ATI vs nVidia Video Cards - Through The Eyes Of A Gamer

A lot of people may not know, and maybe will never care, about the importance of video cards. Many motherboards have built in video chips, because of that most people will not care to install even the cheapest video card. Why should you install a video card when all you need your computer for are office applications or homework, browsing, and of course e-mails. The majority of youths today watch videos through YouTube, and some use computers to fix their digital photographs.

Most of the time, if you want to do more with your computer, it will need a faster video card, especially when converting videos to other formats, or when transcoding to and from dvd's, or if you want to create and edit pictures at their most infinite detail, and gaming pc's need all the crunching video power it can get especially for running newer high-end graphics demanding games.

The difference of having a fast video card is very obvious when transcoding a dual layer dvd, which contains approximately 8gb of data. Normally the transcoding process takes about 5 hours, but if you have a really fast video card it won't reach 20 minutes. If your system has a fast dual-core Intel or AMD processor and a high-end video card combined, transcoding a dvd won't even reach 7 minutes.

When playing games, a fast video card can mean the difference between turning all the special effects and features off, versus maxing them all out. For those skeptics who think they can live with lower quality graphics settings, I'll tell you now that it's as different as a five year olds drawings and Da Vinci's paintings. Take for example these two pc-games Lara Croft Legends and Far Cry, if I turn down all the special graphic effects and settings the trunks of trees become smooth and simple colored, like it's covered with paper, mountains are plain drabby grey with big blotches of brown and triangular like angles at points where elevation changes. But if you crank the graphics up to maximum effects, tree barks become real with textures and color, mountains are rocky and have actual vines hanging and crawling at the walls, shadows come out depending on the light source and suddenly you realize why your character has a flashlight and what its for, birds fly around, smoke billows from fires at a distance, water sparkles and looks so real you can imagine swimming in it, fish swimming everywhere and even sand looking like real sand. When you shoot the water with your sub-machine gun it really splashes where the bullets hit and you can even see bullets whizzing past you if you're underwater and bad guys are shooting at you from their gun boats on the surface.

With my experience of using many models of video cards, I think that ATI has always been a tad faster than nVidia. I know that there are “loyalists” out there who stick to one brand, and we all know that most games display the nVidia logo more often than ATI's, but actually I find ATI the better choice of the two. nVidia is more often than not the company that first comes out with a newer video card, but soon after its release ATI introduces a video card faster than nVidia's. There are times when ATI releases first, shortly after nVidia usually comes out with a faster card, but within a few weeks ATI will have one that's faster than nVidia's again. It's kind of like a weird yoyo cause and effect model between these two giants, and what's even more impressive is that it isn't really a price struggle between these two, but instead a power war. Obviously their high-end clientele look for performance first, then price.

My quest for the fastest video card started when Half-Life was released by Valve/Sierra 9 years ago, precisely at November 1998. During that time having a default 1mb video card was enough to run almost any game. In fact, monster video cards didn't have more than 8mb's of RAM and cost more than most high-end cards today. I couldn't believe that Half-Life needed at least an nVidia TNT with 16mb to perform just right. I remember buying Voodoo 2500 and 3500 cards with 16mb each and was able to play Half-Life very smoothly except that Voodoo cards could only produce 16-bits of colors, which isn't as pretty as 32-bit, so finally when nVidia released its TNT I finally got to play Half-Life for the 2nd time with its full 32-bits of graphics glory. I tried almost every nVidia video card model after that, starting with the TNT, TNT2, GeForce, GeForce 2, GeForce 4, GeForce FX-5200, GeForce 5700, but before I bought the GeForce 5950 I decided to wait for the rumored GeForce 6800.

Funny thing is that I was satisfied with my nVidia 5700, and I wouldn't have even considered upgrading if not for the game Far Cry, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2, all of which needs very high-end graphics cards. Before the GeForce 6800 was released, ATI came out with their X800 and it was so powerful I almost bought it, but decided to wait for the GeForce 6800's release and reviews. When the GeForce 6800 finally came out it blew away the ATI X800's performance, but then there was rumor of ATI coming out with their tweaked X800XT which will be faster than both the X800 and the GeForce 6800, so I waited again. When the ATI X800XT finally came out it was well worth the wait, I read the reviews and after learning that it was indeed faster than the GeForce 6800, I bought it! That video card surpassed all expectations! The ATI X800XT served me well and still does, in fact I have yet to see a game that won't run well with it.

After 2 years of using my ATI X800XT, I upgraded my system with an nForce chipset board because I wanted to try out the performance of an SLI (dual-video) card setup. Unfortunately it didn't satisfy my expectations. It was a bit faster, but I didn't see a big difference compared to my ATI X800XT. In fact the dual nVidia 7900 SLI didn't feel much faster than a single nVidia 7900 system. I changed my video card to the nVidia 7950GX2 which was like an SLI with 2 7900 video cards, but using only 1 PCI-Express slot. Again it was even slower than a single nVidia 7900 video card. I was about to buy the ATI X1900 video card but decided to wait for the nVidia 8800 GTX because of Vista and DirectX 10. ATI video cards last year did not have DirectX 10 yet, not until after mid-2007.

I am very satisfied with my nVidia 8800GTX video card, it surpassed all expectation and even more. But after reading about the specs of the up and coming ATI 2900 DirectX 10 video card, and learning that it should be about 50% faster than the nVidia 8800GTX, I think I'll be transferring to ATI again soon.

Bottom line is, ATI rarely crashes, it is more stable, and it is a very powerful video card. My problem with nVidia is it's not very compatibile with other chipsets. If I have an nVidia video card on a VIA chipset board, I find that there are games whose video's crash unless I upgrade the VIA's chipset or BIOS. In my experience, nVidia stops crashing after all the upgrades and devices are installed, but ATI works fine even if you haven't installed any upgrades or devices before using it.