6800 GT vs X850. How important is shader model 3.0?

[KiLLerKnight]

I am planning to buy one of these two cards. I know the X850 is the faster one in most games, but it doesn't have shader 3.0. How important will that be? I know that Age of Empires 3 engine will be shader 3.0, my favorite RTS-series. I am not planning to get SLI, and the price difference isn't really an issue, as the GT is only 50 euros cheaper. What do you guys think?

 

[Tab]

I've been asking my self that question too, however besides AOE3 what other games in the near future are going to use PS3?

 

[zakee00]

first of all, good luck getting your hands on an x850.
PS3 isnt that big of a deal, but in the future it will be. For example, the new unreal engine 3's MINIMUM spec video card is one that supports PS3. so you would be out of luck if u got the x850.
basicly, they just increased the ammount of instructions that a shader program can be, from like 200 to 10000 or somthing. the reason it dosnt matter is becasue no shader program needs to be that long. if money is no object, get the x850.

EDIT: pretty much all games i would think are going to "take advantage" of ps3 from now on. but its not like you need a ps3 card to play them, they will all have "fallback" ps2 shaders (except for the unreal 3 engine for example, which will have no fallback shaders) for the ATi cards. no visual difference, just a minor performance increase in some areas for PS3 cards.

 

[fsstrike]

Originally posted by: zakee00
first of all, good luck getting your hands on an x850.
PS3 isnt that big of a deal, but in the future it will be. For example, the new unreal engine 3's MINIMUM spec video card is one that supports PS3. so you would be out of luck if u got the x850.
basicly, they just increased the ammount of instructions that a shader program can be, from like 200 to 10000 or somthing. the reason it dosnt matter is becasue no shader program needs to be that long. if money is no object, get the x850.

EDIT: pretty much all games i would think are going to "take advantage" of ps3 from now on. but its not like you need a ps3 card to play them, they will all have "fallback" ps2 shaders (except for the unreal 3 engine for example, which will have no fallback shaders) for the ATi cards. no visual difference, just a minor performance increase in some areas for PS3 cards.

Actually, unreal3 minimum spec is not a video card that supports sm3. It will work in ps2 mode aswell. Your slightly confused, the minimum spec is a card that had dx9, and by the time u3 comes out we might see dx10. Even current high end video cards wont be very good for unreal3, so even if he has a 6800UE in SLI, he would still need an upgrade to play u3 on high settings. Either way, everyone will need to upgrade for unreal3 if they want to play it with the eye candy turned up, its not much different for x800 or 6800 users.

But just based on the fact that you want to play AOE3, then I would suggest getting the 6800GT. But if you can afford an x850, then why not just get the 6800 Ultra?

 

[flexy]

Originally posted by: KiLLerKnight
I am planning to buy one of these two cards. I know the X850 is the faster one in most games, but it doesn't have shader 3.0. How important will that be?

right now its really not important. I mean, i am getting a X850 too since it is the fastest card and ATI always has a edge when you have Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering on.

The only advantage the 6800 has (which is not a bad card either, dont get me wrong ) right now is a FEW frames more in Doom3. In all D3D games (which are most which i will play, D3 is OpenGl) the X850 is WAY faster.

PS3.0: As the others said..current games (and probably many more upcoming games) all have a fall-back mode and use PS2 with no disadvantage.

I remember seeing the status page for HL2 users and the VADT MAJORITY of people's graphics card is really very, very lowend. Eg. Geforce 4 TI etc.....a company would dig their own grave to have an game-engine which supports only 5% of all peoples current hardware. Thats why all games now and in the near future wil be fine on ATI 2.0 and NVidia cards.

I also wish(ed) the X850 had shader 3.0...but realizing that this is not important (right now) and that i will have faster framerates in the current games (and i always use at least 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic) made me decide for the ATI card. ALso....there have been too many (in my opinion) complaints about issues with th 6800cards (eg "texture shimmering") which REALLY worried me a lot....eg people compared the image quality of NV/ATI and the 6800 also had weird aliasing/artifacts. I didnt like that at all.


Edit: this really is not an "bash nvidia" posting..but rather the result of my long, long research what card to get. Also, for U3 etc....i think then we're already looking at R520 which i am VERY excitedly looking forward to. (I guess it will be out end this year ?) This will be a SM3.0 card.

 

[KiLLerKnight]

I want to get the Ultra, but there are only agp-versions available. And they are about the same price or at some shops even more expensive than the X850 here in the Netherlands. And I think I can get the X850 earlier than a pci version of the Ultra.

 

[KiLLerKnight]

Originally posted by: flexy
this really is not an "bash nvidia" posting..but rather the result of my long, long research what card to get. Also, for U3 etc....i think then we're already looking at R520 which i am VERY excitedly looking forward to. (I guess it will be out end this year ?) This will be a SM3.0 card.

Yeah ok, but I wasn't planning to buy another new card in the next 18 months or something. And by the time the R520 arrives in quantity, I am maybe too old to play games anyway LOL.


Edit: BTW is XFX really that bad, I heard their cards (and their service) really suck.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: KiLLerKnight
I want to get the Ultra, but there are only agp-versions available. And they are about the same price or at some shops even more expensive than the X850 here in the Netherlands. And I think I can get the X850 earlier than a pci version of the Ultra.

Which ATi card are you actually referring to? The X850 series is made up of the X850 XT Platinum Edition, the X850 XT, and the X850 Pro - there is no "vanilla" X850. The two XT models are superior cards to the 6800GT and have a pricetag to match. On the otherhand, the X850 Pro either ties or trails the 6800 GT in most tests (except HL2) http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2290&p=6, but has the same MSRP.

If you can get either the X850 XT or XT PE for roughly the same price as a 6800 GT, there really isn't much of a question here... The ATi card would be the way to go SM3.0 or not.

 

[KiLLerKnight]

The platinum edition.

 

[nitromullet]

Well, that's simple. Get the X850 XT PE. Read the rest of the article I linked to in my earlier post.

 

[zakee00]

Originally posted by: fsstrike

Originally posted by: zakee00
first of all, good luck getting your hands on an x850.
PS3 isnt that big of a deal, but in the future it will be. For example, the new unreal engine 3's MINIMUM spec video card is one that supports PS3. so you would be out of luck if u got the x850.
basicly, they just increased the ammount of instructions that a shader program can be, from like 200 to 10000 or somthing. the reason it dosnt matter is becasue no shader program needs to be that long. if money is no object, get the x850.

EDIT: pretty much all games i would think are going to "take advantage" of ps3 from now on. but its not like you need a ps3 card to play them, they will all have "fallback" ps2 shaders (except for the unreal 3 engine for example, which will have no fallback shaders) for the ATi cards. no visual difference, just a minor performance increase in some areas for PS3 cards.

Actually, unreal3 minimum spec is not a video card that supports sm3. It will work in ps2 mode aswell. Your slightly confused, the minimum spec is a card that had dx9, and by the time u3 comes out we might see dx10. Even current high end video cards wont be very good for unreal3, so even if he has a 6800UE in SLI, he would still need an upgrade to play u3 on high settings. Either way, everyone will need to upgrade for unreal3 if they want to play it with the eye candy turned up, its not much different for x800 or 6800 users.

But just based on the fact that you want to play AOE3, then I would suggest getting the 6800GT. But if you can afford an x850, then why not just get the 6800 Ultra?

Unreal 3 Interview

A major design goal of Unreal Engine 3 is that designers should never, ever have to think about "fallback" shaders, as Unreal Engine 2 and past mixed-generation DirectX6/7/8/9 engines relied on. We support everything everywhere, and use new hardware features like PS3.0 to implement optimizations: reducing the number of rendering passes to implement an effect, to reduce the number of SetRenderTarget operations needed by performing blending in-place, and so on. Artists create an effect, and it's up to the engine and runtime to figure out how to most efficiently render it faithfully on a given hardware architecture.

They don't make it totally clear weather they will be supporting PS2 or not, but i would think not. And like a guy said earlier, it dosnt really matter because non of today's cards will play it well anyway, even in SLi