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
The Latest CUDA App: MotionDSP’s vReveal
NVIDIA had more slides in its GTX 275 presentation about non-gaming applications than it did about how the 275 performed in games. One such application is MotionDSP’s vReveal - a CUDA enabled video post processing application than can clean up poorly recorded video.
The application’s interface is simple:
Import your videos (anything with a supported codec on your system pretty much) and then select enhance.
You can auto-enhance with a single click (super useful) or even go in and tweak individual sliders and settings on your own in the advanced mode.
The changes you make to the video are visible on the fly, but the real time preview is faster on a NVIDIA GPU than if you rely on the CPU alone.
When you’re all done, simply hit save to disk and the video will be re-encoded with the proper changes. The encoding process takes place entirely on the GPU but it can also work on a CPU.
First let’s look at the end results. We took three videos, one recorded using Derek’s wife’s Blackberry and two from me on a Canon HD cam (but at low res) in my office.
I relied on vReveal’s auto tune to fix the videos and I’ve posted the originals and vReveal versions on YouTube. The videos are below:
In every single instance, the resulting video looks better. While it’s not quite the technology you see in shows like 24, it does make your videos look better and it does do it pretty quickly. There’s no real support for video editing here and I’m not familiar enough with the post processing software market to say whether or not there are better alternatives, but vReveal does do what it says it does. And it uses the GPU.
Performance is also very good on even a reasonably priced GPU. It took 51 seconds for the GeForce GTX 260 to save the first test video, it took my Dell Studio XPS 435’s Core i7 920 just over 3 minutes to do the same task.
It’s a neat application. It works as advertised, but it only works on NVIDIA hardware. Will it make me want to buy a NVIDIA GPU over an ATI one? Nope. If all things are equal (price, power and gaming performance) then perhaps. But if ATI provides a better gaming experience, I don’t believe it’s compelling enough.
First, the software isn’t free - it’s an added expense. Badaboom costs $30, vReveal costs $50. It’s not the most expensive software in the world, but it’s not free.
And secondly, what happens if your next GPU isn’t from NVIDIA? While vReveal will continue to work, you no longer get GPU acceleration. A vReveal-like app written in OpenCL will work on all three vendors’ hardware, as long as they support OpenCL.
If NVIDIA really wants to take care of its customers, it can start by giving away vReveal (and Badaboom) to people who purchase these high end graphics cards. If you want to add value, don’t tell users that they should want these things, give it to them. The burden of proof is on NVIDIA to show that these CUDA enabled applications are worth supporting rather than waiting for cross-vendor OpenCL versions.
Do you feel any differently?
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SiliconDoc - Friday, April 24, 2009 - link
You failed to read his post, and therefore the context of my response, you IDIOT.Can you run a second ATI card for PhysX - NO.
Can you run an ati card and a second NV for PhysX - not without a driver hack - check techpowerup for the how to and files, as I've already mentioned.
So, THAT'S WHAT WE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT DUMMY.
Now you can take your stupidity along with you, noone can stop it.
pizzimp - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
From an objective point of view there is not really a clear winner. At the lower resolutions do you really care if you are getting 80 FPS Vs 100 FPS?IMO it is the higher resolutions that matter. I would think any real gamer is always looking to upgrade there monitor :).
I wonder how old you guys are that are posting? Who cares if something is "rebadged" or just an OC version of something? Bottom line is how does the card play the game?
IMO both cards are good. It comes down to price for me.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Ahh, you just have to pretend framerates you can't see or notice, and only the top rate or the average, never the bottom framerate...Then you must discount ALL the OTHER NVIDIA advantages, from cuda, to badaboom, to better folding scores, to physx, to game release day evga drivers ready to go, to forced game profiles in nvidia panel none for ati - and on and on and on...
Now, after 6 months of these red roosters screaming ati wins it all because it had the top resolution of the 30" monitor sewed up and lost in lower resolutions, these red roosters have done a 180 degree about face.... now the top resolution just doesn't matter -
Dude, the red ragers are lying loons, it's that simple.
The 2 year old 9800X core is the 4870 without ddr5. Think about that, and how deranged they truly are.
I bet they have been fervently praying to their red god hoping that change doesn't come in the form of ddr5 on that old g80/g92/g92b core - because then instead of it competing with the 4850 - it would be a 4870 - and THAT would be an embarrassment - a severe embarrassment. The crowing of the red roosters would diminish... and they'ed be bent over sucking up barnyard dirt and chickseed - for a long, long time. lol
Oh well, at least ati might get 2 billion from Obama to cover it's losses ... it's sad when a red rooster card could really use a bailout, isn't it ?
helldrell666 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Well, you have a point there. But the card is still not operating on a WHQL driver, and the percentage of those who use 30" montiors is negligible compared to the owners of 22" / 24" monitors.I think this is probably due to the 256bit internal memory interface compared to the 484bit that the gtx275 has.even at xbitlabs the 4890 drops significantly in performance compared to the gtx285.
7Enigma - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
From a subjective point of view you may feel that way, but from an objective point of view there is a clear winner, and it is the 4890. Left for Dead and Call of Duty are the only 2 30" display tests where the 275 significantly defeated the 4890. In all of the other tests either the 4890 either dominated (G.R.I.D., Fallout3), or was within 4% of the 275 which I would call a wash. At all other resolutions the 4890 was the undisputed leader. So I find it difficult to say there is no clear winner.What Nvidia should have done was not nerfed their 22" and 24" resolutions for the very few people that game at 30" with the latest drivers. To be honest I wish the article had included all of the results from the 182 drivers (they show just G.R.I.D. but allude to other games also having similar reduced results except at the highest res). It could very likely be a wash then if the 275 is more competetive at the resolutions 99% of the people buying this level/price of card are going to be playing at.
Anand, any way you could post, even just in the comments, the numbers for the rest of the games with the 182 Nvidia drivers. I don't mind doing the comparison work to see how much closer the 275 would be to the 4890 if they had kept the earlier drivers.
7Enigma - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Ah, I see now that the 185's are specifically to enable support for the 275 card. So you can't run the 275 with the 182 drivers. Still would be interesting to see all the data for what happened to the 285 using the newest drivers that decrease the performance at lower resolutions.minime - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
First, thanks for your review(s). I'm a silent reader and word-of-mouth spreader for years.Second, don't you think reviewers should point their fingers a little bit more aggressively to the power-consumption? Not because it's trendy nowadays, but because it's just not sane to waste that much energy in idle (2D, anyone remembers?) mode. I was thrilled what you alone (don't take it as a disrespect) were able to achieve on the SSD issue.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
PSST ! The ati cards have like 30 watts more power useage in idle - and like 3 watts less in 3d - so the power thing - well they just declare ati the winner... LOLThey said they were "really surprised" at the 30 watts less in idle for the nvidia - they just couldn't figure it out- and kept rechecking ... but yeah... the 260 was kicking butt.. but... that doesn't matter - ati takes the win using 1-3 watss less in 3D..
So, you know, the red roosters shall not be impugned !
capiche' ?
VulgarDisplay - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
It appears that you may have had Vsync turned on which caps the game at 60fps in some of the CoD:W@W tests. It's pretty apparent something is up when the nVidia card has the same FPS at 1680x and 1920x. Either way it still seems like the 4890 wins at those resolutions which is different than most sites that pretty much say it's a wash across the board. I'll take nVidia's drivers over ATi's any day.SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Hey any little trick that smacks nvidia down a notch is not to be pointed out.