[Kristian Joensen]

Why not to get an ATI card. I wish that company would go bankrupt ASAP.

[MusicallyInspired]

I had the misfortune of actually being an ATI fanboy for the longest time. I've only recently come to see the folly of my ways and am stuck with an ATI card pining for a GeForce 9500 GT or something.

[NetNessie]

I've never owned enough video cards to really have an justified opinion, but it seems that mobile video cards just generally suck when compared to the desktop models. GeForce Go cards have always given me headaches.

I use a ATI HD 4870 on my PC at home and I've encountered no issues (except an ugly shadow problem with Company of Heroes, but my brothers GeForce 8 does the same thing).

[Spiker]

I always had nVidia cards and I was never disappointed. ATI may be good too but there are some bad rumors about some models.

[Daedolon]

ATI has somehow started getting some terrible driver issues the last year or so, but it still beats paying $100 more for a similar powered nVidia card, there's always some sort of fan drivers for ATI anyway.

[peoplessi]

 Daedolon, on May 9 2009, 12:22 AM, said:

ATI has somehow started getting some terrible driver issues the last year or so, but it still beats paying $100 more for a similar powered nVidia card, there's always some sort of fan drivers for ATI anyway.

What problems exactly? It's useless to just toss about some abigous information that can't be proven true. Also, the "fan drivers" are based on the drivers made by ATI.

[Kristian Joensen]

So this has prompted me to consider buying a new laptop. But it not exactly my expertise. But the offer that seemed most appealing was a Asus X72VN-7S107C. Do any of you guys know anything about it? A quick Google search didn't turn up any tests/benchmarks.

[sol]

Hmm I thought I already replied to this.

For your laptop; search for the processor, hard drive & graphics card separately. Don't bother with trying to find benchmarks for the laptop itself. You pretty much always get what you pay for, though.

ATI is better for value but nVidia's top cards are the best. Most game companies work with nVidia so compatibility is pretty much assured. Geeks tend to support + talk more highly of nVidia because they've traditionally had much better driver support (freebsd, linux, etc), however, ATI (under AMD now) released pretty much all of their specs to the public in the past year or so --- so ATI drivers will end up being better within the near future.

** Personally, I think drivers from both companies are bloated crap for Windows, so whatever in that regard. I've had more hardware problems with ATI, but those were very cheap cards.

[Kristian Joensen]

Well thanks for the reply. But I bought it already .

[The Commander]

The only thing wrong I see with ATI cards at the moment is that there drivers are a bit crappy for OpenGL type apps, other than that they are good value for money. I have now owned three ATI cards and two nVidia ones.

[Jezza]

 Daedolon, on May 8 2009, 01:22 PM, said:

ATI has somehow started getting some terrible driver issues the last year or so, but it still beats paying $100 more for a similar powered nVidia card, there's always some sort of fan drivers for ATI anyway.

That's strange. On linux at least, the ATi driver has improved no end over the last year or so. nVidia used to be the only option when picking a card on linux, but now, the catalyst driver (although I use the xorg radeonhd driver) has really started competing.

[leilei]

I had no qualms about my ATI hardware, and fglrx for linux is decent and they've been more open about their specs than nvidia has ever done, so give them a break if it's not 100% perfect forever. Nvidia isn't either (ugh 8bit thrashing, for old gamers that play old games nvidia is your worst bet for sure)

[MusicallyInspired]

One thing I resent about ATI is that I own an X1650 AGP card. A card which is now considered a legacy product and not supported by the latest driver (9.4). I also use Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. Now Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty is released and the only supported ATI driver is....you guessed it, 9.4! A driver that does not work with my video card! So I can't even upgrade to the latest release of my OS. It was bad enough FINALLY getting fglrx to work in Ubuntu 8.10. It would never work for any earlier version. And when your graphics card only works with one out of however many releases there are of Ubuntu that's pretty sad.

Also, it sucks for eDuke32's Polymer.

[leilei]

Don't blame ATI for Ubuntu's regressions.

[MusicallyInspired]

It's not Ubuntu's fault that ATI's Linux drivers suck. Or their cards, for that matter. As they seem to work for some people and not for others with the exact same card.

[TerminX]

 leilei, on May 27 2009, 02:45 PM, said:

Don't blame ATI for Ubuntu's regressions.

It's not really an Ubuntu regression. It seems more like ATI is failing to maintain a "legacy" driver set like NVIDIA does. You run into things like newer versions of X breaking compatibility with the previous ABI so you're stuck until the vendor releases a new driver (and if the vendor doesn't give a shit, you're screwed).

[Forge]

I've owned both type of cards for my desktop at one point in time or another.

The bottom line is, you get what you pay for. I never had any major problems with either card running windows or linux for the last 10 years or so.

All this argument boils down to is your personal preference. Both companies put out quality cards, both put out crap. Both have good and poor support depending on whether you bought quality or crap.

[z0mb1e]

I haven't really had any problems with ATi other than driver crashes, but I got way more driver crashes with my last nvidia card

[Nemesis]

nVidia > ATI nuff' said

[z0mb1e]

 Nemesis, on Aug 8 2009, 08:06 PM, said:

nVidia > ATI nuff' said

because rebranding most of your older series cards > making faster ones with more improvements

the only 'new' cards out of nvidia's last series were the 260,280, and 295. 275 and 285 were added later and arent too much of an improvement.

[peoplessi]

 Nemesis, on Aug 9 2009, 03:06 AM, said:

nVidia > ATI nuff' said

Hah, not really I would expect some real argumentats backing your claim. If we look market shares, yes, nVidia has major edge over ATI - majorly due the brand fanaticism. Even the FX series wasn't enough to break the mold. ATI is better than people give credit for, their fast & cheap cards forced nVidia to lower prices of their cards - I wouldn't complain as a customer.

ATI's drivers on Windows platform since Vista have been better. Most of Vista BSODs were caused by faulty nVidia drivers. ATI was first on Windows 7 too, first with DX10.1. DX10.1 which nVidia said they wouldn't support since it's useless, but are supporting it now in some cards. Wonder why? Could be because DX11 includes DX10.1 - so you basically have to do the work in some spot. ATI did it early, nVidia much much later. Now it seems ATI beats nVidia to the market with DX11 cards - again competitively priced. nVidia's flagship GT300 hasn't even had a public showing yet, I'm not sure if anyone from press have seen the silicon even It might be solid 3-6months after ATI DX11 cards, that nVidia get their's out. Big, complex, expensive chip coming from nVidia - again.

On Linux nVidia does better, OpenGL in professional enviroment they do better. But, ATI offers really competitive performance in professional applications with lower prices of course. ATI has catched up on nVidia on both fronts. Windows is ATI's dominion if you look at the driver quality. Monthly releases for all major OS's. Clear naming scheme with them too, 9.8, X.Y - where X is designating the year 200_9_ and Y for month 8. Really easy.

Then we can talk about the product naming, which is a lot clearer on ATI, than with nVidia. nVidia is branding old stock with new names almost on a monthly basis. Making people even more confused. They are now moving towards more unified naming scheme - similar to ATI. ATI is moving ahead of nVidia in the laptop GPU market, nVidia has had quality issues there - a lot.

In the end, I would buy the product that offers most value for my money. For years that has been delivered from ATI. HD2 and HD3 failed a bit, but before that ATI had dominance with X1*** -series, X800 series, 9700/9800 series. Taking front again with HD4, and with HD5 atleast until GT300 is realeased for real. GT300 has a hard time matching HD5 due the big size of the die -> wasted units from wafer. It equals to a expensive chip. Like with GT200 - which were priced almost double to that of HD4.

I wouldn't undermine ATI with such poor basis.

[Chip]

I've had an ATI card now for like 2 years and I have not had any single issues with it at all. The only thing is that they "apparently" don't handle Eduke32's polymer renderer well but I don't have Polymer so I have no idea if this is true for my card or even how bad they handle it.


With my Nvidia cards I have indeed had problems.
When I had my 7600GS, I could not run it in SLI else it'll cause green artifacts all over the screen on newer drivers so I had to stick with the box drivers for its whole life.
My Nvidia 7900GS (in SLI) would cause irregular slow down on some older games like Turok2 and Worms Armageddon.


So far the problem count for my ATI 4850 = 0!

[The Commander]

The only thing I have found wrong/sucks with ATI is the OpenGL support. (Poor drivers)
Other than that they are a great affordable card.

Yes I have had both ATI and Nvidia so I can make this statement.

[Tea Monster]

In 'Yea Olde Tymes' ATI just plain old sucked for game cards. No Open GL support at all, or it was professed and it was never really delivered.

Then they had a big push to make it for gaming cards and recently, up to the last 2 years or so, they were doing pretty good.

Now, unfortunately, they have a bad rep for anything to do with Open GL. Games and just recently Blender (the open source 3D App) had a lot of problems as ATI's cards didn't handle the standard commands at all well.

If you are playing most modern games, you will be using Direct X, which, AFaIK, ATI has no (read as: "no MAJOR") problems with. But for Duke, and a LOT of legacy games and Open Source games, you will be using Open GL - which ATI sucks at.

I've also heard reports of lots of driver issues in general with ATI cards, but I haven't owned one since 2001 so I couldn't really tell you.

[Chip]

Quote

Games and just recently Blender (the open source 3D App) had a lot of problems as ATI's cards didn't handle the standard commands at all well.

Only with the latest Blender3D or with the latest ATI drivers?
I haven't got any problems with my Blender but I last updated that over a year ago. My ATI drivers however are upto date.
Aside note about Blender, is it wrong to have a model worth 14MB of animations?
My latest Duke3D model currently has 18 animations and is about 14MB in size, is that really high? Or am I doing something wrong in my animating to make things heavier in memory then they should be?

[peoplessi]

 Tea Monster, on Aug 27 2009, 11:20 PM, said:

In 'Yea Olde Tymes' ATI just plain old sucked for game cards. No Open GL support at all, or it was professed and it was never really delivered.

Then they had a big push to make it for gaming cards and recently, up to the last 2 years or so, they were doing pretty good.

What? Ok continue...

 Tea Monster, on Aug 27 2009, 11:20 PM, said:

Now, unfortunately, they have a bad rep for anything to do with Open GL. Games and just recently Blender (the open source 3D App) had a lot of problems as ATI's cards didn't handle the standard commands at all well.

If you are playing most modern games, you will be using Direct X, which, AFaIK, ATI has no (read as: "no MAJOR") problems with. But for Duke, and a LOT of legacy games and Open Source games, you will be using Open GL - which ATI sucks at.

Bad rep in OpenGL? Most of the games work just fine, can't comment on Polymer since I haven't seen the source. But if 99,8% run perfectly, I doubt there are any big issues. ATI doesn't suck in OpenGL, in fact nVidia and ATI are pretty much tied in both. Only in professional use would I consider there to be a difference worth mentioning. In everyday, gamer use, there is no difference.

Blender works fine here, so does Luxology modo & XSI. I use modo daily, no problems.

 Tea Monster, on Aug 27 2009, 11:20 PM, said:

I've also heard reports of lots of driver issues in general with ATI cards, but I haven't owned one since 2001 so I couldn't really tell you.

I've heard reports of lots driver issues in general with nVidia cards - but I own one currently, and they are indeed true. You need to use specific drivers to be able to play certain problematic games. Which seem to be plenty considering how wide-spread nVidia is. One would expect better. Both have their flaws, but ATI doesn't have anymore driver issues that nVidia. In the past years it has been nVidia with the problems. Like the famous BSOD bugs with Vista drivers...

[Striker]

I now have absolutely no problems with my NVidia 9800 GTs (in SLI), every game I've played so far works. Now, a little while back, I was having tons of problems, such as crashing, memory corruption, freezing, and artifacts in certain games. Thought it was the NVidia drivers or my card was bad, but it actually was the fact that NVidia Cards are very sensitive to overclocking and RAM quality. My NVidia 9800 GT's were of the OC set, which are factory overclocked, so I underclocked them to the core and memory speeds of the normal 9800 GT, disabled CPU overclocking on my PC, and changed SLI-Ready Memory setting in my BIOS to CPUOC 0%..... the problems disappeared, entirely.

When the GPU is overclocked, it seems to cause little errors in the VRAM that are not always hit in all games. Games like Fallout 3 or Gears of War PC for some reason hit these errors all of the time and you have a PC lockup on your hands, or, if you manage to close the game on time, the OS runs slow as shit until you restart. RAM and CPU overclocking run hand-in-hand, and can experience the same problems, when games need to use the RAM.

Also, if you are not overclocking and are having problems, your RAM, Motherboard, or BIOS Settings might be at fault. Bad RAM/Mixed RAM in Dual Channel or an ill-configured BIOS tends to cause all sorts of fuckups when using an NVidia Card, though, ATI cards seem affected by Bad RAM / an ill-configured BIOS quite a bit as well from what I've seen.

imho, NVidia beats out ATI when you put some effort into creating a stable running environment. I like having PhysX Support, which ATI doesn't have yet, and SLI. (ATI has Crossfire, yes, but finding a motherboard that supports it is more difficult in my area than finding one with SLI support. The performance is slightly less too.)

[peoplessi]

So much stuff based on nothing, Crossfire doesn't need specific chip to work. Anyone can put Crossfire support to their chipsets for free. All modern Intel & AMD chipsets support Crossfire. Where as SLI is almost solely supported by nVidia chipsets only(few exceptions). The performance scales about par on both SLI & CF. The functionality isn't perfect with either of them.

PhysX, yeah, keeping in mind it will eat up GPU time if you have 1 card. Or it will eat another card doing the computation. OpenCL based solutions are coming, and Havok is more commong. Although PhysX supports few nifty features, it's nothing special when you compare it to what can be done with OpenCL & DX11. nVidia has gone great lengths to secure it's use on only nVidia homogeneous platforms. It worked in the past so, that you could have ATI for rendering + nVidia for PhysX - but not anymore.

As for the RAM, BIOS stuff - yeah, overclocking causes instability if one doesn't know what one is doing - or doesn't know the limits of the system. It's not tied to brand of GPU. GPU OC, it will show up in shader intensive games like those based on UE3(Gears of War).

[TerminX]

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Weakest troll over dude. I don't think anybody is going to seriously bite that.

[William Gee]

UT3 works perfectly with my ATI card.