The new 40 nm resolution manufacturing process that both Nvidia and ATI are using from TSMC has turned out to be more problematic than advertised. ATI was getting very low yields of functional chips per batch of silicon. Fermi, being half-again more complex than Cypress, is even more vulnerable to random fatal defects. Reports were that the original test production runs resulted in 1.7% functional chips. Those that functioned turned out to do so at much lower clock rates than expected. If you have a chip with massive capabilities that works at a relatively low frequency, it may not outperform a less elaborate chip that can run faster...


Nvidia is in better shape than ATI to take a(nother) financial hit. The question is what, if anything, the company will be able to do *afterwards*?

So yeah, Nvidia? Deep trouble.

A GTS 240, depending on manufacturer's modifications, might work around the 9800 GT "entry" mark. However, the GTS 240 (and 220 and 210/310) does not support SLI. Unlike the 9x00s, there is no way to combine two of them for potentially greater performance.

"Maybe." It depends on a lot of things we don't have information on. Under ideal circumstances, an SLI-ed pair of 9800 GTXs should actually outstrip a single GTX 275. The operative phrase there is "ideal circumstances". Not every game supports multi-GPU configurations (CoX currently doesn't). Those that do support multiple GPUs don't necessarily scale 1:1; you might get 1.3x the performance of a single card rather than 2x. Those that do support multiple GPUs also don't necessarily react to Nvidia SLI and ATI Crossfire format the same way.

Assuming Ultra Mode responds to SLI with 1:1 scaling, there are other factors to consider. I presume that you have an open PCIe 2.0 x16 slot on your motherboard to put the second card in, but does the board actually support SLI? The last generation of motherboards tended to license either Nvidia SLI or ATI Crossfire, but not both. Also, do you have the requisite additional 6-pin power connectors on your power supply to hook it up? If you've got the connectors, is your power supply rated high enough to support both cards, your quad core, and whatever else is in your system?

If the answer to all of that is "yes", then there still remains the problem of getting a "matching" card. I'm not sure how precisely you are naming the board, but you can't find "9800 GTX"s anymore. You can find 9800 GTX+s and GTS 250s. The 9800 GTX, 9800 GTX+, and GTS 250 are all using the same G92 chip, which originally debuted in late-model 8800s, with a progressively more impressive sounding label. However, each one is clocked a >little< bit higher than its predecessor. In order to match the new card to the older one, you might have to underclock it a bit (which you can do with EVGA's Precision program).

Potentially, this could be a cheap(er) upgrade. It's not necessarily trivial though.

Oh, those things were wretched. >_< It wasn't just XFX. I had a PCIe 1.0 6600 and it resulted in my very very first-est after-market component modification when I bought a Zalman VF700 cooler to make the hurting stop!

I've never trusted those little single-height fan-sink designs on any other card since then. Case In Point.

Wait, I just reread that... Okay, I expect you meant tax refunds, not that you were able to write off a gaming PC as a tax deduction, but that makes me think of one of my favorite Penny Arcade strips. (Warning: some language)

You can click the "News" link to read the story behind the strip.

A GTX 295 is two GTX 275-class chips stuck on the same board and slightly under-clocked in a desperate attempt to stay below 300 Watts TDP. It's how the two companies compete for the "fastest single graphics card in the world" title. Despite lackluster performance in the rest of the GTX 2xx line this year, the GTX 295 barely managed to hold onto the title against the ATI 4870 X2 (two 4870s built into the same package). However, they lost that standing just last week against the ATI 5970 (two 5870s on the same board and underclocked to 5850-speeds in a desperate attempt to stay under 300 Watts TDP =P).

These cards are the "best discrete cards in the world". They also are huge, run hot, and tend to make noise like a Basset Hound being sucked into a vacuum cleaner. (Of course, if you've got the money to buy one or more double-chip cards, you probably have the money to drop on a hefty water-cooling system).

I would note that I think there have been three revisions of the GTX 295, one of them being two distinct circuit boards with one chip each inside the cowling instead of two chips on one board. I'm not sure what the dissatisfaction with them was, but apparently not all GTX 295s are built the same.

................. Good to know .

They're different companies with different architectures and will both behave a little different in each situation. There are two significant things to note however.

Firstly, in current implementation of the game, ATI cards have a number of "graphic glitches" in CoX. (See Bill Z's aforementioned sticky thread in the Technical Issues and Bugs section.) We've had no official word if these are going to be remedied in Going Rogue. It is likely that Ultra Mode will not see these problems with ATI since they were demoing it on ATI boards and ATI is the official graphics partner. However, we can't know for certain if these oddities will go away entirely when Going Rogue is live, or if they will only disappear in Ultra Mode but remain in the standard version of the game.

Heck, for all we know, Nvidia cards might end up sporting "graphical oddities" in Ultra Mode =P.

For now though, be aware that there are quirks with using ATI in the current game.


Secondly, ATI does not support hardware-accelerated PhysX.

Wait, what does that mean? For CoX, pretty much nothing.

Ageia was purchased by Nvidia a while ago, and a proprietary physics engine got even more proprietary. All Nvidia cards of 8800 or newer vintage (except the "brand new" G210/G310 =P) will run the PhysX calculations on their GPU. If you *don't* have an Nvidia card, the PhysX gets done entirely by the CPU.

In CoX, that's not a huge burden. I've never heard of ATI users complaining of massive framerate drops when flying debris appears on their screen in-game. The PhysX calculations are light enough that the CPU can handle it as implemented; which makes sense considering the minimum hardware specifications Paragon wants to maintain. Given the processor you've suggested, you shouldn't even notice the "lack of hardware PhysX".

Where it might become important though, is in other games. There aren't very many that use PhysX, and even fewer that use them intensively. The only one I can think of, though it's definitely significant, is Batman: Arkham Asylum. The PhysX implementation in the game is very intense when set to "High". You can be using an ATI card in B:AA with PhysX effects turned on, zoom along at 60 frames per second, and as soon as you encounter volumetric smoke or flying sheets of folding paper, the PhysX will crush the frame rate until it passes. Even a high end Nvidia card will see a dip in frame rate under those circumstances.

Some people have taken to using a second Nvidia card in another motherboard slot as a Dedicated PhysX Processor; there's an option in the Nvidia driver control panel to implement that when there are two graphics cards present. They don't have to be the same card either. People have been taking low-end 9600 GTs or 9800 GTs, pairing them with GTX 260s, and seeing a boost in overall performance since neither the CPU nor Graphics processor have to deal with the PhysX stuff. The weaker, older cards are plenty enough to handle the specialized task.

Here's the kicker though: you can do the same thing with an ATI card as main GPU! In fact I've seen some reviews that say an ATI card outperforms the equivalent Nvidia one in B:AA while using a 9x00 GT as dedicated PhysX unit. You don't need an SLI or Crossfire motherboard (the two companies proprietary dual-card standards). You do have to be using either Win XP or Win 7 though; both have the required "Driver Test" mode wherein you can run two graphics drivers at the same time. Vista doesn't have this capability.

A little while ago, Nvidia caught on to this and disable dedicated PhysX operation in their drivers unless there was an Nvidia card in the other motherboard slot. Amongst the antics of an increasingly erratic company, I find this particularly asinine. Nvidia has essentially abandoned the high-end graphics card market and all they have to compete on are their lower-class boards. Those same boards are going to become even less competitive in Jan/Feb when the new ATI bargain cards arrive. If people are choosing ATI performance cards for quality, but could still pick up a cheap Nvidia card to run with it for specialized purposes, Nvidia might still make some money. But I'm not in marketing, so what do I know =P.

You can still do the different-cards trick if you use older (pre-190.xx I think) drivers. If you are using Win 7, there is also a homemade patch (predictably ) floating around that will let you use the newest Nvidia drivers while telling them "No no, that Radeon chip in the other PCIe slot is really a Geforce ! Really !"


Off the top of my head, those are the two things you need to know: as currently implemented, CoX has graphics quirks with ATI cards and a small handful of games (but not CoX) can see drastic performance fluxtuations with PhysX enabled in the absence of an Nvidia card.


I know ASUS makes solid motherboards, I don't know what their reputation in Graphics Cards is; though I would be surprised if it wasn't at least decent.

I do know that Sapphire is well respected for ATI cards. Sapphire is basically to ATI what EVGA is to Nvidia. Sapphire also has a good line of custom, non-reference-standard versions of the cards they sell, like the Vapor-X line with better cooling/quieter fan/slight overclocking.

Another good company is XFX. XFX is the never-quite-overtaking-them closest quality-competitor for EVGA in the Nvidia line. About a year ago though, they looked at Nvidia and went "these guys are nuts !" and started setting up to build ATI cards as well. From looking at newegg after following your links, I also noticed that XFX had (past tense) both ATI 5850s and 5870s available for a $60 premium today; apparently no other company had them stocked with Newegg for Black Friday. Definitely no flies on these guys.


I will refer you to Father Xmas' superior answer to that question.

That should be fine.

You might hold off on this purchase though, unless you want it Real Soon(TM). Positron said they don't have any data on the ATI 58xxs yet. Not surprising since no one can get one. On the review sites however, ATI 5850s were delivering equivalent-or-superior performance to the GTX 285 at a price point of $300; $115 less than the card you have there. The 5850 also runs cooler, quieter, and consuming less power than the GTX 285.

If the price point is no object, then you could also grab an ATI 5870 for the same money ($400-$420) and get something that flatly outstrips the GTX 285 head to head. Since the 5850 and 5870 use the same chip, the available dies are all going to the 5870 and it's a little easier to actually find a 5870 for sale.

Unless there's something bizarre about the implementation, I would expect the ATI cards to run at their maximum strength in CoX; as Bill Z pointed out to me, the ATI sticker has replaced the Nvidia one at the bottom of the CoH Homepage . We don't have empirical data that the 58xxs will perform that well with CoX, but as they are using 48xxs as a baseline, the 58xxs are a scale-up of similar architecture, and ATI is now the official graphics partner for CoX, it's quite likely to be so. Supposedly, new 58xxs are hurtling towards market as we speak and will appear magically on Dec 15th; just in time to be sold for Christmas. If they don't appear then, they'll certainly show up in January.

So if you want the card now, it would be easier to get a GTX 285. If you wait a bit, you could probably get the same performance for cheaper or better performance for the same price.


With all that said, EVGA is an excellent company. They're kind of the Cadillac of Nvidia board makers. If you decided to go with the Nvidia card, that's likely to be a quality one.

Where are you seeing this? i7 920s on Newegg are going for $280.

However, the i5 750 gives most of the performance of the i7 920, costs $200 currently, and will require much less money to give it a motherboard and RAM than an i7 920. That's also a possibility if you're working inside a strict budget.

Don't count on it!

The price of graphics cards is usually driven perpetually-downward by the back and forth between Nvidia and ATI. Right now though, that situation doesn't apply for either company.


Nvidia is in a very nasty developmental position right now. Their new G300 processor is delayed until at least late spring/early summer of next year; it was supposed to have debuted before the ATI 5xxx cards a few months ago. Early sample reports about their performance are not encouraging either.

Meanwhile, the company is bleeding money on the GTX 2xx series cards introduced around this time last year. The G200 processor is fairly huge, larger than the contemporary ATI processor of the 4xxxs, and is relatively expensive to produce because of that. But 4xxxs not only equal-or-out-performed the GTX 2xxs, they undercut them on total price as well. They had to reduce the prices on the GTX 2xxs to the point they were basically unprofitable in order to maintain their leading market-share. But Nvidia has a sales-guarantee with its card producers wherein Nvidia will pay the difference if the producer ends up having to sell their cards for less than Nvidia's reference MSRP. I've seen it described as Nvidia having to wrap each chip in a $20 bill for someone to be willing to take them out of the warehouse.

Now the 5xxxs have hit and Nvidia still doesn't have an equivalent offering. To prevent having to lose even *more* money from a price decrease in response to the flatly superior 5xxxs, Nvidia told its card producers that they were "having production difficulties" and started to taper off distribution of GTX 2xx chips. The GTX 2xxs have been made "artificially scarce" to keep their price up. Then Nvidia announced a few weeks ago that they were End Of Lifing the GTX 260, 275, and 285; what's in the production chain *right now* is all there will ever be of these cards.

So Nvidia has to keep prices of their current cards up while they struggle for a new product, have constructed a situation to make that happen, and are now stopping production of the cards entirely to staunch the bleeding.

So no, the price of Nvidia cards isn't likely to drop between now and next spring.


For ATI's part, they are currently dominating the market with superior products and do not have an equivalent competing product on the immediate horizon. However, they have a superior product...but there aren't any around to sell. The same company (Taiwan Semiconductor Manuf. Co.) that is fabricating Nvidia's G300 chips is also making ATI's 5xxxs with the same manufacturing technique...and it's suffering similar production problems. There are mid-range 57xx boards available, but there are virtually no 58xxs. Indeed, the price for the 5850s has gone UP $50 since they were released in September. There's rumor that supply will get better around Dec 15th, but we'll have to wait and see.

ATI has a free run at the market, with Nvidia sitting on its hands, and they can't take full advantage of it because of supply problems! Add in that ATI is carrying a large amount of structured debt they have to service and they have no reason to reduce prices, every reason to keep them up, and real logistical problems forcing them to keep it that way.

So no, ATI won't be dropping prices on their cards any time soon either. (They will however, be dropping low-range versions of their new cards on the market in the first quarter of next year.)

If you want a cheaper card, I recommend trying to catch a holiday sale of some sort.


As a related note, I'd like to mention that Nvidia has just announced release of a G310 card. Do not buy this thing thinking it is part of a new high-performance line and will be better than a 2xx card! The G310 is a re-named G210 (which was a piece of junk) that Nvidia hopes will sound attractive because "300" is higher than "200". It's the same thing they did with the GTS 250 actually being a renamed 9800 GTX+; still using an older G92 chip rather than one of the newer G200s despite the name. The more I learn about Nvidia's business practices, the less I like the company.

*Blink* *Blink* Er, does that mean your last name actually does refer to this? I kept telling myself that couldn't be it.

Actually, that sounds like what happens when a regular soldier gets recruited for the US Special Forces. Each branch of the US military has it's "own" Special Forces Unit(s) (Army Rangers, Marine Corp Force Recon, Navy SEALs, etc), but even though recruited within a single branch, they are all now under a separate, independant Command that answers to the Department of Defense (The Pentagon).

If you want a soldier that proved himself as a dynamic fighting man before being recruited into an elite organization and given strong, independant authority, I'd recommend: An enlisted soldier who was sent to Officer Training School after attaining the rank of Corporal, distinguished himself in battle with his men as a Lieutenant, and was promoted to Captain in recognition and showed he could handle responsibilities greater than single-unit sized. He took University courses while both a Lieutenant and Captain, earning a graduate degree in [insert here]. At which point he was cherry-picked by Special Operations Command for their new Special Biologics unit and given a courtesy promotion to Major with his new responsibilities.

He is now an Officer and a Fighting Man who is outside of the regular chain of command from [insert original branch of the military], who answers to someone high in Special Operations Command, who in turn probably reports directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the highest ranking officers in each branch).

If you like this concept, I highly recommend you check out the old E E "Doc" Smith Lensman series. Lensman was written in the 1930s and 40s, originated the "Space Opera" genre (Star Wars, etc), and was the template for later fictional organizations like the Jedi Knights and Spectres.

"Lensmen" are selected through a multi-year screening and training process that takes in several million recruits from a galaxy-spanning civilization and produces a spare handful of graduates at the end. Lensmen, by their nature, are self-starters, totally focused, incorruptible, and completely devoted to the principles of Civilization. Lensmen are the face and leaders of galactic law enforcement and defense, given authority for independent action and ad-hoc command over any regular military units.

If an enlisted soldier is raised to Officer rank through Officer Training School, it tends to happen fairly early in their career. If a soldier spends a lot of time as a Sergeant, they tend to stay a Sergeant for their career. A Sergeant may eventually be granted the respect of a Colonel (see: Plummley in We Were Soldiers; who, yes, was a real person), but would never, ever have equivalent authority.

Well, when you have a couple Taunting characters keeping enemies from running anywhere and several MMs with pets firing on Aggressive, all of those "waypointer" mobs tend to get extremely dead long before they point to anything...