HD 4850 Previews

[DilTech]

NVIDIA can only stall adoption, not prevent it. Look at the hits NVIDIA takes in games with deferred shading... up to 68% in Bioshock on the GTX 260. If Bioshock were DX10.1 you'd see the same 14-24% AA hit on the 4850. Eventually, almost all games are going to use DX10.1 and deferred shading, that's a promise. When that day comes (probably by this time next year), assuming it doesen't run out of video memory, you'll see 4850s beating GTX 280s any time >= 4xAA is used. The only way this projection could be wrong is if NVIDIA has undocumented support for DX10.1 based shader AA.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334&p=7

They do, NVidia support some DX10.1 features, but they won't state which ones they do. There's a support query feature in their driver developers can use to check what features NVidia support, aka, they found out how to get around DX10.1's all or nothing support.

It's useful to point out that, in spite of the fact that NVIDIA doesn't support DX10.1 and DX10 offers no caps bits, NVIDIA does enable developers to query their driver on support for a feature. This is how they can support multisample readback and any other DX10.1 feature that they chose to expose in this manner. Sure, part of the point of DX10 was to eliminate the need for developers to worry about varying capabilities, but that doesn't mean hardware vendors can't expose those features in other ways. Supporting DX10.1 is all or nothing, but enabling features beyond DX10 that happen to be part of DX10.1 is possible, and NVIDIA has done this for multisample readback and can do it for other things.

NVidia supports it.

- 8800GTS is a EOL product. Is a matter of time to they disapear from the market. They don´t event count to this fyght.
- HD 4850 with beta drivers is competitive with 9800GT/8800 ultra. And competite = equal or better in overall performance.
- Crysis is 1 game. We need to see the overall numbers or the cards are just made to bench and not to play?
- The Nvidia= God drivers and ATI=Bad drivers is just hilariours. If is that your argument it´s false. ATI don´t use costumers to bombard them with beta + beta drivers like Nvidia and the oficial ones have 3 months or so. So if anyone has to learn is Nvidia from ATI with their 1 month driver WHQL launch.

NVidia's every few week betas I actually would rather have than once per month. Why? Every issue in a game for the most part recently has had a beta driver to fix it very shortly afterwards... Meanwhile, how long did it take for ATi to get AA working in UE3 titles with it's "better whql drivers", or the length of time it took for a fix to lost planet with it's "better whql drivers"? That's where the argument comes from, and it's very valid.