Good thing SOW is Nvidia's friendly !

[robtek]

Rightly said!
The correct thread-title should be: Nvidia is SOW friendly.

[T}{OR]

Important thing to note when looking at all those reviews (e.g. when comparing the two current rivals HD 6970 vs. GFX 570):

GFX 570:

• quieter & colder
• better value for money

HD 6970:

• hotter and louder
• has more RAM - must have if you're playing on more than one monitor

Originally Posted by robtek

Rightly said!
The correct thread-title should be: Nvidia is SOW friendly.

Oleg himself confirmed that he will be sending early versions of the game to Nvidia for optimizing. That was over a month ago.


Performance wise, both cards are almost equal with only difference in some games for which they are better optimized. Since 570 is an nVidia card, the choice is obvious here.

However, the real diamond here is HD 6950. In CF it's performance is awesome. Decisions, decisions...

[JG52Krupi]

Originally Posted by T}{OR

Important thing to note when looking at all those reviews (e.g. when comparing the two current rivals HD 6970 vs. GFX 570):

GFX 570:

• quieter & colder
• better value for the money

HD 6970:

• hotter and louder
• has more RAM - must have if you're playing on more than one monitor

Oleg himself confirmed that he will be sending early versions of the game to Nvidia for optimizing. That was over a month ago.


Performance wise, both cards are almost equal with only difference in some games for which they are better optimized. Since 570 is an nVidia card, the choice is obvious here.

However, the real diamond here is HD 6950. In CF it's performance is awesome. Decisions, decisions...

LOL when has nvidia ever been the cheaper option

[T}{OR]

Originally Posted by JG52Krupi

LOL when has nvidia ever been the cheaper option

Apparently the Hell froze over as 570's are priced lower than 6970's.

[JG52Krupi]

Originally Posted by T}{OR

Apparently the Hell froze over as 570's are priced lower than 6970's.

Dammit i must have slept myself into a parallel dimension again...

[robtek]

The prices i see atm are HD6970 330€ and GFX 570 350€!

[T}{OR]

I only quoted what various reviews said on the first page. If that is the case than AMD made a good choice. Or just your retailer.

[swiss]

Originally Posted by speculum jockey

Good advice. Everyone always quotes Nvidia/ATI's flagship card, but really few people buy them. They're just bragging rights because anyone with 1/2 a brain waits for the next "middle of the road" card release 3-4 months later that has the same or better performance at 1/2 the price. I'm waiting a few months after it's out. Maybe wait for a patch or two. Then after all the reviews and tests are out I'm going to pick the card (whatever brand) that runs it best for the money I'm willing to spend.

As for AMD/ATI not sending a card or a rep over, I can totally understand that.

"Hey, we got a call from Russia, about SOW."
"What game?"
"Storm of war, the guys that made IL-2, it's been in development for the past 5 years."
"A flight sim. . . been developed for 5 years? Forget about it."

Sounds like ATI missed out on a highly lucrative opportunity! It's a wonder they own over 1/2 the market. Oh wait! They don't have to do jack since anyone making a game would be stupid to not use ATI samples to appeal to over half the market.

Hmm. . . Spend money by sending a rep and free cards over so you get a logo on boot-up? Or save your money and time on a niche release and have the developers do it themselves?

Really?
You may have noticed the PC market is not emerging but shrinking.
As a result any manufacturer would be well advised to fill any niche they can find or are offered.
Not at any price of course.

The price of cards are peanuts, they would need maybe 6 cards, if they retail at $600, cost will be around $150/p.
Big bucks, huh?

As for sending a rep over - AMD have a Moscow office...

BTW: I now of a few bicycle companies who had exactly the attitude you suggested - all of them went for chapter 11.
Rock Shox and Cannondale are probably the most famous of them.

[Chivas]

I could care less which company makes the fastest gpu. The competition should make thing cheaper for all of us. I buy which ever gpu is faster at the time I'm upgrading. I like the idea of Nvidia working with the SOW developers. This could lead to a similiar situation where nvidia cards were better than ati card at rendering water in IL-2 at one time.

I know I will be upgrading quickly after SOW is released, and I see the first benchmarks.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Flanker35M

S!

Hopefully we do NOT see the "TWAT" symbol when starting up SoW one day. Would be a big error to margin a game already in a small niché to just one brand..again. Should have learned that from IL-2.

Blaming AMD for NOT developing SoW with Oleg is pretty darn useless as we do NOT know anything what goes on deep behind the scenes. We get tidbits of info, but Oleg does NOT share confidential information with the community. Be Sure!

I read at some point Luthier(if I remember right) had a machine with AMD 5870HD for testing SoW. Both AMD and NV support DX9-11 that are to be used in SoW, would not worry about it

I run AMD system, have a 580GTX too and must say that in games I play (VSync is ON) I see no difference in performance AT ALL between the cards. IL-2 is an exception but it is "TWAT" certified as we all know.

Benchmarks are different, but if BOTH brands can push a steady 60fps+ at your preferred resolution/settings then it is just stupid to argue if the other brand can do 200fps and the other 190fps..as you can not see the difference at all

Originally Posted by addman

Isn't it very simple though? Buy the best you can for the money you have! I can't afford a new monster card at the moment but even if I could, why would I want to fork out X amount of € now? SoW is still far off. General advice, wait til SoW is released, try it with your current hardware. You might be surprised/dissapointed at the performance but at least you'll know what the game demands, IMHO of course.

Originally Posted by speculum jockey

Good advice. Everyone always quotes Nvidia/ATI's flagship card, but really few people buy them. They're just bragging rights because anyone with 1/2 a brain waits for the next "middle of the road" card release 3-4 months later that has the same or better performance at 1/2 the price. I'm waiting a few months after it's out. Maybe wait for a patch or two. Then after all the reviews and tests are out I'm going to pick the card (whatever brand) that runs it best for the money I'm willing to spend.

That's pretty much the way i see it as well. I've had nVidia cards all my life but got an Ati for the first time when i bought my latest system, simply because it was better and cheaper than nVidia's offerings for my preferred price range at that point in time.

All i care about is having a card that gives me about 50-60 FPS in mid-high settings or 35-50 FPS in high settings (not perfect for now, just a bit more than middle of the road), runs cool and low on wattage and is not terribly expensive. I have a single 1680x1050 22" monitor as well, so it's not like i'm going to need something that can push an awful lot of pixels anytime soon, in fact i will probably bring up my RAM from 3 to 6GB before i even consider swapping my Ati 4890 1GB.

Also, the thread title is misleading as there's no official verdict on which brand runs SoW better and the reason is simple: we don't have SoW yet to run any benchmarks on. All we know is nVidia is interested in pushing some cards to the flight sim crowd, but we don't know how well their architecture works with the game engine or what AMD will or won't do.

IL2 is nVidia friendly due to OpenGL. SoW is a directx game engine, so as long as both GPU manufacturers come up with driver updates to correct any possible glitches it will be just fine either way. And that's the way it should be, because lack of competition only hurts us, the consumers. For example, if the end result from picking any brand is a gain of 10 FPS for an extra 150$ then they can keep their extra 10 FPS, i can wait and run things in lower detail for another 6 months before things get cheaper

In any case, there's a lot of speculating and quoting benchmarks from games that are fundamentally different from flight sims (like first person shooters for example) in the way they work and what kind of resources they depend on. Well, i don't need 150 FPS, give me 50 FPS but stable/constant frame rates so as not to mess up my gunnery, some fast RAM to shorten the map loading times and that's what i need for my flight simming. We don't really know much about the kind of graphics features the SoW engine will or will not use, or how much it will benefit from each GPU architecture. Case in point, the excitement about tesselation (used mainly in shooters up to now) until Oleg Maddox himself went forward and said that SoW won't use any tesselation at all.

The whole situation reminds me of a Greek saying that goes "the fish are still in the water but the frying pan is already on the fire"