New ATI 6 series

[Bodzilla]

Looking around checking out getting a new GFX card because mine just decided it didnt want to live.

*sigh*

Anyway i'm looking for a really good mid range card, but in checking out the online stores i saw that the 6 series is out.
Long story short the prices for the 6 series are actually lower then the 5th series.
and i've seen that it appears they've mixed it up the naming and now the x8xx is actually the low mid range.

Thoughts on this?
What do you guys know? apparently the rest of the series will be out before christmas soo..... Should i wait or is it like the 8800 --> 9800's from nividia a couple years ago.

:/

[Higuy]

Last I heard... 5 series > 6 series... thats why they're cheep, I think.

[annihilation]

I've heard they will be faster than the 5000 series.
Idk, I havn't bothered learning much about them.

[Rook]

Apparently the 5850 is just a touch faster than the 6850 but the 6850 is also cheaper. If I were in the market I'd probably go for a 6850.

http://bacon.modacity.net/img/images/perfrel.gif

[Amit]

There is an elaborate reason why the HD 6800 series is slower than the HD 5800 series. I won't go into it, but the HD 6800 series is not made to outperform the HD 5800 series. It's made to close the price gap between the HD 5700 series and the HD 5800 series. It does it well for the prices.

[Warsaw]

It's a refinement of the HD5 series architecture. THe HD6970 will be faster than the HD5870. However, I feel that they made a mistake in changing the numbers. They originally had the 6850 and 6870 listed as the 6750 and 6770 in their slides, so I don't know what prompted the shift.

[BobtheGreatII]

Get a 480 or a 580. Stop being such a bum. nVidia is the only way to go.

[CN3089]

nvidia is terrible, hope this helps.

[Rook]

Get a 480 or a 580. Stop being such a bum. nVidia is the only way to go.

http://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss274/Darkraven909/Not_sure_if_serious.jpg

[annihilation]

Nvidia is far superior.

[Cortexian]

Nvidia for global moderator 2011

[Warsaw]

Nvidia is far superior one generation behind.

ftfy.

I'm anxious to see what Cayman can do. A few more weeks and we should find out.

[BobtheGreatII]

I've had two 5770's in crossfire for about a year now. I can't stand Catalyst. Haven't been able to since my x1550. And nothing has changed. My friend bought a 6 series card. And boasted about the architecture being so different. Frankly nVidia performs tessellation, physx (obviously) and other cuda (yes another nVidia thing) feature flawlessly. DX11 on an ATi card is miserable. Performance isn't as great. Now. What I will say is that the 470 I currently own... is a little on the weak side compared to my 5770's. But I still have higher scores in all my benchmarking. And better performance in games. Crysis is an exception. But I've read that the 400 series had problems with directx 9 and 10. But that's no real excuse. My point is. You get more features with an nVidia card. Price and power consumption are obvious draw backs. But ATi to me has become more of a joke. Also I completely understand that the 5770 and 6 series are on completely different points on the board. I'm just talking pure personal experience. If I had the money to throw at a graphics card. I would choose an nVidia card all the way. Preferably something above the 470 though.

[Cortexian]

Talking to ATI fan boys is like talking to religion. You're gonna lose.

[Warsaw]

Nonsense. If this were a thread where people were shooting at nVidia first, I'd say nVidia is better. I keep an open mind about my PC parts.

Also, nVidia couldn't get their architecture working properly for the GF100. The GTX580 is actually what the GTX480 was supposed to be, so don't let that numbering fool you. PhysX is a gimmick, and not even one that they created. DirectX 11 hasn't been fully implemented by anyone yet, so as far as I'm concerned it is also a gimmick. You also have to remember that the GF100 chips launched over half a year later than the HD5 series, so nVidia knew what they had to beat and could make modifications appropriately. As for better perfomance in games, get real. We all know it's because nVidia pays off the developers with their "TWIMTBP" program, though that advantage is shrinking as AMD opens up the drivers to developers, something ATi hasn't done in the past.

tl;dr: nVidia has performance crown, but if you don't have money to blow on a new barbecue grill then ATi is the way to go.

[InnerGoat]

nvidia is terrible, hope this helps.lol

Get a coin and flip it. Heads buy a 6850, tails buy a gtx 460 then close thread. :downs:

[SiriusTexra]

After lurking guru3d for nearly 6 months on modding and overclocking info, I can safely say that ATI are far superior as of late.

I own an nvidia though, 460 overclocked to hell and back. It does a great job for being so cheap, but really, it's still falling short. There's only so much voltage can do.

Ive seen very good things about the 5870's. Don't get a 480, too hot and loud and sucks psu like a cunt. Wait till the 570 comes out. Theres your mid-high range pumper, if your going nvidia.

Actually, I myself am considering getting another 460 for sli. That should pretty much put me up fairly high in benchmarks for reasonable pricing. Trouble is sli support is shaky. Otherwise, I'd definitely go with the ATI 6850 for a good single.

If you need something now, safest bet is either a 470, sli'd cheap 460's, crossfired 5850's or just get a 6850 and juice that fucker up.

Though, in this day and age, your probably gunna want to future proof yourself a little. Your resolution needs are going to get larger, and there's a threshold past 1600 that just dramatically smashes performance if you on mid range tech. For instance, my 460 creams crysis at 1680, but at 1920, it's pretty slugglish, not much difference in size really. It's just a threshold, and you wanna be over that.

Game visual quality is plateuing anyway. You'll find any card you purchase end of this year, or next year will hold you out for quite some time. That is until the next big revolution comes along. I assume that comes when carmack starts playing with voxels.

[CN3089]

lol

Get a coin and flip it. Heads buy a 6850, tails buy a gtx 460 then close thread. :downs:

yeah this unless you want to spend the money for a 6870 then go hog wild

[BobtheGreatII]

I don't see how PhysX or DirectX11 are gimmicks at all. Both add wonderful visual effects in most games. Subtle but obvious differences. And frankly if I wasn't looking for better graphics, extra features, and better gameplay, I don't see why I would be a PC gamer. Just because DirectX11 hasn't been put in too many games, I don't see the point in not investing in the future. But it's your call.

[iizahsum]

I don't see how PhysX or DirectX11 are gimmicks at all. Both add wonderful visual effects in most games. Subtle but obvious differences. And frankly if I wasn't looking for better graphics, extra features, and better gameplay, I don't see why I would be a PC gamer. Just because DirectX11 hasn't been put in too many games, I don't see the point in not investing in the future. But it's your call.
PhysX is the biggest gimmick ever, go play half life2 or any other game on the Source engine ( Which uses a tweaked version of Havok physics) and tell me why the physics in those games can be near perfect and not put my system under extreme stress, when PhysX drops my FPS like crazy.

[Amit]

I don't see how PhysX or DirectX11 are gimmicks at all. Both add wonderful visual effects in most games. Subtle but obvious differences. And frankly if I wasn't looking for better graphics, extra features, and better gameplay, I don't see why I would be a PC gamer. Just because DirectX11 hasn't been put in too many games, I don't see the point in not investing in the future. But it's your call.

I own a number of DirectX 11 games and not a single one of them look substantially better than DirectX 10. Dirt 2, Bad Company 2, LOTRO, Aliens Vs. Predator, Civilization 5, F1 2010. The list goes on. They all look virtually no different than DirectX 10. Bad Company 2 is the easiest one to see this flaw. Even fucking DirectX 10 looks similar to DX9!

Now that's not what I came to argue here. ATi cards give you more features overall and benefits. Well first and foremost, HD 5000 series+ ATi cards have EyeFinity. Sucks for you nVidia dudes who need at least 2 video cards to use nVidia surround. ATi takes the time to make sure that their GPUs don't drink power. They create efficient cards so that people can play games with the settings turned up, but without creating a heatwave in the case. Not to mention, they price their cards appropriately for the performance level right at the launch. Most people don't want to spend hundreds on a card when you can buy an ATi product for less than the nvidia equivalent and still have a game perform just as appropriately. When you buy an ATi video card, you buy quality. Your video card is unlikely to fail with either nVidia or ATi, but what makes the difference is drivers. nVidia is known to have released drivers that had the potential to destroy your hardware. Like wtf? And remember when many laptops started failing due to the nVidia GPUs in them?

I also find it funny how nVidia uses XBOX gameplay to advertise their GTX 400 series GPUs haha.

[Warsaw]

I don't see how PhysX or DirectX11 are gimmicks at all. Both add wonderful visual effects in most games. Subtle but obvious differences. And frankly if I wasn't looking for better graphics, extra features, and better gameplay, I don't see why I would be a PC gamer. Just because DirectX11 hasn't been put in too many games, I don't see the point in not investing in the future. But it's your call.

Because by the time DirectX 11 is finally implemented properly and fully, your "investment into the future" won't be powerful enough to run it anyways.

[RedBaron]

My personal experience may be a bit outdated, but I've used an nVidia 7600 gt and 9800 gt. Both cards failed on me and had cost a good deal of money in their time. My grope with nVidia is that from what I've seen so far, their build quality really is horrible. It bothers me that there are 6+ manufacturers that basically make clone products from each other, each one priced higher than another with marginal differences. One company would release a GTX 470, and another company would then release a GTX 470 XXX Super Overclocked or some horse shit like that. Both cards would have horrible power consumption and have a price difference of $100 on release.

Now I'm not saying that this doesn't happen with ATi, but their price scaling is certainly fuckloads better. You can pay much less at launch and get the same performance as the nVidia counterpart. As far as DX11 and physx, I really haven't seen any difference worth dishing out cash for. I have Metro 2033, the supposed new benchmark software after crysis, and the game looks almost identical in DX9 compared to DX10 or DX11. There is a slight difference in color shading, and maybe a slight difference in how good the motion blur looks. I mean really, who really gives two fucks? I would rather run it in DX9 and get a 40 fps boost than be able to notice a tiny tiny volume boost in the cobblestones with tessellation on.

Right now, I'm running on a Radeon mobility HD 5870, and I out preform my friend's desktop 8800 gtx that he bought for $400 on release. To me, there is something really really wrong with that.

[Bodzilla]

I'm just leaning towards ATI because price scalings great.
My 8800GTX ran beautifully for years and years, it's just why pay more for something that is getting the same performance, and if you remember the BEAST in my sig you'll know that coolings an issue with me.

i think ATI have had the upper hand for about 2 gens now with nividia pushing for the enthusiast and ATI setting the bench's for everyone else.

[Warsaw]

Right now, I'm running on a Radeon mobility HD 5870, and I out preform my friend's desktop 8800 gtx that he bought for $400 on release. To me, there is something really really wrong with that.

HD5870 was $400 on release and the 8800GTX is two generations behind the HD5 series. Not a valid comparison, at all.

[Bodzilla]

yeah warsaw, all i saw when i saw that was


I DONT UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY

[Cortexian]

I dunno, I like to think of Nvidia as more refined and streamlined graphics. Whereas ATI AMD would be the raw power house.

That said, Eyefinity is significantly easier to use than Nvidia surround since you only need one card (theoretically) but you still need two or more to get good triple-or-more-monitor frame rates. But Nvidia just released Nvidia Surround and it's getting steadily better and better, the drivers and control panel still seems to be better on the Nvidia side. Not to mention CUDA GPU Acceleration.

[Amit]

I dunno, I like to think of Nvidia as more refined and streamlined graphics. Whereas ATI AMD would be the raw power house.


What the fuck? You own two GTX 285s in SLI. How could you possibly think that ATi is more of a powerhouse than nVidia? Everything points to nVidia being the beast. High power consumption, extreme heat, slightly louder cooling fan, low efficiency, high price. ATi is the opposite of all those.

[Warsaw]

nVidia has always been the raw power and ATi has always been for the refined image and efficiency. The exception to this is in CUDA/Firestream (or whatever AMD's equivalent is called) processed images, where CUDA is clearly superior because nVidia places more emphasis on GPGPU tasks than ATi does.

In related news, AMD is supposedly resurrecting the ATi brand. This is good. I don't want green team vs. green team.

As for the control panel: what the fuck? The new nVidia control panel is shit, I always used the legacy one on my old rig with the 7800GT. The Catalyst Control Centre just makes so much more logical sense.

[Cortexian]

Catalyst has either always bugged out on me, or just been a pain to use. Whereas the Nvidia Control Panel either works, or something goes horribly, horribly wrong right away and you know there's a driver issue or something.

[Warsaw]

To each his own, I guess. I never got used to nVidia's "updated and modernised" control panel, it was just too automated and was not intuitive at all. CCC has a drop menu to take you to various categories of settings and each category has tabs for each setting with the final tab being all the settings together for review. It makes sense, it works. What was the last version you used?

[Rook]

Everything points to nVidia being the beast. High power consumption, extreme heat, slightly louder cooling fan, low efficiency, high price. ATi is the opposite of all those.
Every one of those things you say make nvidia a 'beast' are cons, you fail to point out how amd actually out performs nvidia now whilst remaining cooler and more efficient. I haven't heard about nvidias new cards yet but I'd say they'll be just as hot and power hungry as what they run now.

[Warsaw]

Rook, I think you misinterpreted it. The "beast" in this case is not a good thing. It is a bad thing. The benchmarks show that nVidia has more horsepower, but ATi performs well enough for most people where it actually counts.

[Cortexian]

What was the last version you used?
Whatever the latest version was for HD 5970's last August... Was playing with a guys 6 monitor Eyefinity setup at Fragapalooza, didn't like Catalyst at all then.

[=sw=warlord]

How could you possibly think that ATi is more of a powerhouse than nVidia? Everything points to nVidia being the beast. High power consumption, extreme heat, slightly louder cooling fan, low efficiency, high price. ATi is the opposite of all those.

Nvidia is basicly the Harley Davidson of the VGA market, loud, full of noise but not as efficient as it could be compared to other brands.

[Amit]

Every one of those things you say make nvidia a 'beast' are cons, you fail to point out how amd actually out performs nvidia now whilst remaining cooler and more efficient. I haven't heard about nvidias new cards yet but I'd say they'll be just as hot and power hungry as what they run now.

I completely agree with you, but I think you misinterpreted the "beast" part. nVidia is the beast. The fastest video cards but it doesn't really make sense to even produce them due to the flaws I stated.

[Bodzilla]

well the new cards are out now, and the specs are bit dissapointing... so.... 6950 seems like the way to go tbh.

what do you guys reckon. i wanna nail it before christmas :P

[Warsaw]

It's not quite what everyone wanted. I'd call the entire 6000 line a step sideways, so the 7000 series will be the next vertical step. The step sideways was necessary to make the next step up feasible within their desired constraints.

[neuro]

Nvidia.

[Amit]

well the new cards are out now, and the specs are bit dissapointing.

Do you mean the new nVidia cards?

[Hotrod]

I'm still using my good old HD4850 :S

[Warsaw]

Do you mean the new nVidia cards?

The "new" nVidia cards are essentially GF100 with everything unlocked. The new ATi cards are actually a brand new architecture that sidesteps the previous generation. They generally perform better, but there are some instances where the 5870 still does better. However, the 6870s in Crossfire absolutely demolish GTX580s in SLI for Metro 2033.

[343guiltymc]

Are either parties going to make something lower end? I can't afford a 6850 nor a GTX 460, sadly.

[CN3089]

Are either parties going to make something lower end? I can't afford a 6850 nor a GTX 460, sadly.

5770s are still good cards friend :)

[Bodzilla]

so the overall price to performance card is the 6950??

[Rook]

Nvidia.

Yes nvidia, how people even think it's a feasible choice for mid range gamers is beyond me.

[CN3089]

so the overall price to performance card is the 6950??

If you're willing to spend that much money on a video card then sure go hog wild

[Bodzilla]

Getting the 6950

~

should keep me fine and dandy for a couple of years :D

[Warsaw]

5770s are still good cards friend :)

This. I'mma get another one soon for Crossfire.

[Shock120]

AMD Catalyst 10.12 Download & Discussion (http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=334401)

New drivers. :D

[Dwood]

If they still have 4xxx series around in the bargain bins I'll pick one of them up in about two years to Crossfire. We're hitting the point in PC Games where the 2+ cards will actually make a difference and last for more than 2 years before they're completely demolished by the latest and greatest cards.

[Warsaw]

You have consoles to thank for that.

Also, the 4000 series if going to give-way to the lower end 5000 series. The 5770 is just as good as the 4850 in 90% of tasks until you start pushing huge resolutions where its 128-bit bus width (opposed to the 4850's 256-bit) starts choking it. Even then, it's hardly appreciable.

[Bodzilla]

Righto guys i'm checking out AI overdrive in catalyst. anybody got any recommended settings for a safe overclock?

never bothered with this shit before lol

[Cortexian]

Increase OC, torture test for at least an hour (preferably 24), if it's still stable, repeat until something breaks and then down clock.

Have fun! :)

[Bodzilla]

well.... i've got it at max on catalyst... dunno what else to do :S

anyone got a guide for dummies?

[Rook]

Skimmed through what card did you get? I wouldn't even worry about OC unless you're having problems running your games at your desired FPS.

e: if it's 6950 leave it at stock good god.

[Bodzilla]

yeah it's the 6950

good god? :S?

[Warsaw]

You can actually flash a second BIOS (6950 has dual BIOS capability) that unlocks all the stream processors and clocks it to 6970 speeds, thus giving you a cheap 6970. Since you only have two six-pin power connectors (as opposed to a six and an eight on a legit 6970), I don't recommend overclocking it any further than that.