ATI or NVIDIA

[iceangel89]

i heard NVIDIA is better, nowadays? but some sites said ATI is good.

so which is better? and why?

for dual GPUs... i think its more for upgrading... of cos performance if u have too much $$$ to spare... but if its for upgrading, after say a year, computer parts will have become cheaper and it might be cheaper to buy a new card?

Edited August 23, 2008 by iceangel89

[rendrag]

that's exactly why i haven't gone SLI... the benchmarks i've seen don't really justify the added cost of a 2nd card, and what differences were there, they'd disappear in a year or less as new hardware comes out (unless you spend $1000 USD on 2 ultra high-end cards).

[jcarle]

There was an article I read years ago that explained the problems inherent in SLI and Crossfire. It basically boiled down to the fact that the management overhead to synchronise and distribute the workload between the cards negated a large portion of the benefits.

[shahed26]

ATI is the best in almost everything EXCEPT for games. Am not a gamer, but i have been using ATI cards for years. Their image quality and features are the best compare to NVIDIA. Nvidia are better when it comes to gaming.

Nvidia is also always sort of over priced, compared to ATI.

Nvidia's drivers are poor compared to ATI. ATI write very good drivers, while Nvidia's drivers are so much more optimized for games, thats why ATI can hardly beat NVIDIA is gaming arena. But thats changed with their 4800 series cards

When i look at a Video card, i look at more video decoding/encoding and other features, and ATI has all these stuffs better than nvidia. Nvidia also has good video and other features, but their driver coding lets them down.

SLI/CROSSFIRE are just over hyped. They do not give you the boost in games you expect, only a very little speed gain is what you get, and you end up paying for two cards, and also EXTRA power consumtion or even most people end up buying a 800W PSU that costs alot unless you go for these cheap ones.

So overall ATI is much better, unless your a gamer then nvidia. ATI are really back in business with their new 4800 series cards, and even forced Nvidia to drop their ridiculous price of GTX200 to match ATI's 4800 series card, which perfoms much better in most gaming benchamrks when compared to GTX200.

My vote goes for ATI

No SLI/CROSSFIRE

GPU Vote for 4800

Edited August 24, 2008 by shahed26

[iceangel89]

@shahed26

i read that NVIDIA is recommended for use with Maya a 3D program, so its not only games its good in i guess... or maybe for softwares, NVIDIA works better with Maya only? i think NVIDIA is better in OpenGL?

Edited August 24, 2008 by iceangel89

[cluberti]

Nvidia's hardware has always been at least as good, or superior too, ATI's. However, their driver support for the most part is awful.

That is enough for me to stick with ATI, for now. They've been as bad or worse as ATI used to be (and those of you who used ATI cards 2.5 - 5+ years ago know what I mean).

[Thunderbolt 2864]

I like both ATI and NVIDIA, but I voted for NVIDIA because their last generations of cards have usually outperformed ATI, until recently.

For the second option, I voted for yes, since I got a 4870x2, though they have their share of problems, such as microstuttering.

As for the third option, I voted for Radeon 4800, I just got a 4870x2.

But I also have a GeForce 8800 GTS as well.

NVIDIA's drivers are usually better than ATI's. Right now I'm experiencing annoying glitches and issues with this current ATI's driver which is annoying, argh. I wish ATI would make better drivers already, want to make me go back to NVIDIA.

Edited August 24, 2008 by Thunderbolt 2864

[shahed26]

@shahed26

i read that NVIDIA is recommended for use with Maya a 3D program, so its not only games its good in i guess... or maybe for softwares, NVIDIA works better with Maya only? i think NVIDIA is better in OpenGL?

ATI and NVIDIA's recent cards are both good. But i wouldnt buy a NVIDIA card just because it works better for only a particular software, i would go for that works well with everything i throw at it, and ATI is IMO better because of their excellent drivers. Open GL maybe is better with NVIDIA, but ATI is not bad either.

ATI had rough times in the past where NVIDIA dominated, but thats all changed now. ATI all the way for me!!

[ripken204]

in my opinion this question is stupid.

ati has that fastest card out, the 4870X2, and its 4870 and 4850 are the best cards for price/performance.

you need to specify what you mean by best? what price range?

[Tripredacus]

I chose ATI but that isn't my favorite. I started being a dedicated 3dfx guy, as my first 4 video cards were 3dfx. They were the Voodoo Rush, Voodoo 2, Voodoo 3, and the Voodoo 5500. There was a Riva TNT2 in that timeline someplace tho... By default I ended up getting an nVidia card (PNY GeForce 3 Ti200) which I used until just recently. I bought an ATI card recently because the price was good, had a decent amount of RAM and worked in a 4x AGP slot. I haven't been disappointed with it at all, so I have switched to ATI for now.

[puntoMX]

They were the Voodoo Rush...

Wow, we have some old-timer here , I bought one in 1997 and loved it with Hexen .

I go with ATI too these days, just for their better Vista drivers a while ago. I like my 2600XT as it does the job well without giving me some DLL error from time to time.

[Tripredacus]

They were the Voodoo Rush...

Wow, we have some old-timer here , I bought one in 1997 and loved it with Hexen .

I go with ATI too these days, just for their better Vista drivers a while ago. I like my 2600XT as it does the job well without giving me some DLL error from time to time.

ah Hexen... aka Heretic II or do I have that backwards... You try nowadays to spend $200 on a 6MB video card... But I bought it to play GL Quake, I didn't play Hexen on the PC only the Nintendo 64. I liked Hexen II tho.

[cluberti]

OK. Another (recent, mind you) set of reasons to avoid nvidia hardware:

G84 and G86 65nm chip problems (note that first link will end up with "nvidia-opens-whoop-a**-itself" in your browser's url. Change the *'s to "s"'s to see the URL. Silly filter)

G92 and G94 55nm chip problems

Dell has put up a blog post on the issue and HP has a "warranty enhancement" program for laptops affected by these types of problems (failure to boot, random beeps, video issues, wireless adapter failures, etc). That's quite an extensive hardware list, and quite the spectrum of nVidia chipset issues (and it looks like there are many more HP models affected than Dell models, but those are also some of the most popular models from both vendors, so...). Again, nVidia's fix basically does nothing more than to try and postpone the problems until warranty periods expire, so users cannot replace what nVidia (and HP, and Dell, and... you get the picture) know are defective parts. Not only shoddy engineering, but shady business practices. I can't say AMD/ATI are any better or worse, just pointing out the facts about nVidia's problems that relate to this thread.

[rotjong]

IMHO, right now ATI has the advantage. Their solution is powerful and scalable. I foresee it getting even better. NVIDIA released a monster of a card, yes, but then turned around and released new G92 based cards as well. They didn't dive right in.

I have owned NVIDIA cards since I replaced my 3dfx Voodoo5 5500. I got the NVIDIA Geforce 3 the day it was initially released and stuck with NVIDIA since. I skipped the FX fiasco. Now I own an ATI Radeon HD 4870 and I don't regret the purchase one bit. It's truly amazing. This is the first ATI card that I've every purchased.

NVIDIA was so sure they'd destroy ATI with the GT200 series of cards yet they got an enormous shock. They're doing damage control on the PR side, as well. NVIDIA has been wounded and they know it.

The quote below is from an article here: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/220947/nvision...-from-2006.html

Fighting back against ATI

Mottram then turned to the company's most direct competitor, ATI, the graphical division of AMD whose RV770 GPU has put Nvidia's GT200 based cards on the back foot.

"We underestimated ATI with respect to their product," he admitted. "We've looked very closely at this, and we know there are certain things we can do better. There will be improvements to things from all angles: there are some easy fixes in the software domain that will soon be forthcoming. Believe me, it's a very prime focus of ours."

Mottram ascribed the company's current embarrassment, at ATI's hands, to its earlier successes. "ATI has had the benefit for a long time of seeing Nvidia's products and having something to shoot for," he argued, "while Nvidia has not had the benefit of having someone to be shooting after."

He also predicted that ATI would regret its focus on raw graphical power at the expense of more general-purpose capabilities.

"ATI did not spend on things like PhysX and CUDA. But we believe that people value things beyond graphics. If you compare only on graphics, that's a relative disadvantage to us, but the notion of what you measure a GPU on will change and evolve," he argued.

"We're forward-looking. And sometimes, when someone's forward-looking, they get a little bit ahead of the game. And that's kind of where we are."

NVIDIA was all about how they'd kick ATI and Intel to the curb. They'd thrash them with sheer raw graphical power. They didn't thrash ATI. They didn't even come close and things were actually so close that NVIDIA had to cut prices to compete. Now we have NVIDIA saying, "Yeah, they shocked us BUT..." No buts. They predicted wrong and now they're looking for any possible way to find an out as to why their cards are better than ATI's.

For now I believe ATI is headed in the right direction and has the right technological methodology. Come Q4 of next year when we'll likely be seeing the next generation of cards that fully support DirectX 11 then things may have changed. I'm not a fanboy. My allegiance is to myself. I just go with what I see as the better technology and right now ATI happens to be the winner in my book.

Edited August 29, 2008 by rotjong

[CoffeeFiend]

I guess I'll add my own opinion too.

I was a long-time fan of ATI cards (never had a problem with them back then).

Then the GeForce 4 Ti4x00 came out, and it was supposed to be oh-so-great, so I spend a fair amount of money on it, and it turns out it sucked. The drivers weren't too great, the video input (it was a VIVO card) was crippled with Macrovision detection (unless you used ancient drivers), the video output (s-video) quality was pretty awful, and you *HAD* to reboot to change which display is your primary monitor (so things like the video overlay work, so you can play stuff on your TV -- think HTPC). That was perhaps the most problematic/most deceiving card I've ever owned.

Then I got some more (including intel onboard, and a ATI x800 that worked fine besides a couple buggy versions of the drivers). No major issues with any of them.

And now I felt like trying nvidia again, because of their then new video processor (VP2/BSP/AES128) that would supposedly decode H.264 in hardware and all that. Turns out, I never actually got it to work, using any drivers, on any OS, using any codec, or any player. And now we know these cards (G84/G86) are also experiencing very high failure rates. Combine that with poor drivers... I can't say I'm really happy about it.

ATI doesn't seem to have the heat problems, their cards have always been a lot better for HTPC/video usage (for me at least), their Avivo/UVD stuff seems to work a lot better, their drivers could hardly be much worse, some ATI cards seem to be more power efficient (low power) than anything nvidia has to offer, and they currently beat nvidia on the 3D-power/$ (for gamers) too. And they're even releasing their specs to have fully working & open source Linux drivers.

You know what I'll be buying next time.