Complete drivel that NVIDIA is better than ATI
Used to be true that NVIDIA had superior cards, with better support but that just isn't true since the GeForce 5-Series.
NVIDIA's drivers are no longer as good as they used to be, their performance over ATI is marginal at best; as for NVIDIA being cheaper don't make me laugh.
(source being dabs.com)
Radeon HD 2600 XT £60
GeForce 8600 GT £70
Radeon HD 3850 £100
GeForce 8800 GT £150
Radeon HD 3870 £140
GeForce 8800 GTX £300
Those are the prices for the cards with equal power.
The Catalyst drivers for ATI are now as stable as the NVIDIA Forceware used to be, and the cards have no trouble playing any games even older titles even on Vista now.
Not to mention all ATI cards also use less power, run cooler and can be overclocked more with overclocking options within the drivers themselves unlike NVIDIA who have recently removed this functionality.
Oh and add to all of this while yes ATI cards do show slightly lower performance in benchmarks, the NVIDIA cards peak more often.
When you see adverage frame-rates the story is very different.
I have an GeForce 8600 GT and Radeon 2600 XT here, while I can get some nice impressive framerates with the 8600GT this often is closely followed by much lower ones.
Half-Life Episode 2 for example with identical settings (everything max at 1280x1024 4xFSAA 8xAF ) the 8600 will range from 45-80fps where-as the Radeon runs at a stable 60-70fps.
This is true in a huge number of games I have, which is why I bought the 2600 XT to see the performance difference and have given my old 8600 GT to a friend. Not to mention I've yet to come across a game it doesn't run, where-as my 8600 had games it would simply crash on; others it was touchy about running. Not to mention I could guarentee atleast once a week if not more it would reset the driver crashing back to desktop.
It's all just sheer propagander that frankly has no place when it comes to gaming. As far as I'm conserned whatever someone wants to get is up to them in the end, just give them the options available in their price-range.
They can go with what they prefer, but personally I see ATI as far better value for money. As does every review I've seen for the Radeon HD-Series.
