Quote: "Nvidia has more Compatible games, ATI has alot of games that will run retardedly slow, or just not run at all."
I recall people saying that 5years ago except swap the makes around. (With a little forum digging you can actually find this out for yourself too)
Personally I saw a change in the tides when AMD and ATi were merging and they released the Radeon X1K-Series.
Over the past 2years we've seen AMD's cards go from being brute force, to technically superior like NVIDIA used to be. NVIDIA also used to be reknown for having extremely stable drivers that would constantly improve performance.
The roles realistically speaking have completely reversed now.
ATIs Drivers on Vista are stable and run more titles correctly, and more importantly don't break games in bizare ways between builds.
The cards produce less heat, and require less power.
Oh and most importantly are CHEAPER. Not even by a small amount either.
I build a new system back in March specifically to run new titles, and it does that flawlessly and I only spent £350 on building it.
AMD Phenom 9500
ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB
1GB Kingston Hyper-X 733MHz Memory
IBM/Hitachi 320GB SATA-2 HDD
alright so that cost doesn't include the monitor but then I'm quite happy sharing my HD television for it and the 360.
that rig runs Vista Ultimate, Gears of War, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 like a dream at 1280x720p with the graphics at max... well cept Crysis that's just on very high rather than extreme.
Still you can't really fault it especially given it cost about the same as a new PS3, which was the choice I had since mine was bricked with one of the updates.
I did have the choice of getting a new NVIDIA card for it but frankly, after the poor performance and stability of the XFX 8800GT I bought back in January; something I promptly sent back after a week and exchanged for a HD 2600 XT (which btw is on a dual-core system which again runs most current games at medium-high graphics at 60fps at 1280x1024 as long as I don't use Anti-Aliasing) which has served me quite well since.
To me ATI are quite frankly the sane choice. If only to understand how your card performs against the rest of the series.
They have a very clean-cut way of telling what is aimed at what market.
Family (Series), Market (User = 4, Gamer = 6, Extreme = 8), Performance-Rating (Low = 00, Medium = 50, High = 70)
I mean to me nothing could be easier than that outlay, but then maybe I'm just getting confused with NVIDIA since they dropped their basic way of doing things for the GT, GTO, GTS, GTX, GTXXX, Ultra, G0D71K3 ... and whatever else they can think of to make it more confusing. That's on-top of the what 4 different cards, which I suppose is a step forward from the 9 (no joke) of the 7-Series.
7100, 7150, 7200, 7300, 7500, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950
maybe the 200-Series will change this for NVIDIA but as their actually released 2 cards of similar performance next to each other; I highly doubt it.
As for the newly added PhysX (which honestly I'm still more in favour of Havok) to NVIDIA cards via CUDA. Yeah honestly I don't care.
The 360 has no dedicated PPU or multiple GPU pipeline. In-fact it has a graphics card 2 generations behind my own. If it can handle The Force Unleashed without one... my PC doesn't need one either.
