i heard NVIDIA is better, nowadays? but some sites said ATI is good.

so which is better? and why?

for dual GPUs... i think its more for upgrading... of cos performance if u have too much $$$ to spare... but if its for upgrading, after say a year, computer parts will have become cheaper and it might be cheaper to buy a new card?

that's exactly why i haven't gone SLI... the benchmarks i've seen don't really justify the added cost of a 2nd card, and what differences were there, they'd disappear in a year or less as new hardware comes out (unless you spend $1000 USD on 2 ultra high-end cards).

There was an article I read years ago that explained the problems inherent in SLI and Crossfire. It basically boiled down to the fact that the management overhead to synchronise and distribute the workload between the cards negated a large portion of the benefits.

ATI is the best in almost everything EXCEPT for games. Am not a gamer, but i have been using ATI cards for years. Their image quality and features are the best compare to NVIDIA. Nvidia are better when it comes to gaming.
Nvidia is also always sort of over priced, compared to ATI.

Nvidia's drivers are poor compared to ATI. ATI write very good drivers, while Nvidia's drivers are so much more optimized for games, thats why ATI can hardly beat NVIDIA is gaming arena. But thats changed with their 4800 series cards

When i look at a Video card, i look at more video decoding/encoding and other features, and ATI has all these stuffs better than nvidia. Nvidia also has good video and other features, but their driver coding lets them down.

SLI/CROSSFIRE are just over hyped. They do not give you the boost in games you expect, only a very little speed gain is what you get, and you end up paying for two cards, and also EXTRA power consumtion or even most people end up buying a 800W PSU that costs alot unless you go for these cheap ones.

So overall ATI is much better, unless your a gamer then nvidia. ATI are really back in business with their new 4800 series cards, and even forced Nvidia to drop their ridiculous price of GTX200 to match ATI's 4800 series card, which perfoms much better in most gaming benchamrks when compared to GTX200.

My vote goes for ATI
No SLI/CROSSFIRE
GPU Vote for 4800

@shahed26

i read that NVIDIA is recommended for use with Maya a 3D program, so its not only games its good in i guess... or maybe for softwares, NVIDIA works better with Maya only? i think NVIDIA is better in OpenGL?

Nvidia's hardware has always been at least as good, or superior too, ATI's. However, their driver support for the most part is awful.

That is enough for me to stick with ATI, for now. They've been as bad or worse as ATI used to be (and those of you who used ATI cards 2.5 - 5+ years ago know what I mean).

I like both ATI and NVIDIA, but I voted for NVIDIA because their last generations of cards have usually outperformed ATI, until recently.

For the second option, I voted for yes, since I got a 4870x2, though they have their share of problems, such as microstuttering.

As for the third option, I voted for Radeon 4800, I just got a 4870x2.

But I also have a GeForce 8800 GTS as well.

NVIDIA's drivers are usually better than ATI's. Right now I'm experiencing annoying glitches and issues with this current ATI's driver which is annoying, argh. I wish ATI would make better drivers already, want to make me go back to NVIDIA.

ATI and NVIDIA's recent cards are both good. But i wouldnt buy a NVIDIA card just because it works better for only a particular software, i would go for that works well with everything i throw at it, and ATI is IMO better because of their excellent drivers. Open GL maybe is better with NVIDIA, but ATI is not bad either.

ATI had rough times in the past where NVIDIA dominated, but thats all changed now. ATI all the way for me!!

in my opinion this question is stupid.
ati has that fastest card out, the 4870X2, and its 4870 and 4850 are the best cards for price/performance.
you need to specify what you mean by best? what price range?

I chose ATI but that isn't my favorite. I started being a dedicated 3dfx guy, as my first 4 video cards were 3dfx. They were the Voodoo Rush, Voodoo 2, Voodoo 3, and the Voodoo 5500. There was a Riva TNT2 in that timeline someplace tho... By default I ended up getting an nVidia card (PNY GeForce 3 Ti200) which I used until just recently. I bought an ATI card recently because the price was good, had a decent amount of RAM and worked in a 4x AGP slot. I haven't been disappointed with it at all, so I have switched to ATI for now.

Wow, we have some old-timer here , I bought one in 1997 and loved it with Hexen .

I go with ATI too these days, just for their better Vista drivers a while ago. I like my 2600XT as it does the job well without giving me some DLL error from time to time.

ah Hexen... aka Heretic II or do I have that backwards... You try nowadays to spend $200 on a 6MB video card... But I bought it to play GL Quake, I didn't play Hexen on the PC only the Nintendo 64. I liked Hexen II tho.

OK. Another (recent, mind you) set of reasons to avoid nvidia hardware:

G84 and G86 65nm chip problems (note that first link will end up with "nvidia-opens-whoop-a**-itself" in your browser's url. Change the *'s to "s"'s to see the URL. Silly filter)

G92 and G94 55nm chip problems

Dell has put up a blog post on the issue and HP has a "warranty enhancement" program for laptops affected by these types of problems (failure to boot, random beeps, video issues, wireless adapter failures, etc). That's quite an extensive hardware list, and quite the spectrum of nVidia chipset issues (and it looks like there are many more HP models affected than Dell models, but those are also some of the most popular models from both vendors, so...). Again, nVidia's fix basically does nothing more than to try and postpone the problems until warranty periods expire, so users cannot replace what nVidia (and HP, and Dell, and... you get the picture) know are defective parts. Not only shoddy engineering, but shady business practices. I can't say AMD/ATI are any better or worse, just pointing out the facts about nVidia's problems that relate to this thread.

IMHO, right now ATI has the advantage. Their solution is powerful and scalable. I foresee it getting even better. NVIDIA released a monster of a card, yes, but then turned around and released new G92 based cards as well. They didn't dive right in.

I have owned NVIDIA cards since I replaced my 3dfx Voodoo5 5500. I got the NVIDIA Geforce 3 the day it was initially released and stuck with NVIDIA since. I skipped the FX fiasco. Now I own an ATI Radeon HD 4870 and I don't regret the purchase one bit. It's truly amazing. This is the first ATI card that I've every purchased.

NVIDIA was so sure they'd destroy ATI with the GT200 series of cards yet they got an enormous shock. They're doing damage control on the PR side, as well. NVIDIA has been wounded and they know it.

The quote below is from an article here: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/220947/nvision...-from-2006.html




NVIDIA was all about how they'd kick ATI and Intel to the curb. They'd thrash them with sheer raw graphical power. They didn't thrash ATI. They didn't even come close and things were actually so close that NVIDIA had to cut prices to compete. Now we have NVIDIA saying, "Yeah, they shocked us BUT..." No buts. They predicted wrong and now they're looking for any possible way to find an out as to why their cards are better than ATI's.

For now I believe ATI is headed in the right direction and has the right technological methodology. Come Q4 of next year when we'll likely be seeing the next generation of cards that fully support DirectX 11 then things may have changed. I'm not a fanboy. My allegiance is to myself. I just go with what I see as the better technology and right now ATI happens to be the winner in my book.

I guess I'll add my own opinion too.

I was a long-time fan of ATI cards (never had a problem with them back then).

Then the GeForce 4 Ti4x00 came out, and it was supposed to be oh-so-great, so I spend a fair amount of money on it, and it turns out it sucked. The drivers weren't too great, the video input (it was a VIVO card) was crippled with Macrovision detection (unless you used ancient drivers), the video output (s-video) quality was pretty awful, and you *HAD* to reboot to change which display is your primary monitor (so things like the video overlay work, so you can play stuff on your TV -- think HTPC). That was perhaps the most problematic/most deceiving card I've ever owned.

Then I got some more (including intel onboard, and a ATI x800 that worked fine besides a couple buggy versions of the drivers). No major issues with any of them.

And now I felt like trying nvidia again, because of their then new video processor (VP2/BSP/AES128) that would supposedly decode H.264 in hardware and all that. Turns out, I never actually got it to work, using any drivers, on any OS, using any codec, or any player. And now we know these cards (G84/G86) are also experiencing very high failure rates. Combine that with poor drivers... I can't say I'm really happy about it.

ATI doesn't seem to have the heat problems, their cards have always been a lot better for HTPC/video usage (for me at least), their Avivo/UVD stuff seems to work a lot better, their drivers could hardly be much worse, some ATI cards seem to be more power efficient (low power) than anything nvidia has to offer, and they currently beat nvidia on the 3D-power/$ (for gamers) too. And they're even releasing their specs to have fully working & open source Linux drivers.

You know what I'll be buying next time.

Thats what i mean guys, their drivers are very bad, but their hardware features are good, too bad NVIDIA can't write good drivers, even now with their new cards as well. No point having a top video card, if there are no good drivers, and thats been the case with NVIDIA.

If your after a video card with excellent all round features and also features that actually work, then go for ATI 3800 OR 4800 Series. AVOID nvidia!!
(unless your a pure GAMER, then nvdia is a good choice, NOTE: ATI's recent 4800 series card can outperform nvidia's new card almost in every benchmark)

I forgot to comment on how the poll is setup in my previous post. I see that for the ATI cards the Radeon HD4800 series is combining the 4850 and 4870 into one vote. How come? If the NVIDIA GTX 260 and 280's are listed separately then it would have been better to separate the 4850 and 4870 or just list the NVIDIA cards as the NVIDIA GT200 series.

Indeed, I get loads of HP systems here with fried chipsets from nVidia, especially the 6150/430. These systems include laptops and desktop computers, the V3000 and the SR1915.

So you got the "not TI" version? That one had a big hardware cursor bug by the way.

I got a golden sample from ASUS back in those days, and it was given to me by nVidia on a meeting. I liked it as it was a good step up from the GeForce 2 .

Well, the Radeon 9800 had heat problems...

I got the original vanilla Visiontek Geforce 3 the day it first was released so, yes, before the "Ti" versioning existed. I still have the card kicking around. I never was aware of a bug and didn't run into an issues using it other than it getting to the point of just being obsolete due to age.

I voted Nvidia in the poll a few days ago, but am considering changing my mind (although it's too late for the purposes of the poll itself.)

Well. The latest news is that a whole other bunch of nvidia chips are bad. I used to prefer Nvidia, but am seriously considering buying an ATI card. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 looks nice, and allegedly performs on-par with a GTX200, even though it's far cheaper.

Yes, after my earlier posts I heard more about how much the NVIDIA bad boards has expanded. However, that particular writer for The Inquirer has a serious issue with NVIDIA which is noticeable from previous stories concerning the company. The article may be skewed as a result of the author's dripping hatred for NVIDIA. I'm not defending NVIDIA, mind you, but I do want to see other posts independently verifying what was stated in that The Inquirer article.

I own an EVGA NVIDIA 8800 GT (G92), as well, and it still functions beautifully and will still get much use for HTPC use but I'm definitely unhappy to read about just how far and wide the problems with NVIDIA boards is spreading. This is bad extremely bad news for the company.

You shouldn't really believe what comes out of that site, The Inquirer. The author, Charlie, is known as an anti NVIDIA person, he's always against NVIDIA and therefore posts a lot of crap about how NVIDIA products are failing, etc. He recently mentioned that XFX and EVGA were going to abandon NVIDIA, which was proved false and now he is claiming that all G92 chips and so on are defected and going to fail. Don't believe any of his s***, its just stupid.

I'm not an NVIDIA fan either, I choose whatever is best suited for me.

NVIDIA, No, GeForce 9800.

I started using NVIDIA cards when the original GeForce came out. I had used a couple of ATi cards before that and had a really horrible experience with them. I switched to a Voodoo 2 setup after the ATi cards. Went with the GeForce after that. I've been an NVIDIA customer ever since. It's what I prefer.

Having a bias (or even a grudge) doesn't mean the information is inaccurate. And, from somewhat inside knowledge, his story is for the most part quite true and easy to prove. He's a journalist, yes, and has a grudge against nVidia it seems, yes. But the story still has truth. Having a bias does not necessarily make you wrong.

the way I see it:

ATI
currently has smaller fab process, meaning less heat and energy use
UVD supports hardware accelerated VC1 decoding
open sourced some driver specs
supports DirectX 10.1
integrated audio for hdmi

NVIDIA
better OpenGL performance
hardware PhysX processing in Geforce8 or later
HybridSLI / HybridPower

Larrabee (Intel)
real-time raytracing
???

Driver stability and performance goes back and forth so much I cant say who is better anymore.

Go with Green! Green Rules, I love Green and going to stay with Green, Green has been with me forever, I never had any issues with Green but have had more issues with Red than Green.

All in all, I think Nvida is the best.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articl...ire/0432343.htm

Apparently nVidia may actually have to pay for their failures, if a court agrees with the plaintiffs. Bias indeed.

ATI by far has the better products. They're great for video (I have an HTPC with a silent HD 3450) and decent in gaming (I have a 4850) for the gaming rig. I gotta say, NVIDIA really is faltering BIG time. The whole defective products (G86/84) buggy drivers, no solid products. Heck, even in the mid-range ATI is leading now with the new 4600 series.

This is coming from a guy who's had Matrox, ATI and NVIDIA cards.

LOL... They are paying for it now


More details
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39263/118/

So where does my black one rank?

But seriously: Right now I’m using ATI because I like the IQ. These eyes aren't what they used to be.

A second lawsuit has cropped up against nVidia for the same thing. Looks like things will get interesting - if they did indeed lie to the market about the problem they knew about since 2007, there are scenarios where nVidia's $1.6billion reserves do not cover the costs of repairs, putting them into bankruptcy and out of business.

That would be a shame because regardless whether one company makes a better product then another, competition is always healthy and necessary for better consumer products.

Even though i HATE nvidia video cards, because off their awefull drivers (had many bad experience with their drivers), i really want nvidia to get out of this mess, and stay in business. Without nvidia ATI will rule, and we will hardly see anything new in the market, because there will be no competition.

I have voted in the poll...

I have at the moment a GeForce 8800GTS 320MB DDR3 card and its the proverbial dogs wotsits!!!! I wont have anythin else but nVidia!!

My HD4870 is making my eyes bleed. IQ is too high? Textures at a distance are way too sharp.

Can you post a screen of UT2004 if you have it? I'd like to compare.



Larrabee is a paper warrior. Let's see a working chip first.

Its rumored to support hybrid raytracing. Mix of raster, and some ray here and there.

I feel that ATI Drivers is not good as NVIDIA, so...
(Because I meet several problems from ATI when I do Computer Maintenance works in local area )

Are the drivers you are having trouble with old, or newer? ATI catalyst drivers have been pretty rock solid since v7.1 released, back in January of 2007 if I am remembering the date correctly. If you're running into people using 6.x (or heaven forbid 5.x or 4.x) versions, then yes, these weren't of the highest quality. Note that the 7.x releases were the first official releases after the AMD purchase of ATI (coincidence? I think not).

Ah yeah, I agree.
(However in my place, the magazine still says that AMD-ATI's drivers have some problems.
I cannot see if this is true )

BTW, how do you feel about ATI catalyst control center---CCC?
(vs NVIDIA Control Panel)

About the same. Unless you're needing to modify settings on the fly, neither is necessary. Helpful for some, mostly not for others.

I'm partial to ATi cards only because I've had bad luck with most Nvidia ones I've used (not to mention I played CS1.6 for a very long time and ATi kicks a** on GoldSrc based games for some reason.)

SLi/CrossFire were purely marketing schemes, performance increases are minimal.

I think I like the Nvidia Control Panel a little more than Catalyst, though, it's a little quicker, same functionality though.

I guess NVIDIA's Control Panel is only two thing better than ATI's CCC...

One is that, CCC needs .NET Framework 2.0 Redist.
The second, ATI drivers' setup usually have sth bundle...
(Like, Steam or some games trial...)

P.S.
To #40, what is A+ and MSOP???

Well, not entirely true, but in reality yes. Games aren't written to take advantage of multiple GPU processing, and (currently) neither OpenGL or DirectX have the ability to do multithreading of GPU rendering. DirectX 11 will fix that, and games written for DX11 will have the ability to multithread the rendering, but the current crop of hardware probably won't be 100% DX11 compliant so it's of little use now. As it stands currently, the apps/games rely on the drivers and hardware to utilize both efficiently, and you draw conclusions from there as to how successful that has been.

http://certification.comptia.org/a/default.aspx

A+ is probably one of the most standard IT related certs there is and MSOP is Microsoft Office Professional, it's for 2003 though ^_^

Just when I thought nvidia drivers couldn't get any worse... Looks like they're causing RDP problems, and I've experienced the "an error is preventing this slide show from playing" bug since a nvidia driver update. It just keeps getting better everyday! I think I'm gonna order a new Radeon real soon. Probably a 4650, or perhaps a passively cooled 3450..

Even though I voted for ATI a few weels ago, right now my trusty Vanta LT has been called into service while I await a new fan for an ATI card. During the last year I’ve had to do this on three different computers. While it is unscientific to switch brands because of bad luck it’s starting to make sense to me. My two indestructible backup cards are made by Matrox and nVidia so I’m going to try newer cards by these two manufacturers. If nothing else I’ll have more up to date backups so I can avoid down time.

Naaaaa... You would like to take a look at the HD 4830 by then .

The first card I got was a Riva TNT2 which while it wasn't particularly fast (when I got it) still played games for almost 2 years before I switched to ATI and got the 9600 Pro and then (a good bit later) the X850 XT PE. While I upgraded twice, a friend of mine got a Ti4400 (or was it 4600?) and it lasted him for 4 years and he was even able to play GTA San Andreas on it (although not very nicely ).

I've always found Nvidia's cards last fairly long, and they have nice features, while ATI cards (ignoring the 2xxx series) were always pretty good on power and performance but somehow had to be replaced after a while. If Nvidia got their act together now and managed to fix their drivers for the 9xxx and 2xx series then they should be able to edge up to ATI.

I'm definitely interested in seeing the next line of cards from both manufacturers.

[quote name='brucevangeorge' date='Sep 16 2008, 11:12 PM' post='797107']
My HD4870 is making my eyes bleed. IQ is too high? Textures at a distance are way too sharp.


Sorry I didn’t see this sooner.

I repaired a computer that had an ATI card with an Envision monitor and it was too much. The colors looked over saturated and it lacked shadow detail. I tried CCC and the monitor adjustments but that just made it worse. I tried it with an nVidia card and it was fine. I would say it’s a mater of matching the right card with the right monitor.

To use an old school film reference ATI looks like Kodachrome and nVidia looks like Ektachrome. At least to my eyes.

I figured it out. Everything was 'over optimized', texture shimmering. Catalyst AI was set to High, when it should be set to Low. Performance difference is negligible from Low to High.

Its back to normal and everything looks great.

I still have my good old SAPPHIRE ATi 9550 card and playing C&C3 and Crysis with it, although not very nice to play, ATi are the best, forget nVIDIA with their lies, problems, etc. ATi to the end!