Poll: ATI vs. Nvidia for a serious gaming machine.

[JesterRaiin]

Stability, reliability, ease of use, low costs of upkeep (energy), THEN performance. So, nVidia. I'm sick and tired of AMD/ATI's issues. There's no point in buying "soooooooo powerful" piece of hardware you can't just plug and play. :|

Also : Linux.

BTW : Lately i became fanatical supporter of Virtu solution and it doesn't work that well with AMD/ATI cards. :|

 

[wooty]

I usually just go for what I can afford at the time. I bought a nVidia GeForce 9600 GT 3 years ago for about £80, and it still runs even the most modern games. Lovely little bargain I picked up there.

 

[Duffeknol]

To be honest Nvidia's PhysX system is worth the purchase alone.

ATI cards run Physx I think, providing your drivers are updated.

Nah, they're unofficial custom drivers. Still very experimental. Apparently working, though.
But then, still, the best performance goes to Nvidia.

 

[ultimateownage]

ATI if you don't want to waste money, Nvidia if you want a high end one that is more stable and has better performance. I use ATI cards myself, but I don't know what I would choose if I was going to build a new PC.

 

[barash]

Were i you, I wouldn't base my decision on any of the comments here (several have good points to consider) but take a few weeks and do some proper research on the pro's and con's of complete systems and not just gfx-brand vs gfx-brand. Take notes, keep links handy, re-read the reviews you first read after a week as you learn more jargon and accumulate knowledge and so you can spot stuff you missed in the first go etc.

At least then, you can't use the 'some guy on the net told me so' excuse if you make a bad decision and need to remedy it

 

[Robert Ewing]

Nvidia in my mind is more powerful, but you will need a cooling system.

I have an Nvidia GTX 590, and that shit overheats when I'm playing solitaire. Well... Not really, but it gets pretty hot.

And the smell of burning plastic is not a pleasant one. But in any case, if you're thinking of getting a powerful card, ESPECIALLY SLI. Then you seriously need to consider cooling.

Don't think of cooling as an after thought, as many people do. It seriously needs to be cooled. Because if the cards get too hot, they will short out, and shut down your PC. They can also create a spark, which may damage the card, and/or cause a fire in worse case scenario's.

My Graphics cards has two fans, that have options to increase the speed. I also have liquid cooling, and I have a ordinary fan facing at my GPU in case things get really intense.

In total, that's 6 fans on my graphics card, 2 on my motherboard, 1 on my PSU, liquid cooling tubes, and one random external fan. And that keeps it comfortably cool.

 

[Panorama]

I have in the past few years i have only been using nvidia, for the past like 8 years, both have been very good. but i haven't been looking in the past 3/4 years, so im planning on upgrading next year so going to start doing research soonish, but at the very minute i don't know which is better.

 

[Bostur]

My current rig is the first one with an ATI chip (HD 5700). There isn't much of difference, but I do notice slightly more compatiblity issues and graphic glitches. I generally feel that Nvidia has better driver support, but most games do run fine out of the box.

The advantage of my current ATI card is that it does seem to run cooler, and rarely even need to spin up the fan. I remember some of my older nVidia cards making crazy noise as soon as a game booted.

 

[drosalion]

Really prefer nVIDIA pretty much purely for their drivers lol

 

[AngryMongoose]

Generally speaking, I'd go Nvidia (even with their fucking annoying adverts). Specifically for now, it depends. Not read up on absolute newest cards, so couldn't say.

 

[JustOrdinary]

A random poll is not going to be very informative.

What you should do is look at various graphics cards in your actual price range and compare their benchmarks on certain well known games. It might seem overwhelming at first, but the truth is most people have already figured out what works best in their price range. It won't take you that much work, honestly.

Start by viewing this link here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-performance-radeon-geforce,3018-7.html

Do a bit of research in your area, find out what kind of prices the stores offer. A graphics card is an expensive purchase that sticks with you for a very long time, so it wouldn't kill you to spend a couple of days finding the right one.

 

[willsham45]

There really is no difference, its all personal taste. But essentially there is no difference, just different numbers different colours and logos.

I have had Nvideo and AVI nothing has ever made me say one is better than the other.

 

[Michael Hirst]

I'm on an ATI HD 5770 and it's done really well despite being considered a mid level graphics card. Had absolutely no problems with it and the only game I can't run at max is Battlefield 3 which was pretty much advertised as a big jump ahead for graphics cards.

In the past I used Nvidia cards and those performed great as well. You can't go wrong with either brand as long as the model you get is powerful enough, there's no crippling weaknesses based on brand alone.

 

[teh_Canape]

I, personally, will always go with Nvidia, since it's the one I always had
heard good things about ATI too, however, I don't use them because apparently my motherboard is not compatible with them

so that's about as much as I can say, I'm not into tech specifics XD

my actual card is an Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT 1Gb
pretty old, really, but it can run all modern games

from high to medium to very low (like, Crysis 2 on lowest at 800x600, and it's smooth as fuck ^-^)

 

[Duffeknol]

I run Crysis 2 on a years old 9800GT 1Gb on 1680*1050 with graphics on high and it's smooth as hell. Actually all modern games have been smooth as hell. I'm playing the Battlefield 3 beta with the same resolution, with everything set to ultra except the terrain (medium) and I'm running 30-40 fps, which is very good. Do consider this card is very outdated by now.
My friend has two(!!!) ATi Radeon 6800's crossfired, and though I'm of course outmatched by far, he can't even run most games with both of those cards, since none of them have decent support for Crossfire. He's forced to play the Witcher 2 on one card and thus can't even play it on max.

 

[thenumberthirteen]

Basically there is no real difference between the manufacturers on the whole. There are slight differences between similarly priced cards, but that depends on what you get. You always hear "I had problems with ATI drivers", but you hear he opposite as well. Really just pick a budget, and get whichever card fits it.

 

[devotedsniper]

I've pretty much always ran NVIDIA cards, never had one fail and there always up to the job (provided you go mid range or higher), my 460 (the midrange of 400 series) has yet to find a game it cannot run on high to max at 1680*1050 (the only real game excluded would be final fantasy xiv but that requires SLI really to run at the best of the best, still looks amazing though).

I've had an ATI card before and while it was cheaper than a similar NVIDIA card i found it somewhat troublesome, towards the end of it's use it seemed to start messing up (artifacts appearing), and it had never been overclocked in it's life.

I also find NVIDIA cards better supported by games, never had an issue with the ATI card running a game but even so it's not very often you see the ATI logo pop up on the start up of a game where with NVIDIA it's fairly common (although it's not so common now a days, but that doesn't mean ATI has become more common either really, i've seen a few recently though).

To me it weighs up like this in my mind, if you want reliability and good power start at mid range cards go NVIDIA, if you want a cheaper but similar card go ATI but be warned things which are cheaper are usually made out of cheaper and poorly made materials/components (that being said though i had a cheap 750watt power supply which went bang after 4 years, and it was my fault anyway so really it's how lucky you are).

 

[Skorpyo]

Nvidia cards are the most powerful in spec, but they do this by sacrificing stability. Also, if you go with an Nvidia card, keep in mind that you'll require a higher rated power-supply.

ATI is pretty much the opposite. Their cards have outstanding stability, with great drivers and fantastic compatibility, but they are noticeably less powerful than an equivalent Nvidia device.

I personally recommend Nvidia.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Generally I prefer Nvidia, but truthfully it's really 6 of one, half a dozen of another; with it all coming down to personal preference.

 

[BoTTeNBReKeR]

I've had ATI cards for the past 8 years I believe and I really like them. However, ATI does have a reputation of having worse drivers than Nvidia and sometimes this causes problems. Take Rage for example, I've heard the game has a lot more texture popping with ATI cards, though I'm not sure if this has been fixed or not.

So yea, I like ATI cards but I have to admit that Nvidia is probably better when it comes to gaming.