hehehe so we meet again solargame..... my vote goes out to nvidia - major pixel pushers and fully SLi enabled.. there's no comparison. What do you think people?
i just read the latest isuue of Maximum PC mag, and they were doin a ATI vs.Nvidia contest. seems that the overal score came out that the nvidia is a better deal. ati is for the real hardcore fans.
My vote would go to Nvidia. Nvidia drivers are much more stable and support a much wider range of operating systems. If you even consider running an alternate OS such as Linux, Nvidia is the winner hands down for driver support. At one time ATI would only release their drivers in RPMs. Great if you were running Red Hat, but not if you were running any of the other Linux distributions. A few reasons why Nvidia drivers are the best choice for Linux/BSD: Unified Driver Architecture - the same driver supports 200+ Nvidia cards, from the old Geforce 3's to the latest and greatest. 95% of the code is the same across operating systems, making Nvidia drivers much more portable to Linux, BSD, etc. This makes upgrading an Nvidia card a breeze since the same driver supports all cards. ATI has moved in this direction, but it has just been recently. OpenGL - much better native performance with OpenGL than ATI Support - dedicated Linux support with Nvidia, ATI provides a forum only I have also found that the Nvidia drivers are much more stable in Windows as well. I still remember having to downgrade ATI Catalyst drivers to play games such as Neverwinter Nights, the newest drivers were not backwards compatible. Arx Fatalis was another that I played a lot that had ATI driver issues. Baldurs Gate II would crash if you used OpenGL mode on an ATI card. Even back in the days of my 486 I remember ATI driver issues with Shadowcaster, a game that some of the iD people worked on before Doom. Of course those are old games, but even later games such as Far Cry had some issues with ATI cards as well, freezes with the 4.9 Catalyst drivers is one issue I knew about in Far Cry. The one thing I would have to say that ATI is better at than Nvidia is their All In Wonder cards. Their TV tuner and Multimedia features of those lines of cards are better than Nvidia's offering.
I would have to go with ati since its my graphics card and it has been working flawlessly scince day 1