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Question about ATI


ShnitzelKiller
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I'm getting a new computer soon, and the ATI Radeon HD 4670 is apparantly four times faster than the Nvidia card I could buy it with. My current graphics card is crap, but will ATI in general have any compatibility issues with 3d Coat? Or the majority of programs out there? Which one is more widely used?

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I use Nvidia in laptop & ATI in desktop & can't tell you I've noticed any differences, but laptop is 32bit machine so I obviously don't stress it as much as the ATI powered desktop.

ATI 4850 in a new-ish Dell i7 & Nvidia 9600 in (maybe 9800, can't remember? Laptop-spec card).

I wouldn't believe the hype about 4x as fast but.

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I use Nvidia in laptop & ATI in desktop & can't tell you I've noticed any differences, but laptop is 32bit machine so I obviously don't stress it as much as the ATI powered desktop.

ATI 4850 in a new-ish Dell i7 & Nvidia 9600 in (maybe 9800, can't remember? Laptop-spec card).

I wouldn't believe the hype about 4x as fast but.

Well, the ATI card costs 300 dollars more.

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The only problem is 3DC is using CUDA for Voxel acceleration. At the moment no ATI cards will be supported. If you can wait until December, NVIDIA will launch a new series of DX11 Cards...

Rene

Are you sure about December? Actually they are very in late with their card.

I'm in the same situation, I want a new computer before Xmas and probably I'll go with an ATI 5870 waiting for OpenCL.

But I will prefer Nvidia....

Luca

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Are you sure about December? Actually they are very in late with their card.

I'm in the same situation, I want a new computer before Xmas and probably I'll go with an ATI 5870 waiting for OpenCL.

But I will prefer Nvidia....

Luca

I had been an ATI guy for so long, then when I bought a 4850...it worked fine for most programs and games...but I could never get Combustion to work properly with it...took months of updated drivers, and no solution. Never could get particles to work AT ALL in Combustion with the card...and with 3DC using CUDA, I figured it was time to get an NVidia. I got a GTS 250 (slightly updated 9800GTX w/ 1GB memory)...close to getting a 275, but wasn't sure if I'd notice any noticeable improvement for the extra $100+.

Anyway, that was exactly the problem...the ATI card. The drivers just wouldn't let me use Combustion (which I use a lot, so that was a no go). Don't think I'll be buying an ATI for a good long time.

Good bang for your buck if all you do is browse the internet and play games, but it's not meant to be all that compatible with CG applications..you'd have to buy their FIREGL Pro cards to get that.

What's more for NVidia owners is that Mental Ray is supposed to be have an interactive variant called IRay...which leverages CUDA (and will use OpenCL at some point)for interactive rendering. I'm guessing that will soon be available for all programs like Max, Maya, and XSI that have Mental Ray built-in. ATI just has nothing going for it at all with this market(CG). I like competition, but ATI is all about games and little else. I think you'd be doing yourself a favor by going NVidia.

I researched the cards pretty heavily, and while there are some specs on ATI cards that make them seem so much faster, but when we compare the actual side by side comparisons in real world applications, you don't see the output you'd expect...things like having more GPU processors and faster RAM (DDR5 vs DDR3)...it's like there are more GPU processors per card, but that's offset by the fact that the NVidia processors generate more output or other features.

CUDA and 3DC is enough reason for me to stick.

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