New
#21
NVIDIA
ATI
Out of the over the dozen or so XFX cards I've had I've only had to RMA 2 of then and since I live only 40 miles from their headquarters I could send it out on Monday and get it back by Friday.
But to be perfectly honest my prefered brand is Evga. Fabe
Actually there was one CAT release that claimed an X% performance increase on AMD+ATI systems (9.12?) compared to an Intel+ATI system.
Whether that was just ATI marketing hype that actually panned out or not is a matter of conjecture.
It didn't make any difference to bugs however.
The thing with ATI drivers and issues varies a lot between games. One release may work with title A,B,C but not D,E,F.
If you are playing title A,B,C with driver X that works - you'll never notice an issue. And thus be one of the lucky users that 'has never' had an issue with any of the drivers.
But if you try A,B,C,D,E,F with driver X - where d,E,F is broken/flawed - you're going to notice an issue.
Then again being a crossfire user just adds fuel to the fire.
Just last night, I fired up Dirt 2 for the first time in ages on Cat 10.7a and it was woeful - jumping and flickering and unplayable. Reverted back to 10.5a = perfect.
But single GPU's aren't immune to issues, but if you lucky enough not to notice any issues - then you are lucky :)
I think ATI offers the most bang for the buck. NVidia cards usually get better framerates (performance) while ATI cards render graphics more beautifully (quality), when comparing cards in respective price ranges. For me, I don't care whether I get 50FPS or 75FPS, can't really tell the difference. I just want a card that will give me good graphics for the buck, so I go with ATI. Also, ATI cards tend to be more power efficient and don't heat up your system that bad.
Also, if I remember correctly, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 is the fastest and most powerful graphics card out right now and is of WAY better value than NVidia's fastest. The ATI Radeon HD 5970 performs at 4640 GFLOPS and costs around $650. NVidia's fastest, the GeForce GTX 480 performs at 1344.96 GFLOPS and costs around $490. So with ATI, you're getting 3.5 times more performance for only 1.4 times the price of NVidia. Now, that's what more bang for the buck is. Plus, even though the ATI HD 5970 is 3.5 times more powerful, it only uses ~50 more watts than Nvidia's fastest (or only 1.2 times more power). Talk about high efficiency. So in price, performance and power efficiency, ATI holds the lead right now.
Now, ATI is planning the new ATI HD 5970 Eyefinity which will add about almost another 1000 GFLOPS of graphics processing power.
My sources:
Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Comparison of AMD graphics processing units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I had plenty of trouble with Nvida cards. I stuck with Nvidia because my card was under warranty. After upgrading the card (and paying the difference in price), I played with five different drivers before I got rid of the freezes and blue screens. I have had no problems since then. It was an older driver that worked for me, the third one down on the list. The latest drivers, including the beta, did not work.
Well it has been said over and over that ATI is cheaper than NIVDIA. Personally I would rather pay double the price and know when I get behind my monitor and play a game I don't have to spend 90% of that time tuning the card in just for that game or never getting that game to run correctly at all as I had with the ATI card
Same here.
I just got the 5850 about 6 weeks ago. I removed the GTX285 and 9600GT and put in the 5850 and booted up, loaded the drivers, and it's been fine.
Played a few games in Eyefinity, Crysis, Counterstrike, and Borderlands.
Been playing Just Cause 2 as well, just with 1 screen though, should try it in Eyefinity sometime.
Currently I am an ATI fan:
The last 3 nVidia cards I had all did not work for one reason or another. One card BSOD my machine at the end of the Vista days and BSOD my Windows 7 machine, nothing would fix it and Support had no clue.
I now have an ATI card in the same machine not a single BSOD so I know for sure it was the video card.
I feel each have their pros and cons.
IMO Both AMD and Nvidia have made great graphics card, both of them were easy to install. However I tend to lean towards ATI as my first choice but I would buy whichever card is on sale(I was aiming at the 5770/5750 and caught the 9800gt for $70)
Graphic Cards that I owned:
Nvidia Tiva TNT2
Nvidia Geforce 6150SE (onboard)
ATI Radeon HD 3650
ATI Radeon HD 3200 (onboard)
ATI Radeon HD 4650
Nvidia Geforce 9800gt
I think Intel IGPs and their new Intel HD Graphics should also be thrown into the comparison .