i think nvidia is the better option due to superior software/drivers and physx

im an ati owner, btw, and not unhappy with the card by any means.

i thought the software/driver issue was a thing of the past?

i cant force vsync off since I upgraded to win7. Id call that driver problem.
If the game in itself doesnt have a vsync option (which granted most games do) im screwed

lol physx, usefull for flying papers in batman and same kind of stuff in mirror's edge ; i won't ever make it big for the obvious reason

and btw idd ati seems to have the best perf/price cards since a few years

I dont beleive that the engine in itself is particuarly good however i dont like missing out on effects in games. im thinking about cryostasis in particular which i love but im missing out on so many effects due to not having nvidia

has been nvidia > ati for years but these days i'd probably get an ati. Good cards and a lot more bang for your buck

ati currently seem to have the edge, nvidia are releasing new cards in the next couple of weeks i heard, might be worth waiting if ur planning to buy..

I seen an artical on digg with latest graphics card round ups from budget to top end, ati won all catagories

I've always had nvidia btw.. never had a problem

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nvidia, I bought a 8400GS for £15 to replace my broken ATI card temporarily and can't be bothered to replace it since it does everything I need :<

ati has the upper hand despite some problems.
nvidia has still better results in opengl games & linux support, still :)

Nvidia, easy.

from performance/price definitely ati.
however I have had more issues with ati drivers more than nvidia.
I have bought more ati cards than nvidia cards so far, though currently on nvidia.

dude! THE FUCK?

is that you?

Thank you! The guy pretty much covers everything thoroughly and explains some of the concerns I had. I think I'm gonna message him in the future for some computer help....

he rules

It has to be AMD/ATI because this guy says Nvidia.

I like Nvidia as a company, but I think its important to support AMD because they are getting out punched in the CPU market by Intel who I dislike. The day the market is ruled by Intel alone will be dark times and that's exactly what they want.

Nvidia has been on top for so long, I think its nice to support AMD.
It just so happens that AMD are also strong in this area too.

Also Intel are fined 940 million, yet first place at quake 3 dubai gets a few 1000 dollars for being the best in the world.

you need to wake up and smell the coffee, Intel are cheap bastards.
I don't care how many self supporting ESL admins come on here talking shit.

The bottom line is there is ZERO money in esports in the deepest sense, yet there are all these multi billion pound companies that got rich off it.

You would think one of them would make it happen given it would be peanuts to them. Yet still some of the best players have to flay halfway round the world, be the best at something skilled and barely break even for flights and hotel.

The cost of flying an intel employee first class from New York to London is more money than they put up for events.

You need to put that into perspetive and realise these people keep esports smalltime because they know the players will still play for peanuts and they get the same exposure.

That's why mainstream esports will be smalltime for a very long time. Ther will always be suckers chasing the cash no matter how small. its just a horrible cycle I don't see being broken.

Intel provides lots of money for Starcraft. Play a kids game, get a kids prize.

Yes but that's in asia on a fairly niche game/franchise.

Why are there not huge Street Fighter 4, Quake 3, Tekken 5-6, Trackmania tourneys going on every few months with nice prize pools?

I.E.
Fairly mass market games that are pretty cool to play and easy to get into and see waht is going on.

You can never watch starcraft and understand it without investing some serious time into it, of which most people dont want to do, and those type of games are not really console games anyway, which is where the mainstream market is.

Its jsut shit, if I had a few million I would gladly stick up a few g a month, when you consider the amount of cash these companies make they do jack shit in the relation to how much they make.

Again, you play kids games, and you get kids prizes. When you're ready to play a manly game like SC, you can get some real money.

as a kid i played StarCraft.. just because you remember a game from when you were a kid it doesn't make it a "kid's game" (whatever the fuck that is)..

besides, the competitive fighting games demographics is on par with Quake/StarCraft (maybe a wee bit older, since arcade days).. with some of the top players being in their early 30s.

just because you see 2 characters fighting as opposing to tens of units, doesn't mean you can oversimplify the first type of games.

..and i'm willing to admit StarCraft is more complex and top players are insanely skilled, if such comparison could be made.. still both types of games offer different things and should be appreciated in their own rights

Street Fighter requires extended knowledge of matchups, framedata and move properties.. execution to back all that up, then mind games and pattern recognition

if you would know how to play the game maybe you could see more of all these.

doesn't make it a "kid's game" (whatever the fuck that is)..

A game... that should only be played by children.

who's to say that?

Lumberjacks.

i thought it was plumbers :D

ATI/AMD do not need anyone's sympathy. Seems like most ppl on this thread are oblivious to the fact that for the last 4 months at least ATI has both the performance and price crown.

u might get stuttering whit nvidia, i have. it comes and goes and its annoying.
arQon told me it was something whit the drivers and nvidia doesn't care enough to fix it, some don't have the problem at all some dose.
if i mainly wanted to play q3 i would go for a ATI just to be safe.

The cheaper one.

nVidia. ATI failed so hard, they had to be bought by AMD.

Failed how? Guess you weren't around for the 9800 pro day's when nvidia was failing. AMD bought them because ATI was already successful. I own a 4890 and see nothing wrong with it and by comparison tests, it best's the Nvidia 260 and even some tests against the 275, yet priced significantly lower and also very overclockable.

currently, ati > nvidia. faster/better price/dx11 support etc.

i'd wait for fermi though, it doesnt look that promising but if nvidia can get its shit sorted out it might be worth buying nV again.

just need to wait like... 2 months ;p

Also I will add you can forget massive jumps in the PC market before long.

Whether you like it or not PC game sales are crap, development is moving to consoles, consoles are priced to be affordable, that means they will be limited in tech.

So in 3 years time I would not be surprised if the next Xbox will be no more powerful than somethign like an i7 920 with a top of the range radeon card.

GFX and CPU vendors can only justify processing power IF<<< there is software to run it.

Game developers are the only people who use this power, if they are making thier games with console hardware in mind, tell me?

Why are they going to develop art assets which will only be seen by a small % of people.

Consoles will halt the progress of the CPU and GPU market because nobody needs a super computer to run the games.

Its going to get like microsoft word, you never needed to upgrade from office 2003 or a computer from 2000 to do what you need to with it, anymore than you needed to upgrade to vista from XP, or even windows 7.

That threshold is kinda already here. And without something hugely revolutionary happening in games or hardware I don't see it changing anytime soon.

I dunno maybe in a 5 years time the console market will finally realise that the PC is the superior platform, I mean if you look at a console, its basically crap PC isn't it?

there's always AA, AF & resolution you can up on the PC though

pc game sales aren't as high when compared to consoles but it's still enough to have all the major publishers still putting out games for it. i've been hearing about the death of pc gaming for 10 years and it's no nearer happening. ATI have sold over 2 million DX11 cards just over the the holidays, which tells u that there are lots of pc gamers out there. Even If there are only 10 times as many pc gamers on DX9 and DX10 hardware (which is severely underestimating) then that is still a worthy market and it's why the publishers aren't going anywhere

I'm not saying thye will stop producing games for them.

I'm saying the technological advances of the PC will start to slow down compared to consoles because the games will be developed with consoles in mind, BEFORE they are developed for the PC.

Nobody is going to develop a game with game assets that a console is incapable of rendering because they would never make the money back.

Therefore, you have to ask yourself, how is INTEL/AMD/NVIDIA going to create a demand for the new equipment on the PC if developers are developing their games with console hardware in mind before PC.

they are hamstrung by that, but by having DX11 specific features running on pc (and having assets scaled down for consoles) they can convince ppl still.

'We will also be one of the first games to really show off how good DirectX 11 games can look, with hardware tessellation of the Aliens using displacement mapping, and Shader Model 5.0 Compute Shaders for post-processing effects'

'All the art assets are authored at higher resolutions than can be squeezed onto current console hardware [..] it looks truly state-of-the-art on PC. Similarly effects such as shadows and full-screen passes like ambient occlusion are more complex and detailed on PC'

old interview but relevant

you know its not only games that need a grafics card and a fast cpu, don't you?

yeah, very much agreed.
i don't care about graphics, i don't even notice AA and AF too much to care

now if only consoles would support mouse and keyboard in most games i wouldn't even bother with PC gaming..

developers are to blame on this one i think, they either want their game not to be "ruined by skill" (and to waste extended time on making the gameplay balanced and fun for all input devices) or they're just stuck with the console paradigm fueled by mass ignorance from the console gamers

.

My ati card doesn't even let you force off AA, so Nvidia

Personally I stopped using ATI cards ever since their drivers required .NET framework to be installed. Sure, you can install the basic display driver without .NET, but I don't believe you can install the full driver package. Even on a higher end system, I do not like having software running that I don't need.

A little tip for ATI card owners. Don't install the control center and use the ati tray tools instead (http://www.atitraytools.tk/). Than you've got plenty more options available!

And regarding the topic, well i've switched from nvidia to ati when they released the 4800 series because of the performance/price.
But i think the new cards at the moment are too pricey. So wait till nvidia sell their cards.

nvidia cos ati drivers blow

Nvidia's drivers always have been better with opengl support.... ATI is better performance/price ratio wise (+ DX11), but just because of it's sucky drivers I wouldn't go for an ATI (rofl @ requiring .net framework for a graphic driver).

when sells are down, nvidia will ask for cinefx royaltes

For years I said "never again ATI" because of many driver issues I had in the past.

Nevertheless at the moment ATI: has Dx11, Hdmi-out and more performance per $. Waiting whether nvidia can come back on top with their next gen, though. (Release in March?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpdPSZB8A8E
doesnt seem that mind blowing imo, but then again fermi cards are not all about raw power (something about supporting GPU computing w/e the fuck that is)