9800GT vs 3870 Crossfire

I know this has been discussed, I just read through some threads but they were a few weeks old and so the question of
nVidia or ATI could not be answered (aside from the occasional opinion of the ATI│nVidia fanboy).

It is now December and I am hoping that someone has new information
that can put this question to rest.

Some threads suggest that any given game may perform better with either
an ATI or nVidia card and that is fine, but as a whole and for the majority
I'd like to know which performs better in games, not 3DMark06 or any other
benchmark software.

I am looking at the OCZ Whitebook but ATI GPU's are what keeps me from
entering my Amex number.

Thoughts anyone?

 

ati gpus are not "weak" they just dont have the most powerful single card(4870X2), plus their drivers are more stable and there arnt 300 driver releases a day.

From what I have seen, the 3870 crossfire is equal to the 8800m GTX SLI, which is equal to the 9800gt SLI.

The 3870 x-fire can be had for less too.

 

the Xfire 3870 will kill a single 9800gt obviously, but you have to be a lil bit patient with Multi GPU systems, you will have to wait for new drivers for each game that comes out to make Xfire work better

 

exactly, theres a waiting game with ATI drivers sometimes, but when the work, the cards always dominate Nvidia, but if they dont, its the other way around.

 

... 3870 Crossfire....?

 

Crossfire vs SLI, 3870s are outperformed by 9800GTs and GTXs. There's enough benchmarks in the OCZ forums that make this fact evident. Supposedly, the upcoming ATI driver which releases on December 10th will boost performance, so stay tuned.

1v1 or 2v2, the 3870 can't keep up, but the power they provide comes at a much lower pricepoint than any SLI notebook.

 

Not a fanboy or anything, but I have noticed that ATI drivers have been unstable here and there.

 

what did you expect? they are the first ATI Xfire drivers for notebooks ever, just wait and you'll see what those beasts can do

 

Not cheaper at all, you can get the toshiba 305x-706 which has sli 9800gts 512mb, with 4gigs ddr3 for the same price as m17 with crossfire 3870's with 2gigs

 

but the Xfire will win

 

but you do realize geforce 9800gts is weaker than geforce 9800gt right? And 3870 is same league as geforce 9800gt more or less.

 

yup, they both are in the same range, the 9800GTS is a bit more likely an HD 3850

 

notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9800M-GTS.9918.0.html
Are you saying this is incorrect? according to notebookcheck 9800m gts scores 1080 more points in 3dmark06

 

notebookcheck.net my friend.. is what i will rely on when all people on planet earth are dead

 

First - notebookcheck isn't the most reliable source for benches since they don't list the system nor do they list the resolution 3dmark was ran at.

Second - you shouldn't compare cards based on 3dmark scores alone, but more on the framerates they get in real world benchmarks such as games themselves. What good is a video card that can outscore every other card on the market but achieves less framerates than most other cards?(i'm not talking specifically about any card)

 

from what I've read, the gts and gt and gtx were pretty close to havng the same frame rates in games. They were with a couple frames within each other. So, the cards are pretty close in terms of performance.

 

notebookcheck says that my rig scores 6k or something, while on real world, i can score above 9100 (and i believe i can break 10k with a better CPU)

EDIT:

well, in games like Crysis thats a yes, but on most other games, you can see a framerate difference

 

3870s in Crossfire are significantly better than a single 9800M GT in most games (now that most games are optimized for multi-gpu configurations). Games such as Crysis and Far Cry 2 don't scale well with Crossfire, hence significantly lower performance when compared to SLi, but as some are speculating in the OCZ forum, drivers may be the issue.

If the ATi GPUs are holding you back, you may want to consider the 48xx that will be available for the Whitebook in Q2 2009.