AMD's DX10 is not up to scratch

DX10 testing of AMD's latest ATI Radeon 2900 XT has shown that its performance is lacking when it comes to Company of Heroes, the first DX10 game released to much fanfare last week.

Running an Intel Core 2 Duo system, as is de rigeur for the enthusiast these days, the ATI Radeon 2900 XT came out below the 8800 GTS at both 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with and without AA (and that's even with the AA set at guidelines that the boys at AMD recommend).

The gap isn't much, but there's a good 10-15 per cent difference between the two cards, and this is rather disappointing for a card that has been repeatedly marketed as future proof.



It seems that DX10 still remains Nvidia's game right now.

Based on which drivers? 10-15 sure isn't much at all. First lets see future drivers that fix the high current level of parralelisation (is that spelled correctly?) and then lets see how well Ati's 320 streamprocessors do against Nvidia's mere 120 something. Comparing a product that's just out to one that has been out for over a half year is ridiculous, and we shouldn't even have this pointless discussion.

Edit: Check this btw, you speak japanes don't ya? :P The card has gddr4, that's kinda hot :francesco:

Catalyst 7.5

Yeah I know, but that is 'desperate' getting 1GB of framebuffer. The AMD 320 stream processors do not actually equate directly to anything NVIDIA offers. The internals of both technologies are so staggeringly different to do a 1to1 comparison. I did read a fascinating article about it once, but it got a bit OTT and I fell asleep with the excitement.

If you like I can dig it up.

Anyway my dear friend, here is a link to the benching:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/507/1/

I think it's pretty obvious that AMD's drivers are suffering the same immaturity that NVIDIA's 8800s suffered from upon release. Give them time and their performance will probably get to be more decent. They are really late to the game though. Plus those 2900 XTs run so hot and consume so much power. Not exactly a good thing.

Pretty funny though. With the 2900 XTs coming out, it seems the 8800 GTS 640 MB cards are sold out at a lot of online retailers and the price has rebounded back up to nearly $400. Hehe, I got mine for $285 ;)

I just got a Sapphire X2900 XT and I'm very happy with it. I have briefly tried COH w/DX10 and it doesn't look all that impressive. However I did run the Call of Juarez DX10 benchmark and I get a higher AVG fps than most people running 8800GTS 640mb. Since the card has been out for only a few weeks, I'm sure ATI's next drivers will help out performance quite a bit.

Out of curiosity I just ran the COH benchmark @ 1600 X 1200 everything cranked with no A/A and I got AVG FPS of 30.2 My cpu is only an E4300 @ 2.43GHz which is holding me back quite a bit. What was the test system of the first benchmark oyu posted?

Originally posted by guitarguy@Jun 13 2007, 05:13 PM
What was the test system of the first benchmark oyu posted?

The Test System:

The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit on an ASUS M2A-VM motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ processor. A 2GB kit of Corsair PC2-8500 DOMINATORS was used. The Zalman heat sink kept things cool, while the Corsair 620W Power Supply kept power flowing smoothly.

I took that info out of the link that was provided later on in this topic by GM. Ofcourse your results are better then that old benchmark that has biasity ( is that a word?) dripping from it from all angles. I think Slay "I love Nvidia and Intel and will not look into anything else" mate wrote it :P

Yeah CoJ is the same story as the Lost Planet demo though. Techland worked with AMD to optimize the CoJ dx10 version just as Capcom worked with NVIDIA to optimize the Lost Planet dx10 version. Naturally the CoJ benchmark works better with ATI hardware and the Lost Planet benchmark works better with NVIDIA hardware. Then they go crying to each other about it when they are the ones that started this whole stupid mess. It's not really a good test since the developers keep getting in bed with either ATI or NVIDIA.

The Company of Heroes dx10 patch looks like a joke though. What exactly was done there that dx9 could not do? I don't see any shader model 4 effects at all, just higher detail settings.

I was just reading that on NVIDIA hardware in CoJ a hidden "ExtraQuality" parameter only accessible via a configuration file is enabled, which seemingly has no visual enhancement but reduces the framerate by 10-15%. I wonder if they did this on purpose to artificially deflate the NVIDIA framerate to make ATI look like the better choice. http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=5057

Yeah it seems so, I am actively discussing this over at Beyond3D and it seems that whilst it may be true its not a one off. AMD/ATI also known as DAAMIT are up to dirty tricks to try and lever back some top-end support.

Which essentially means it contains code specifically introduced to undermine G80 based products! Nice one AMD!