Which graphics card to choose?

Ah i see. Thank you for the helpfull information!

RaviR said:

Ok noted! The only draw back is the drivers for Ati cards? Don't want to end up buying a card only to be fustrated with driver issues. If that's the case the 660ti is the best bet?

Nvidia is actually enchancing his drivers to increase performance in games and to keep updated Physx, Surround, SLI, 3D vision profiles and other visual effects (like ambient occlusion) in games. Ati does it, but not like Nvidia. If you play a game with 2 GPUs with identical graphics performance, one Ati and the other one Nvidia, the Nvidia one will perform better.

Also keep in mind that Nvidia cards supports Physx technology and are able to use it in games, providing extraordinary phisics real effects. With an ATI card, if you want to use PhysX technology (and sometimes you can't without an Nvidia card), it must be rendered by the CPU.

Also, in my experience I always had issues with Ati cards. I owned a Radeon 9600 AGP which was running in 4x mode instead of 8x, an HD 3450 AGP which had the same problem, a MSI X1650 which worked well (the only one! :) ), an HD 5670 which didn't display anything on-screen and I returned it back to my vendor, and now in my second pc I'm using an HD 4870 X2, which is giving me power issues and I spent last 15 days to keep it working perfectly (and I reinstalled Windows for it).
I hope that with Radeon HD 7000 series, AMD solved these issues...

I owned also 2 Nvidia cards, a GTS 450 which was a really good mid-end GPU, and now I own a GTX 690 on my main pc, which provides extreme performance and good configuration via Nvidia control panel.

But, Nvidia cards are really more expensive than Ati cards... So, this time, if I must choose, I'd go for the HD 7950, because the performance gap between it and the GTX 660 Ti is not small. Anyway, Radeon HD 7000 Serires GPUs should be well supported...
But i prefer Nvidia

Dorado said:

RaviR said:

Ok noted! The only draw back is the drivers for Ati cards? Don't want to end up buying a card only to be fustrated with driver issues. If that's the case the 660ti is the best bet?

Nvidia is actually enchancing his drivers to increase performance in games and to keep updated Physx, Surround, SLI, 3D vision profiles and other visual effects (like ambient occlusion) in games. Ati does it, but not like Nvidia. If you play a game with 2 GPUs with identical graphics performance, one Ati and the other one Nvidia, the Nvidia one will perform better.

Also keep in mind that Nvidia cards supports Physx technology and are able to use it in games, providing extraordinary phisics real effects. With an ATI card, if you want to use PhysX technology (and sometimes you can't without an Nvidia card), it must be rendered by the CPU.

Also, in my experience I always had issues with Ati cards. I owned a Radeon 9600 AGP which was running in 4x mode instead of 8x, an HD 3450 AGP which had the same problem, a MSI X1650 which worked well (the only one! :) ), an HD 5670 which didn't display anything on-screen and I returned it back to my vendor, and now in my second pc I'm using an HD 4870 X2, which is giving me power issues and I spent last 15 days to keep it working perfectly (and I reinstalled Windows for it).
I hope that with Radeon HD 7000 series, AMD solved these issues...

I owned also 2 Nvidia cards, a GTS 450 which was a really good mid-end GPU, and now I own a GTX 690 on my main pc, which provides extreme performance and good configuration via Nvidia control panel.

But, Nvidia cards are really more expensive than Ati cards... So, this time, if I must choose, I'd go for the HD 7950, because the performance gap between it and the GTX 660 Ti is not small.

As I suspected, Nvidia is the way I think I'm gonna go. The 690 really is a beast just the price is a little out of my range I'll wait a while and make a final decision on which one I'm going to get.

Thanks again for the helpful information!

You're welcome :)