ATI or nVidia?

[Uberfuhrer]

Let's answer this question once and for all. Who makes the better GPUs? AMD/ATI or nVidia?

Personally, I like ATI better. Not once have I had a problem with their cards. I'm not bothered by their loud fans -- they never sound like lawnmowers to me.

[JivinJeffJones]

I've just bought myself an ATI 4870X2 based on highly favourable reviews, and it's in the mail. I'm a bit nervous about drivers though, especially since it's a dual-gpu card. I was looking at getting 2, but the price in Aus is $670 a card right now, and quadcrossfire driver support is pretty dodgy right now from what I've read. So I'll wait 6 months or so and get a second one.

I really don't know what cards I've used before, since my computer died before I was into components enough to see what vid card it had. But it was a laptop, so I doubt it had a lot. I hear nVidia is bringing out PhysX drivers for their cards, which could be a plus.

[Uberfuhrer]

Originally Posted by JivinJeffJones

I've just bought myself an ATI 4870X2 based on highly favourable reviews, and it's in the mail. I'm a bit nervous about drivers though, especially since it's a dual-gpu card. I was looking at getting 2, but the price in Aus is $670 a card right now, and quadcrossfire driver support is pretty dodgy right now from what I've read. So I'll wait 6 months or so and get a second one.

I really don't know what cards I've used before, since my computer died before I was into components enough to see what vid card it had. But it was a laptop, so I doubt it had a lot. I hear nVidia is bringing out PhysX drivers for their cards, which could be a plus.

Intel is also coming out with their new GPU at the end of the year to compete with ATI and nVidia. The only thing left is for nVidia to get into the CPU market. I wonder if they'll rework the PhysX processor into a full-blown CPU?

[Martoon]

As a consumer, I have maybe a slight preference for nVidia, but it's pretty much a wash. They're both good GPUs, and they tend to leapfrog each other in performance with successive versions.

As a game developer, I have a strong preference for nVidia. Or rather, against ATI. Generally, nVidia chips pretty much do what they're supposed to when you use different features through DirectX or OpenGL. ATI cards almost always have some quirk that doesn't follow what the standard spec says. So we have to hack around, figuring out a way to make the ATI card do what it should have been doing in the first place. We almost always have to have special-case code to accommodate the different ATI chipsets, while the nVidia chips just do what they should. This is because ATI does a lot of "cheating" in their drivers to squeeze a little more performance out of the standard benchmark tests, by taking some performance shortcuts instead of following the spec exactly.

As a consumer, this makes no difference to you, because the developers do whatever it takes to make the game render correctly on ATI cards. But as a developer, I always cringe when it comes time to test things on the ATI cards.

[millerm277]

Originally Posted by Uberfuhrer

Intel is also coming out with their new GPU at the end of the year to compete with ATI and nVidia. The only thing left is for nVidia to get into the CPU market. I wonder if they'll rework the PhysX processor into a full-blown CPU?

Rumor has it that Larrabee (intel's solution) won't be out until 2010. Also, Intel has never released a high-end GPU before, I would doubt it'll be very good, at least initially.

Currently, ATI is in the lead slightly performance-wise.

[Angry Ayrab]

ZOMG, I forgot all about graphic cards... holy crap. The last thing I purchased was the ATI 9800 pro 256mb ram, AGP 8x... Lol it does sound like a lawnmower, but honestly I stopped playing video games sometime right after I beat Resident Evil 4, and I had stopped PC games a while before that. Man I feel old, because I just can't get myself to play/enjoy videogames anymore, except for me getting on and schooling some kids in halo, but other than that, I can't enjoy them anymore.

I swear to god that I never thought that the day I would stop enjoying video games would come, but it has...

Anyway, I used to work as a computer technician at a big repair center for all the stores, and was pretty good at hardware, and back in my day, ATI had a little bit more umph, but nVidia was more supported and stable. Now, I have no clue.

[Xander]

Personally I prefer ATI. They're the only cards I've ever owned where I dropped them in and they worked right out of the box. Nvidia cards always seem to have some glitch in them.

My 9800XT was wonderful. Esp after I fitted an after market cooler (v.quiet).

The two 7600GTs I had were terrible. I kept getting glitches, SLI never worked right and they wouldn't budge an inch on speed. Oh and the control panel caused more problems than it solved!

I bought a 7950GX2 and water cooled it straight away. Not only did this "low heat" card produce too much heat (it ran at 70c before water cooling) but it also lost the second card after a while so I had a really expensive 7900GT underclocked

Now my present 3870X2 was watercooled from day one so I've no idea what the aircooling is like but it runs at around 40 degrees, handles everything nicely, gets a 3D06 of about 17K with no tweaks and never misses a beat (except when battlefield does anyway). I've had a few glitches with drivers but nothing more serious than windows having a border around it.

As for the programming side (sorry Martoon) I consider that SEP [someone else's problem]. Their code keeps crashing, it doesn't use the potential of my hardware yet I'm forced to upgrade...plus they talk funny!!

[Athenian200]

nVidia is good most of the time, but I've had more nVidia cards fail more quickly, and run sluggishly/buggy than ATI cards. I'm beginning to think ATI is better, but that's probably on the mid-range. On the high end, nVidia might well be better, but I've never been on the high end.

I had to say ATI, though... I have an 6600GT card in my computer right now that (apparently) the fan went out on. It still works fine for web browsing and such, but I can't play 3D games at any reasonable degree of quality without the computer totally locking up so far that I have to flip off the power supply and turn it back on in order to get it to work again.

[Xander]

Originally Posted by Athenian200

nVidia is good most of the time, but I've had more nVidia cards fail more quickly, and run sluggishly/buggy than ATI cards. I'm beginning to think ATI is better, but that's probably on the mid-range. On the high end, nVidia might well be better, but I've never been on the high end.

I had to say ATI, though... I have an 6600GT card in my computer right now that (apparently) the fan went out on. It still works fine for web browsing and such, but I can't play 3D games at any reasonable degree of quality without the computer totally locking up so far that I have to flip off the power supply and turn it back on in order to get it to work again.

Check out Zalman's website or Arctic Cooling. Get a third party cooler for it. What you're doing is overheating the computer. That'll kill off components...quick.

[millerm277]

Originally Posted by Xander

Check out Zalman's website or Arctic Cooling. Get a third party cooler for it. What you're doing is overheating the computer. That'll kill off components...quick.

Well, he's only overheating the Video Card, and considering that the card is only worth about $20 on ebay, buying a cooler for it might not be worth it.