ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on April 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
CUDA - Oh there’s More
Oh I’m not done. Other than PhysX, NVIDIA is stressing CUDA as another huge feature that no other GPU maker on the world has.
For those who aren’t familiar, CUDA is a programming interface to NVIDIA hardware. Modern day GPUs are quite powerful, easily capable of churning out billions if not a trillion instructions per second when working on the right dataset. The problem is that harnessing such power is a bit difficult. NVIDIA put a lot of effort into developing an easy to use interface to the hardware and eventually it evolved into CUDA.
Now CUDA only works on certain NVIDIA GPUs and certainly won’t talk to Larrabee or anything in the ATI camp. Both Intel and ATI have their own alternatives, but let’s get back to CUDA for now.
The one area that GPU computing has had a tremendous impact already is the HPC market. The applications there lent themselves very well to GPU programming and thus we see incredible CUDA penetration there. What NVIDIA wants however is CUDA in the consumer market, and that’s a little more difficult.
The problem is that you need a compelling application and the first major one we looked at was Elemental’s Badaboom. The initial release of Badaboom fell short of the mark but over time it became a nice tool. While it’s not the encoder of choice for people looking to rip Blu-ray movies, it’s a good, fast way of getting your DVDs and other videos onto your iPod, iPhone or other portable media player. It only works on NVIDIA GPUs and is much faster than doing the same conversion on a CPU if you have a fast enough GPU.
The problem with Badaboom was that, like GPU accelerated PhysX, it only works on NVIDIA hardware and NVIDIA isn’t willing to give away NVIDIA GPUs to everyone in the world - thus we have another catch 22 scenario.
Badaboom is nice. If you have a NVIDIA GPU and you want to get DVD quality content onto your iPod, it works very well. But spending $200 - $300 on a GPU to run a single application just doesn’t seem like something most users would be willing to do. NVIDIA wants the equation to work like this:
Badaboom -> You buy a NVIDIA GPU
But the equation really works like this:
Games (or clever marketing) -> You buy a NVIDIA GPU -> You can also run Badaboom
Now if the majority of applications in the world required NVIDIA GPUs to run, then we’d be dealing in a very different environment, but that’s not reality in this dimension.
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Warren21 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Yeah, I don't know why they're playing this off as an RV770 overclock. RV790 is indeed a respin of RV770, but hey if nV can get by with 1000 different variants on the same GT200... Why not mention the benefits/differences between the RV770 and the RV790? Disappointed.SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
I guess they didn't mention the differences ? Tell you what, when ati gets 999 more rebrands and catches up with their competitotr, we'll call it even, ok ?In the mean time, the 4870 crossfires with the 4980, and soon enough we'll have the gamer joe reviewers that downclock the 4890 and find it has identical results to the same clocked 4870 - at that point the red roosters will tuck their flapping feathers and go home.
I know, it's hard to see it coming, when all you can see is s tiny dot of red, in a sea of 1000 choices of green. rofl
bill3 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
According to info at other sites, the 4890 has 3 million more transistors (959 instead of 956, very little difference). It also has a somewhat larger die due to tweaks made to allow the higher clocks.Go to Firing Squad or Xbitlabs review, both have an certain ATI slide that explains the small changes in detail.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
" Because they’re so similar, the Radeon 4870 and 4890 can be combined together for mix-and-match CrossFire, just like the 4850 and 4870. "I guess it's not a rebrand.
roflmao
bill3 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_489...">http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati..._4890_nv...The slide is the first clickable pic on that page, actually. Didn't realize we could do links.
bill3 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Or even betterhttp://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_489...">http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati...0_nvidia...
heh
Proteusza - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Thanks guys, good read.The piece on PhysX kinda mirrors my thoughts on it - its not worth basing a GPU purchasing a decision on it because it affects so few games. If you design your game around PhysX, you end up making a gimmicky game, if you design a good game and think of good ways to let PhysX enhance it, you can make something good like Mirror's Edge.
The way I think about PhysX is based on Amdahl's law, which says that overrall speedup of a CPU from an enhancement that affects only a certain class of application is affected by the amount of time spent using that certain class of application. In the case of PhysX, the amount of time spent using it is generally extremely low, and when it is used the effect isnt always noticeable or worth having.
NVidia's marketing tactics leave a lot to be desired frankly, although I'm not naive enough to say AMD never tries a little marketing manipulation themselves.
Sylvanas - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Why on earth would you compare a newly released Nvidia driver to that of an ATI driver from December last year and a Hotfix at that? The latest ATI drivers have had substantial improvements in a few games and surely they would have sent you an up to date driver with the 4890 review sample- somethings not right there. Also, where was the overclocking comparisons? (some reviews stating 1ghz core 4890 no problem). What about Temps and Stock cooling fan noise?7Enigma - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
I'm a bit disappointed with the ATI card. That is pretty much the Sapphire Vapochill model with increased core (actually it's a slightly slower memory setting). At least the GTX 275 is something different.bill3 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Wow lol..both cards are just rehashes. Calling the Nvidia card "something different" is a hell of a stretch.. it's just their same other cards with various clocks twiddled for the trillionth time.If anything the ATI card brings more to the table, as it offers much more clock headroom (1ghz is said to be well within reach) due to it's redesign, while the Nvidia card is nothing at all new intrinsically (aka it will overclock similar to the 285). Too be fair Nvidia's better clock-capable models (285) just came out a couple months earlier instead of now.