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ati vs nvidia ? whats the real diff

R

rowbear62468

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 16, 2004
Messages
319
assuming you have equal level cards from ati and nvidia, whats the real difference? wont they both perform about the same at the given card level?
 
there isnt one... just some nerds love a stupid graphics card more than the wife at home... sad
 
they will perform the same. nvidia has some newer features this time round, but both will give you great IQ and terrific performance. you'll be happy with either brand.
 
Well for a real answer... At the same price point Nvidia is much better this time. And at all price points their cards support more advanced features.
 
rowbear62468 said:
assuming you have equal level cards from ati and nvidia, whats the real difference? wont they both perform about the same at the given card level?
Click to expand...

define "equal level cards"
 
Same price category. Like how the x800 pro is supposed to compete with the 6800gt even though its not nearly the same.
 
ATI and Nvidia can't be properly compared. There are just way too many variables. ATI beats Nvidia in some cases, and Nvidia beats ATI in others. Each have their upsides and downsides.
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
Well for a real answer... At the same price point Nvidia is much better this time. And at all price points their cards support more advanced features.
Click to expand...

well for the correct answer look below. \/

lithium726 said:
they will perform the same. nvidia has some newer features this time round, but both will give you great IQ and terrific performance. you'll be happy with either brand.
Click to expand...
 
If you use any operating system other than Windows, then nVidia cards are better. ATi's driver support for non-Windows OSs is a joke.
 
nvidia is better because their logo is mainly green and green is a nice enviormental clean colour.ati have an evil red coloured logo that can create anger and damage things.

therefore nvidia is best!

j/k

i would like to say ther is a difference but there isn't that could justify a clear victor. maybe nvidia if you use linux because of better driver support. i don't even think that the 'ati is better at d3d, nvidia is better at og' debate can even be completely true anymore, especially with this gen's cards.

so i'd just recommend whatever colour PCB or heatsink or games that come with the card you prefer for your final decision (as well as price obviously)
 
Nvidia cards have pixel shader 3.0, and they are bigger.Also the 6800GT vs X800 Pro, then 6800GT has 16 pipelines, while ATI only has 12, once you get into ati's higher end cards the point becomes moot.
 
The only diff between the two lines of cards is... EVERYTHING- engineering-wise. They are literally incomparable if you look at it that way but fps allows us to have a common medium to compare them thus you can.

~Adam
 
Mister E said:
well for the correct answer look below. \/
Click to expand...

They're both good manufacturers, but if you look at the pricing, availability, and features, Nvidia did win this time. Not last time, but this time they did.
 
Well I recently have tried both; 6800 GT and X800 XT. I think this isn't a fair comparison but just a couple of things I noticed between the two cards.

The X800 XT from what I can tell has better AA and AF in games; thus making the IQ a little bit better. Performance isn't a fair comparison between the two but the X800 XT didn't bog down when running 6X AA and 8X AF at 1600 X 1200.

I was also very surprised in how much smaller the card was over the GT. I have a SFF and it leaves more room in my case; not a huge issue but something I figured I'd point out.

Both cards are very good however. The SM3.0 feature has recently been ruled out as even being useful. I think I was reading that some where in [H]; but i could be wrong. I play a lot of Half Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source so that is why I made the jump over to ATI. For some reason I think I just prefer running ATI. I can't really put my finger on it but something about the IQ with ATI is just better IMO.

It would be cool if they had some type of program where you could physically use each card before buying it. Like have 2 computers at a store or something running the same system specs; one with ATI and the other with nVidia's newest card. Let the consumer decide for themselves which they wanted to go with rather then reading some biased reviews ya know. I'm sure some places actually have that but no where in my area does this.
 
What's with the onslaught of noobs(not the thread starter talking about 12 pipe X800 pro vs 16 pipe GT?
When you have a large clock speed advantage, the point becomes moot.
The GT is,however, a bit faster n average, and loads faster in doom 3, if you're into 4 player multiplayer.
At the ultra high end level, the X800XT is faster in just about everything except Doom3.
Nvidia has SM3, and support for openexr HDR, but it super slow.
Ati supports some things that SM3 can do, such as dynamic branching and geometry instancing, though SM2B, but it is disabled by default since microsoft wont let them enabled by default and pass WHLQ.
Nvidia has legacy FSAA modes ala super sampling, and mixed SSAA/MSAA.
For new games that are demanding like HL2, ati has support for 6X FSAA which is actually playable, and for games that has a frameate that are greater than or equal to your refreshrate,
you can enable what calls temporal anti aliasing, where the sampling pattern is changed every frame, to almost give you double the effective AA, so 2X aa almost comes 4AA, with a little above the cost of 2X aa, or 4X aa almost becoming 8X fsaa etc.
But it by no means perfect, since when the frame rates drops below the refreshrate, it disables it.
It think it's good for people who's CRT can only go up to 1024x768 with an 85hz refresh, or for LCDS, even better since with an LCD, you dont need a high refresh rate.
 
The 6800GT and x800xt aren't a fair comparison at all. The xt costs about 100 dollars more than the x800 pro and the 6800GT... Those two are the ones that should be compared to each other.
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
The 6800GT and x800xt aren't a fair comparison at all. The xt costs about 100 dollars more than the x800 pro and the 6800GT... Those two are the ones that should be compared to each other.
Click to expand...


Yeah no kidding. I'm pretty sure I made that point clear when I posted. I was making general statements about both and things I noticed since I had used both.
 
Don't bother looking at the cards themselves, the performance difference/ Image quality is too small to talk about, at least for this generation.

What is going to make the most difference is the driver support. Each company has their own method, though neither could be called the clear winner.

Nvidia releases official drivers very rarely, thus far, the only official drivers for the 6 Series are 61.77 and 66.93. However, they do tend to release a rather large number of *beta* drivers. Look how many are on the Nvidia FTP alone. Guru3d also has a large collection. There are also the 70 Series drivers, which while still being early editions, allow users to try out new advances early.
Note though that these drivers may be called betas, but they often are far better and more stable than the older "official" ones. For instance, the 67.02's add a feature allowing Negative LOD bias to be clamped, thus completely eliminating "shimmering" in most situations.

Nvidia drivers are also much smaller than ATi's, the 67.03's weighing in at 13.3 megs, whereas ATi drivers are twice that (not counting Catalyst control center or .NET framework 1.1).
Forceware drivers also have the advantage of having things like Clock speeds, Refresh rate override and application profiles built in, though a small registry edit (Coolbits) is needed to unlock them.

ATi follows a tight schedule for driver releases, about 1 a month. Changes aren't to drastic with each, but new features get thrown in all the time. ATi is pushing the Catalyst Control Center, which does look to be great idea, however it requires .net, which may or may not bother you. Can't say much more, since I gave up my 9700p a while back.
 
I just installed the .net to make my CC work and it sucks. Takes forever to load up and my computer runs generally slower. AND it took away the ability to control vsync for me, so I have to do it in the games ini's now which is a pain in the ass.
 
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