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#1
11-02-2010, 12:33 PM
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tessellation
ok, I'm looking at buyinga new rig and just looked at some bench tests of NVidia V ATI graphics cards, showing nVidia have Tessellation down pat while ATI have been left behind! Question, will Tessellation be important in SOW? the answer to this question will guide me whether to go nVidia or ATI.
Thanks 
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#2
11-02-2010, 06:49 PM
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Tessellated polygons are just polygons in the end of the day, so any difference is down to drivers I'd guess.
DX 10 was not a massive success, and DX 11 cards aren't common yet. There's no telling if tessellation will ever be a big hit with designers. There are other ways of doing what tessellation does. The Nvidia v ATI thing is as old as the hills and everybody has their own opinion. I can't look past ATI myself for the power management alone. If you live somewhere hot it should be a no-brainer... a high-power card will be working against your air conditioning, basically doubling the power wastage. I've no a/c and the heat is a nuisance in summer. An Nvidia card would be even hotter still. dduff
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#3
11-02-2010, 07:23 PM
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I think you'll be dissapointed to know that the answer is not that simple
 I don't exactly remember it the way i read it, but there's certain architecture differences that complicate things. First of all, the reason nVidia works so well with tesselation is that it has a load of tesselation-specific shaders in comparison to Ati. On the other hand, Ati handles it a different way, using some general purpose architecture but having lots more of it. The end result? In applications with heavy tesselation nVidia is faster. In applications without heavy tesselation use (or if you turn it off) Ati is faster. Ati is also cheaper to buy, cheaper to run (less wattage required and runs cooler), more reliable hardware-wise (as it runs cooler) and all around great value. Ati's drawbacks are the fact that sometimes they have "funky" driver support for older games (like it was with IL2 and the unreadable text bug). For DX11 cards today, the main advantage of nVidia is driver quality and marketing/developer connections. Unless someone runs tesselation full tilt and 24/7 (maybe first person shooter games, i don't know) i don't think it's good value for money and i wouldn't buy one today. I might buy one 3-6 months down the line though, if the market shifts around a bit. I've had both Ati and nVidia cards over the years and i was pleased with both, because i always had cost effectiveness in mind and not brand loyalty. If i was buying a new PC today i would go for an Ati. For as low as 50-100 bucks more than the top of the line single GPU nVidia DX11 cards you can have a dual GPU Ati DX11 card. Certain benchmarks from the early nVidia 480s showed that comparable Ati models were maybe 5% slower (and that at very high resolutions, it's equal or faster at normal resolutions depending on game/benchmark, ie the differences were negligible) but ran quieter, smoother and cooler. The nVidia cards were still the fastest single GPU cards but being priced so close to Ati's dual GPU models totally defeated the purpose, especially since they needed comparable power (which is a factor if you keep your PC on for long times or days on end, like i do, it shows in the electricity bills) and ran even hotter than them. After all, at the end of the day i'm looking at what kind of performance per dollar (and i mean total cost: buy, power consumption, possible malfunctions) i'm getting, not what kind of performance per GPU  As for wether SoW will use a lot of tesselation, there was such a discussion in the recent update thread. The general feeling is that it will probably be confined to the near-distance LOD models. Meaning, it might be used to render your cockpit but it won't be used to render a railway embankment 3 miles away, until you are flying directly over it and it switches to the near-distance LOD models and even then, i don't even know if it's worth the processing expense when you are zipping along at 250mph. If this is accurate it's one more reason not to invest in nVidia if SoW is your main interest, as nVidia's main advantage and clear performance lead comes in applications with heavy tesselation use. If tesselation is used just for a bit of touching up and small details, an Ati card will do just fine and save you quite some money to maybe get something else (eg, extra RAM). Also, the new 6xxx series of Ati cards will be on the market in a few months, so we can expect the current models of both nVidia and Ati to drop in price.
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#4
11-02-2010, 08:20 PM
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While this is all nice and true, you have to consider the fact that IL2 ran and still runs better on nVidia cards. And that Oleg didn't mention anything about holding a presentation for ATI/AMD this month.
The best answer and suggestion is - wait for the game (or game specs) to come out.
__________________
LEVEL BOMBING MANUAL v2.0 | Dedicated Bomber Squadron 'MUSTANG' - compilation of online air victories
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#5
11-02-2010, 09:24 PM
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At the end of November, both ATI and nVIDIA will release their new top of the line cards...THe 6900 series for ATI and the GTX580 for nVIDIA...
nVIDIA is supposed to have a new desing that is aiming at gaming, so faster AND cooler, and ATI uses same technologie as 6800, but more of it on a single card.... Will see ! Salute !
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#6
11-02-2010, 09:40 PM
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Quote:
Quote:
If you're after a top of the line card, you really have to wait until both sides release their cards, and if it is primarily for BoB, try and hold out for more information from Oleg.
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#7
11-02-2010, 09:47 PM
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ATI have announced new 6900 series cards coming out before the end of the year, and details are emerging of a GTX580 from nVidia early next year, which is when the latest rumours suggest BOB will be out. So if you're into the latest and greatest, I'd say wait and see, or just get something to tide you over until then (ATI or a GTX260 with after-market cooling).
You might want to consider too though, even if BOB does make great use of tesselation (who knows, it could be used on the water, maybe even the coastline), chances are even the next generation cards from both camps won't be able to crank it right up and give you good frame-rates. That was the case with the Il-2 series when new graphical enhancements were introduced (with the Pacific Fighters release IIRC), so there is a precedent, and it makes sense that a brand new game in a new series is going to be ahead of the hardware curve for at least a while, if they don't want their game looking too dated too soon. It should still be playable on pretty much all current hardware, but it's highly unlikely you'll be able to max it out until at least a year or two from now, at which point they'll probably introduce some new hardware-choking enhancements and the cycle will go on. So if you're really serious about buying a rig that will be tailored around BOB, right now is not the time to be doing it. That's how it seems to me anyway. Last edited by Les; 11-02-2010 at 10:27 PM.
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#8
11-02-2010, 11:13 PM
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Quote:
If that's a fact, I want a sauce! Apart from a few months this year when a new driver version was incomparable, IL2 has run perfectly on my last three ATI cards. ed: ran allright on my old Voodoo3 as well 
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#10
11-03-2010, 03:15 AM
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I had ATI and NVIDIA cards during the almost 10 years of IL2 lifespan, and it runs fine in both brands...
As any other PC game in modern VGAs... Pointless discussion! Today, IL-2 will runs better in better ATI card if you compare with a weak NVIDIA card, and will runs better in one better NVIDIA card if you have an old ATI card, as any game out there... But even today, with x64 OS, lots of RAM, faster HDs, multicore processors, +1GB VGAs, people still disabling Vsync in "ATI cards" to prevent "ATI stutters"... Really strange logic!!! I can run Il-2 1946 using an ATI HD4850 with just 512MB, with Vsync, AAX8, AFX16, 1680X1050, etc, without any stutter, just using a good amount of ram and a fast processor... Amd the "water" is the same as an NVIDIA card... The big bottleneck in IL-2, as in ANY good flight sim, is the CPU. Any decent and strong VGA can run IL-2 really OK, and probably will run BoB... Last edited by LoBiSoMeM; 11-03-2010 at 03:22 AM.
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