ATI cards question

[GibsonEX]

Hey guys,

i didn't want to hijack somebody's thread so i'll start a new one as i'm curious about ATI cards. I've never had ATI card, i've been with Nvidia so far, but it's interesting to see how well ATI cards do in 3DMark considering how high they score, but in real world performance they are still a hair under Nvidia. Can somebody explain to me why is that without starting ATI vs Nvidia war, as i would like to learn about it. That upcoming 4870 looks really attractive to me so far, and i am not really impressed with 9 series of Nvidia so far. Again, i don't want to start a fanboys war here, i just want to learn about ATI cards, so please keep the comparisons as civil as possible

 

[cyclone3d]

1. 3dMark is not a usefull test for real word gameplay. It tests theoretical speed.

2. Game devs and MS OS Devs don't know how to program anymore.

3. A lot of games are more "optimized" for a certain type of card... this goes back to the whole... don't know how to program anymore thing.

4. From my understanding, most all games will not be able to use all of an ATI cards power to the fullest, efectively reducing the 320 stream processor units to 160 or 80 due to not enough threading. This also goes back to crappy programming.

Edit: actually... just realized I made a mistake with the strem processor reduction numbers.... unless I am mistaken, it should be 64, 128, 192, 256, 320.