ATI vs NVidia

[Action]

I do not want to start an ATI vs NVidia war by any means but it has been a few years since I purchased a desktop GPU so was wondering which has the best out now and why?  What I look for is good "Eye Candy" as well as FPS.

The main reason I ask is because I will be building new machines for us mainly for work as it is way over due but might as well make it good for games too.  I want something that will last.  The other parts of the PC will be high end.  I am just now stuck on which GPU (or GPUs for SLI) to get.

I was thinking of giving ATI a chance with their new high end 4870x2 but then I read about poor drivers.

[jdierking]

ATI does offer a much higher GFLOP per dollar ratio. With the release of the X4000 series, ATI's GPUs have stopped using the ring bus topography for interfacing with the memory controllers, geometry and shading stream processors, ROPs, render back-ends, thread issuing, and PCI-E bus. Do not let the narrow system bus serve as the soul deciding element since ATI has been using GDDR4 and GDDR5 rather aggressively in their recent series of cards while nVidia is using GDDR3 but with a 512b bus for their latest GTX release. The 4870s and the GTX200s perform on par with eachother when it comes to pure power. The drawback to ATI is drivers as you all know. OpenGL is not as well covered when compared to nVidia. Another fact to consider is that most games these days spend more testing time with nVidia GPUs than ATI so you can expect some issues with new titles in the future.

On the flip side, the flag ship nVidia GPUs are out costing the ATI GPUs. The good news is that driver releases happen much more frequently and they tend to be more reliable. A fact to keep in mind if you are not going for a flagship card is that the geforce 8000 through the geforce 9000 series cards are based on the same architecture, the G92s. Performance between the two so called generations has shown a negligible performance advantage.

If you do go the nVidia route, I recommend the 8800GT. I bought two for a combined total of $260. My SLI setup score a 13K on 3DMark06 and a  P10000 on Vantage. If you are using stock coolers, I would suggest that you overide the fan settings. By default, my cards were temp regulated for 80C. I think this was done to preclude the possibilities of over clocking these cards.

I can't say much for personal experience for ATI cards. The only ones I've had were tier II and tier III cards; specifically, the 9600PRO, the X1300PRO, and the X1600PRO. They have all been working reliably since I bought them, but they're so old that they are out of context for making any kind of decision.

[worph]

i recently got a 4850 a month ago. the price was 170 dollars, and 130 after rebates.

it uses a single slot cooler, so make sure to increase the fan speed as well. stock speeds are 20%. i'm not sure what the RPM is, but i bumped mine up to 80 and it keeps at a nice 40 to 55 degrees C. there are 4850s with non reference fans, but they take up more space.

i don't have any benchmarks to post on my own system, mainly because i'm not as much of a hardcore enthusiast as justin is. i average 40 fps in Far Cry 2 with settings on high. oblivion is maxed out with 2x AA, and crysis warhead is 40 fps with a mix of mid and high settings. the frames might be higher if i had a core 2 or phenom (i have an aging athlon x2).

 there's monthly updates and fixes with the drivers which i like. this month's drivers (8.10) includes a manual fan setting, so you don't have to dig into hidden directories to do that anymore.

i would say it's a great entry level high end card. great performance to price ratio.