[Kazan]

ATI hands down - the have superior fabrication techniques, graphics processor design, less heat issues ( almost _no_ heat issues, they barely have to use active cooling even on their highest end, as opposed to nVidia's needing vacume cleaners),

Pixel Shader 3.0 is nothing but Pixel Shader 2.0 with a larger instruction buffer -- that is the _only_ difference, and no games in the foreseeable future will need PX3 over PX2 -- if you have that long of a shader program then it's not going to run in realtime, period.

nVidia has a long history of making boards that toast themselves, making their drivers overclock their boards, and general asshatery.

[Kazan]

Originally posted by StratComm
Which, by the way, rocks.  I just got my new system up, complete with an X800 XT in a PCI-Express interface.  I've yet to see any slow down on anything.  Period.

don't be surprised if your computer disapears

[JC Denton]

Yes, and suppose we only want a video card and not muck with finding a new motherboard with the PCI-E interfaces?

Personally, I can't give much advice.  My newest-gen card is a Geforce4 Ti4400, so I'm not too knowledgable on how the newest of the new perform.  I've heard much good about the current crop of Radeons, and some not-entirely-unearned ribbing of the FX series.  If you ask me, the 9600XT might be the best choice if you want a balance of power and price.

Now, going on a minor tangent from this, I've done a bit of reading on the All-in-wonder Radeons, and from what I gather they're effectively a slightly refined 9x00 with an integrated TV/FM tuner and appropriate signal processors.  Granted, they only run 128mb of memory, but that's plenty enough for the crop of software I'm using.  And since I'm also needing a TV tuner in my system (as the dorms back at uni are notoroiously lacking in both space and power taps) I figure this would serve well as a replacement for my aging Geforce4.  But, naturally, I've heard rumors that the AIWs are generally a bad thing when it comes to TV viewing (a contradiction from what Anandtech's review of the AIW 9600 Pro says).

Opinions?

[StratComm]

It probably all depends on what you have them hooked up to.  You're limited by the size of your monitor, of course, and by the type of TV you're trying to get.  If it's broadcast, you'd need the same huge antennas as any other TV to get the same reception.

[JC Denton]

Well, the reason I ask of the AIWs is because the TV Wonder VE I currently have, to be perfectly blunt, is ****e.  Compared to a normal TV, the image is grainy/staticy, and the sound is oftentimes too soft to pick up without maximizing every volume slider in software and my speaker set.

Input's no problem, as it'll be a cable connection (essentially a small step down from sattelite), and the monitor's been a faithful one to me.

[ChronoReverse]

At moment, of the new generation cards, the 6800GT has the best value for the buck since it costs about the same as the x800Pro, has similar performance (read, sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse) in DirectX games and better performance in OGL games (read, beats the x800XT-PE in the D3, an OGL game).

Of the high-end, the x800XT-PE is better than the 6800Ultra for a myriads of reasons.

Of the previous generation, the ATi cards win hands-down.


nVidia's dual moniter abilities are better than ATi's as well and nVidia's drivers are better than ATi's across the board (from win32 to linux).


ATi still has better image quality (much less pronounced now between the x800 and 6800 but still there).  The new cards also have temporal AA which is pretty neat.

[Grey Wolf]

Actually, the reason the X800XT beat the 6800 Ultra was due to a bit of a cheap trick by ATI. If you read the early reviews, you notice they all mention disabling the "brilinear" optimizations on the nVidia cards, as suggested by ATI, who claimed it would make the field equal. However, what they didn't mention is that ATI also used brilinear optimizations, which were left enabled because no one knew about them.

Realistically, at the moment, here is my recommendation for each price range:
0-100: Buy a better card
100-175: 9600 XT
175-250: 9800 Pro
250-350: 6800
350-450: 6800 GT
450+: Whatever you feel like wasting your money on

[ChronoReverse]

Except for the fact that ATi's optimizations are almost impossible to see except under very specific situations and with a trained eye.

I'm miffed that you can't turn it off, but nobody actually knew about it or even saw the difference until someone noticed that the ATi x800 was going faster than it theoretically could in certain cases.  This is unlike the "brilinear" optimizations that nVidia had (which can now be turned off in the contro panel) where the image degradation is blatantly obvious.



As for you suggestion list, I'd actually suggest getting a 9800SE 256bit memory interface rather than the 9600XT.  Most 9800SE's underperform the 9600XT, but the 9800SE 256bit doesn't, moreover there's about a 50% chance of modding it to an 9800Pro if you get the correct one.

So for about the same price you get a similar performing card that has a chance at being soft-modded (meanign install a different driver) into a 9800Pro.  Not a bad deal if you ask me.

[Grey Wolf]

True about the 9800SE. I had forgotten about that card. And you can turn off the X800 optimizations. Registry editing.