NVidia or Ati

[Adagio]

What graphic card would you prefer to buy, if you're going to buy one today?



For me? Defently NVidia... I've got a Radeon 9600 Pro at the moment, and I'm very sorry I bought it
I just reinstalled Windows short time ago, and I've had huge annoying problems with it both before and after this reinstall... Basicly I can't play 50% of my games, and I've only seen a performance upgrade in one of my games...

I had a GeForce 3 TI200 before that, and I'm seriously considering installing this card again

Maybe this card is really good for 3D games, but for the games I play, this card really sucks bigtime...

[alva]

Exactly the same card, works perfectly.

[Asher]

I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro in mine, and just installed a Radeon 9600 Pro in the BF's...no problems whatsoever, and very very fast cards.

[Whoha]

I've got a geforce 3, and its going to be a long time before I can get a new card.

[Fake Boris]

C'mon guys?

Didn't you know that Nvidia is funding a program to build an experimental sweatshop on Mars?

And that ATi's assembly lines use broiled kittens?

[Q Classic]

until recently, the ati drivers sucked so much ass. now? it's a flip.

[Solver]

If I were to buy a new one, I'd buy a GeForce FX.

[Ari Rahikkala]

I have a Radeon 7500, using the DRI project's driver.

For those who don't know: There are several* drivers for both ATi and NVidia cards in XFree, the most commonly used display server (a program that takes applications' drawing requests and puts them on the screen, or rather, on the graphics card) in Linux. For NVidia, there's an open-source driver which is pretty much unaccelerated and a proprietary driver which uses the same codebase as NVidia's driver for Windows - and is still considered the best choice for consumers looking for lots and lots of graphics performance on Linux or FreeBSD. For ATi, there are at least two open-source drivers, some from the GATOS project (good for TV-input/output and other 2d goodies), some from the DRI project (some 3d acceleration for models Radeon 8500 and downwards), and one official proprietary driver for models Radeon 8500 and upwards that still does not have a terribly good reputation.

Now, if you got that around your head... I really prefer open-source drivers (they usually cause less trouble than proprietary ones) but it's unfortunately impossible to get a good graphics card from either NVidia or ATi and actually make use of it without proprietary drivers. Fortunately, since I haven't yet been very interested in games that demand more of the graphics card than TuxRacer does (and I haven't played that game for, what, several months - it's just been SMAC and ADOM for me all the time), I can just wait and see what will happen in the patent arena...

* not even considering VESA, SVGA and fbdev and whathaveyou - those work with pretty much every card but... well, they aren't interesting. After all working with them basically consists of setting the display mode and pushing bits into the framebuffer...

[Kirnwaffen]

I have one of each: A lower end nvidia that I got because I needed a graphics card in mid-range machine, and a Radeon 9700 pro. For a while, I had the strangest problem with the 9700 due to (I think) the particular system configuration I was working with. Once I got around to upgrading that system, I fell in love with that card. I voted for ATI, because that's the card I'm enjoying most at the moment, but I really don't care who makes it as long as it screams.

[reds4ever]

NVidia, if it ain't broke don't fix it

[Asher]

Originally posted by reds4ever
NVidia, if it ain't broke don't fix it

It's more like "it if is broke, don't fix it."

In particular I'm referring to the well-known S3TC texture compression corruption that forces developers to find workarounds, the broken trilinear filtering (it's really bilinear), poor anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing.