Ati started making good cards when they started the radeon line. Then they actually started coming on par with nvidia graphics by actually releasing a radeon card that was slightly behind in speed compared to the best nvidia card at the time, but more advanced. That be the radeon 8500, supporting advanced features like truform(i don't remember any other features of it, and as cool as truform was for CS, it didn't work correctly in other games). Either way, the first good card was like the radeon 8500. The cards that started giving nvidia an actual competition and run for their money was the 9000 class of radeons. There is a huge variety of 9000 radeons and was like one of first lines of ati cards to actually outperform nvidia for once. Personally i use a radeon 9800pro 256mb ddr2. This card is 3 years old, bought it during christmas because i don't have pciexpress, and i wanted a card that would release the last potential of my agp. Hence the 9800 i got, funny enough i came to a conclusion that the graphics cards from 2003 were very much at a level above the games of the time (talking about nvidia and ati here). 2003 was the dying use of the quake 3 engine in games, and for the time, the most intensive game was UT 2003. Hell, geforce and radeon cards in 2003 sped through those games like nothing. Here i am 3 years later, and i can play FEAR at max setting beatifully with my 9800pro 256mb ddr2 card. I can max out quake 4 and play speedily, i can max out fs2 with all the nice new stuff with it(even mv_adveffects) speedily. I can even play halflife2 and doom3 at maxed settings speedily. I mean, holy ****, cards from 2003 are ****ing insane.
Personally the only reason i'm an ati guy, is because 3dfx went down the hole
And my next graphics card was a geforce 2 mx 400(later those were renamed to fit the geforce 4 line of budget cards). The geforce 2 mx 400 was just an absolutely horrible budget card solution anyone could think of, it was expensive as hell too. Then later, when ati came out with the first radeons, i bought the first radeon budget card(aka the radeon ve). It was cheaper, but only by like 15$, but it did so much better than nvidia budget graphics. Nvidia does make great high end speedy fast ass graphics cards, but that's if you got money. Personally nvidias budget graphics suck horribly. On another note, you know ati has good graphics when nintendo uses them in the gamecube(dolphin chip or something) and when microsoft drops nvidia from the hardware schematics of the xbox360 to use ati graphics.
IDK, really not much reason to go with ati or nvidia. People prefer nvidia, some prefer ati. The god given speed with them these days does come from both of them. But for ati, it usually comes cheaper than nvidia, and that's why ati should be recommended. But besides that ati offers much better stuff in the cheap graphics department, that's where a lot of the market is for graphics these days. Actually the radeon 9800pro 256 costs a good deal more expensive than the x1600(checkout pricewatch for confirmation). Be rest assured, the x1600 was a good buy, as i see and am glad you are happy with your wise choice flipside. As far as regarding the gamecube and the dolphin, you guys should go research games like resident evil 4, and compare it to resident evil 4 for ps2. Let's just say in porting the game to ps2, there was a big downgrade in polys and textures
The gamecube really does have great graphics.
