ATI vs nVidia

[Sean]

I've always been an nVidia buyer, for a long, long time. The only ATI I've ever had came off an old Dell in 2004 with a 4GHz Intel P4 and an ATI x300.

I've been building my own systems for years now, and I've been leaning towards switching to ATI, because I'm an AMD supporter and AMD now owns ATI, and AMD North/Southbridges are more common than nVidia North/Southbridges on AM2/3 motherboards these days.

Two questions I really have but haven't found solid answers to are...

How do I compare ATI model numbers to nVidia models? Tomshardware used to have great guides for this, but the site's become a nightmare to navigate as of late.

Do AMD North/Southbridges play well with nVidia cards in the PCI X16 slots? I'm FAIRLY sure it doesn't matter too much, but I know the south(?)bridge is a big player in video rendering.

Is it worth swapping off of nVidia, which I've always known to have better driver support, just because I'm running AMD chips on AM2/3 boards with AMD bridges?

[ultima_trev]

The battle always shifts. After G80 based GF 8800 GTX, nVidia rode the wave of success for two years before finally ATI produced a worthy competitor in the form of the Radeon HD 4000 series.

And now ATI pwns the shit out of nVidia with the HD 5800 series, which is priced lower than the GF 285, produces better frames, and supports Direct X 11.

Although that new Fermi architecture does appear to be a beast, it seems mostly designed for HPC apps and not games, meaning ATI might get to be the gaming card leader for some time to come, like nVidia was with G80.

People also seem to like ATI's Catalyst drivers better than nvidia's Forceware.

Anyhow, I like the underdog better. nVidia and Intel can suck it, AMD-ATI FTFW.

As for comparable model numbers:

GeForce 8800 / 9800 series = Radeon HD 2900 / Radeon HD 3800 series
GeForce GTS 250 = Radeon HD 4850
GeForce GTX 260 = Radeon HD 4870
GeForce GTX 275 = Radeon HD 4890
GeForce GTX 285 = Radeon HD 5850
GeForce GTX 295 (dual gpu card) = Radeon HD 5970 (also dual gpu card)

As for running nVidia cards on AM2/3 mainboards, it should be just fine as long as you got enough juice in the PSU and you got PCIE 2.0.

For good tech resource sites, I recommend AnandTech.com, HardOCP.com, or TechReport.com, all at least as good as Tom's Hardware.

[loaf]

I've had both ATI and Nvidia cards.

ATI's CCC is buggy and crashes all the time.

NVIDIA's control panel is great.

I'd rather have NVIDIA, I've had better experience with Nvidia then ATI, but I think ATI's cards run better.