Best Graphics Card On the Market.....

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Sorry about the attitude ... it's just that kind of day. Anyways you do make some good points, but (and this is just my opninion) I don't trust ATI. They have a bad rep for a reason ... i.e: horrible drivers.

I mean this is all just opinion ... the news I hear steers me away from the Radeon and maybe I'm missing out .. I don't know. If the Radeon is still stable a 2 months from now .. or better yet when Direct X 9 comes out ... maybe I'll reconsider. There are no better drivers out there than the Detonators and the new series already cut some of those huge performance claims of the Radeon in 2. Actually every test I've seen of the 40 Det's vs the Radeon 9700 in UT 2003 has the GeForce actually scoring higher.

And the "long standing" thing is true .. ATI has a long standing history of sucking all the way back to the OG Rage cards. I've been in the "industry" for awhile now so I can say my opinion is an educated one.
 
ATI's drivers suck?
:haha:
I remember my first ATI card - VGA Wonder. It had a working utility for setting some graphics modes in DOS :giddy:
Things haven't really improved after those days..
 
Sorry about the attitude ... it's just that kind of day....
Sorry to hear that- hope things look up soon:)

I'm not going to try and convince you that ATI's drivers are flawless, they aren't. I've owned only one NVIDIA product, a TNT1, and that's why I went away from Nvidia with my next purchase, the Original RADEON. The support from Nvidia on that card was far from acceptable.

I bought it 2 years ago, and it served me right, though I've heard the drivers needed improvement at the time of release, mine were great. I had one issue with a flight sim, (CFS2), but a download of the most recent drivers from the ATI websit fixed that.

Recently, I went ahead and bought a used R8500 for $50, and was shocked at how well this card performs, especially with A.F. enabled at it's peak quality. I prefer the look of AF over blutty FSAA any day, I just love sharp textures.:)

Anyway, I've been very pleased w/ both the RADEON and R8500. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I lurk a few websites, and the general consensus seems that ATI's driver have improved greatly, while the quality of Nvidia's drivers are great as well, though the latest DET 40's caused some headaches with a failry high percentage of users.

The latest DET's do NOT signifigantly improve performance in games, however. There is no benchmark I'm aware of that show a signifignant performance increase in games (that I'm aware of) If you have one, feel free to post it. I've noticed that the NATURE part of 3-Dmark increases greatly with the new DET's, but that unfortunatley does not translate into real-world performance.

As fas as the Ti4600 keeping pace with the R9700 in UT2003, just wait until the game comes out, and watch the Ti4600 get smoked as the R9700 will be running at 4xFSAA w/16x anisotropic filtering(all options set to high), and still running smooth, while the Ti4600 (at those same settings) will be putting on a slide show:eek:

Anyway, I think the Ti4600 is more than enough card for any game, as long as your'e not into high FSAA and high aniso settings.

But if you are, then you can't really go wrong w/ the R9700. If you are really serios about knocking ATI's drivers, I would suggest actually trying one of their recent products:) I certainly wouldn't assume Nvidia's drivers are the same quality (or lack thereof) of my TNT1;)

~peace~
 
You're right about the 9700 outperforming the ti4600 at high resolutions and with AA enabled (4x and higher).

What I've been thinking lately is that all that crap is just for those of us who don't know any better or just need the best cards out there to say we have the best out there. I fall prey to this as well. I really don't notice a difference in AA 2x or 4x or 6x for that matter. I also don't notice a difference between 16 bit or 32 bit textures. Maybe I'm going blind from all those programming classes .. lol.

I KNOW I'm not the minority in that respect though. The human eye really can't tell such minor differences. I have 2 machines .. both with ti4600's .. I ran the UT 2003 Demo one with minimum settings and the other with high settings and there was virtually no difference.

Seriously.

Hey .. maybe these guys .. (nVidia & ATI both) just want to sell video cards!!

Well ... thats my 2 cents.
 
LOL- I think that's pretty closed to the truth:)
Only time I'd like to have FSAA is when I'm flight simming.
Anisotropic filtering, however, I couldn't live without. Once you have used it (at high settings), there is NO going back:)
 
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