ATi Radeon or nVidia better?

[Saint]

Main Question or Discussion Point

Which is better?

 

[Integral]

This is Troll bait

 

[Saint]

This is sucker

 

[dduardo]

They are both equally good cards. Ati just makes bad drivers.

 

[russ_watters]

As it turns out, ATI is generally better at Direct3d and Nvidia is generally better at OpenGL. So if you're a Doom3 fan, an Nvidia card is probably better for you and if you're a Half Life 2 fan, ATI is better.

The top of the line from both will run any game adequately though.

 

[graphic7]

They are both equally good cards. Ati just makes bad drivers.

Yet, Nvidia won't release the specifications for any of their graphics cards, therefore, not any operating systems have non-propiertary DRI support for their cards. Quite a dilemma.

As far as I know, DRI support for ATI in Linux and any other OS that supports DRI, was not written by ATI, but the developers of those OSs, respectively. If you're using a non-Microsoft operating system, you'll be using drivers developed by the OS developers.

I'm a proud owner of an Nvidia GeForce 2. Does my FreeBSD configuration support DRI at the moment? No, because I'm not going to use the propiertary Nvidia drivers.

 

[gnome]

I'm not a gamer or an artist so I can't talk about the fine points of the graphics, but I can tell you that I have a notebook with ATI Radeon Mobility, a desktop with Nvidia Nforce2 and another desktop (a few years old) with Matrox Millennium G450, all of them set up to multiboot windows & linux.

I've installed various linux distributions (several times on each machine) and the Nvidia box is always the most troublesome. Take a look at discussions of these graphics cards on forums like www.linuxquestions.org[/url] and [url]http://forums.gentoo.org[/URL]. I don't think you can get full functionality out of the Nvidia board under linux unless you install Nvidia's own proprietary driver, and then you have their name (splash screen) pop up in your face every time x-windows starts up. :grumpy:

Running Windows, they all seem fine to me.

 

[dduardo]

To get rid of the splash screen put this line in the graphics card section of your xorg.conf or xfree86.conf file:

Option "NoLogo" "True"

I run the proprietary nvidia drivers in Linux and they work aswell if not better than the Windows version. This is perhaps because opengl is more refined on the Linux side than that of windows.

 

[BoulderHead]

I recall an ATI driver refusing to uninstall because it couldn't find any ATI hardware (video card had been removed surreptitiously by another). Needless to say this was very frustrating and when I purposefully repeated this with another computer (All-In-Wonder card) the very same thing happened again. As far as quality between the two brands my vision isn't qualified to judge any supposed difference.

 

[gnome]

Thanks for that tip about the splash, dduardo.

 

[KaneOris]

ATI Radeon X800 is the best video card in the world.

 

[dekoi]

As it turns out, ATI is generally better at Direct3d and Nvidia is generally better at OpenGL. So if you're a Doom3 fan, an Nvidia card is probably better for you and if you're a Half Life 2 fan, ATI is better.

The top of the line from both will run any game adequately though.

Excactly.

There's no such thing as "x800 is the best video card in the world."

 

[KaneOris]

From the test ive seen the ATi Radeon X800 is almost as good with OpenGL as the GeForce FX 5700, but the GeForce FX 5700 can't compete in Direct3d.