Need help with Video Card Decision

Except keep in mind that Tom's Hardware runs nVidia cards with optimizations enabled, and ATI filtering optimizations disabled, so figure a 5% boost (give or take) for the ATI numbers posted.

And, incidentally, those are the wrong cards, anyway. The OP was asking about the X1950 *Pro*, not XTX.
 
hmm , thought they were the same ones, well thanks for clearing that up, anyways , I would prolly get the 7900GS , its a matter of prefrence really
 
FWIW, I've had a GeForce 7900GT (supposedly faster than the 7900GS), GeForce 7900GS, and a GeForce 7600GT. The 7900GT from MSI, and the fan was a dustbuster - I hated how loud is was (but, then, I'm picky). The 7900GS and 7600GT both from eVGA. I strongly recommend that brand if you are buying an nVidia card, even though the fan on the 7600GT was also loud - it was 'reference nVidia', so the brand didn't matter much there, it was just how it was designed.

ANYWAY, before that set of cards, I had a Radeon X1600XT, then a Radeon X1800GTO in the mix (I actually liked that a lot, but it died, and MSI RMA'd it with a 7900GT...which I wasn't too happy with), and I now have a Radeon X1950 Pro.

This last is definitely the best of the bunch, by a very large margin. Factors in this opinion:
- While framerate 'averages' tend to be "close" to the 7900GS (although usually higher), the minimum framerate number ALWAYS seems higher. Tech Report includes the min framerate in many of their tests, and you can see this. The minimum is what you feel in the game as 'stutters' in otherwise smooth gameplay, and that the Radeon has less of this is a HUGE selling point to me.
- It's quieter. It doesn't very much in sound from 'load' to 'idle', but in my SFF box, it is quieter in any case than any of the GeForce 7-series cards I had when idling.
- I like HDR+AA. nVidia can now do this with the GeForce 8-series, but the 7-series could not. The Radeon X1Ks can.
- Texture filtering is MUCH better. Again, nVidia kicked the game up a notch with the 8-series, but the texture filtering on the 7-series was abominable. Tech Report has some great screenshots that demonstrate this in their review of the GeForce 8800, here.

As a final comment - why that specific brand Radeon? So expensive! If you need 512mb (and I don't know of any game that does), the Sapphire version is a LOT cheaper. And, really, the 256mb model is all you need. They are all made by the same OEM anyway, so....brand doesn't matter much, aside from warranties (which, IIRC, are all the same).
 
IMHO i would go with the 7900gs because it is cheaper. but i'm a budget builder. cheapest is not always the best.
 
dderidex said:
Except keep in mind that Tom's Hardware runs nVidia cards with optimizations enabled, and ATI filtering optimizations disabled, so figure a 5% boost (give or take) for the ATI numbers posted.

And, incidentally, those are the wrong cards, anyway. The OP was asking about the X1950 *Pro*, not XTX.
Click to expand...

What are you talking about? "Optimizations disabled/enabled"? ...
 
Sr7 said:
What are you talking about? "Optimizations disabled/enabled"? ...
Click to expand...

Read this page on Tech Report. Tom's Hardware tests with "High Quality" checked on ATI cards, forcing ATI to disable all texture filtering optimizations that would improve performance at slight image quality cost. They do NOT do this on nVidia cards (not like it would matter that much on the 7-series, anyway, as you cannot fully disable the optimizations on these cards).
 
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