Thread: Buying a new Graphics Card

AeonsLegend, you have a good question. My answer is based upon the operating system you will be running primarily. If you run Linux as your primary OS, you should definately go for Nvidia; Nvidia's Linux driver support is much better than ATI's. If you run Win32 primarily, you'll probably do better with a Radeon card. Either one is going to give you awesome framerates even with antialiasing, and either one is going to do advanced pixel-shading and provide nice 2D accelleration features. However, ATI currently supports DX9 quite a bit more thoroughly than Nvidia. GeForce 4 cards claim to provide full DX9 support, but that's not completely true. Many DX9 features are actually emulated in software by the drivers; ie your system processor and RAM has to do work the video card should be doing. With games like Half-Life 2 (if it ever comes out ) and Doom 3, this will make a pretty major difference. I'm not an ATI fanboy by any means, but I think they simply have a better product at present.

Originally Posted by AeonsLegend

Oh and why do I see that the 9600 engine beats the 9800 engine by 88 Mhz?

The Radeon 9800 utilized 8 simultaneous rendering pipes, while the 9600 only uses 4 pipes. Even though the 9600 is clocked higher, it cannot compete with a 9800 for raw power.