Hello people,

So my question basically is which cards give the best image quality? I was going to build a little budget pc with an Ati x1950xtx. I feel that this should be able to handle pretty much everything out there with really good performance coupled with an AMD 6000 x2. Then again for the price I could get an 8800 gts.

Whats your opinions?

Anything ATI used to beat anything Nvidia in image quality, but no more. Pretty much every video card out there has the same image quality. If you are talking about Frames Per Second... that is totally different. The 8800GTX/GTS and the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT are the best performing video cards out there, followed (not so closely) by the ATI X1900/1950 series, and the Nvidia 7800/7900 series.

for the dollar spent the Geforce 8800GTS 320 MB is the best

Typically ATI X1k series has the best IQ.

Speaking as a person who owns a 1950 I'd buy the 8800. Don't get me wrong - I love my X1950, but I'm not blind to the fact that the 8800 spanks it performance-wise. The image quality differences should be negligible.

Haven't seen you posting in a while F1N3ST Nice to see you back.

Well, if the guy asks for image quality, we should talk image quality. If someone's in the photoshopping business, image quality would be their main concern, and telling them that the difference is small between different brands are VERY irrelevent.

That said, I'll add that if you were that serious that image quality is your concern, your problems lie primarily on your monitor, and you should be looking for a good monitor. Look for 8bit monitors, not 6bit monitors, and they are easily identified by how many colours they show (16.7m vs 16.2m). The difference is small, but the quality difference is huge. I own an 8bit monitor, and I can say, using 6bit monitors at my parent's are a drag. Pictures just look.... different.

thank you all for the replies!

Well do you think that the x1950 xtx is stable or not? I just dont feel like shelling out 300$ for the GTS where i can get an xtx for about 150$. I mainly going to be doing some hardcore gaming. I use to have a top of the line system back about 2 years ago where the FX-57 was the beast and two 7800 GTX's.

Now I sold that pc and looking to make a rig that could do high gaming at a affordable cost, which then the factors come in on when will DX 10 play a role in games. Which leads me to second guess all the flaws with ATI and NVIDIA and if its even worth me spending the 150 on a card that wont be able to play future games in a short time.

The X1950XTX is the most powerful card in the DX9 era. A single 8800 series card is faster than dual X1950XTXs though.

An X1950XTX will play anything on max, but the 8800s will do it better, especially for games like Oblivion.

All ATi X1xxx card have very good image quality. nvidia just caught up with their 8000 series cards.

I have a x1900xt 512MB and see no reason to upgrade to any DX10 card yet, at least on my main rig. I have a 7600GT in my son's computer and it fails to output DVD and other video files out the S-Video port and as I understand all the 8000 cards have the same shortcoming. I may get a HD 2600XT in a few days just for a full-function s-video port.

what type of processors would you recommend with the 1950 xtx? I was gunna wait till the intel quad core goes down as of july 22nd or atleast thats what I have heard or I was going to go with an AMD x2 6000 or an 5600 and just overclock the crap out of it.

What would you recommend.

I mainly want to play WOW, Guild Wars, Supreme Commander and Warhammer 40K Dark Crusade.

With the 6000+ or a 5600+ your really looking at ~3.1GHz max overclock. Both are defiantly fast enough for what you want to do.

Get a Core2 E6600 and OC the crap out of it, they will OC WAY WAY WAY more than ANY AMD Processor.