I'm in a dillema here. I've read everywhere that Radeon cards are better than geforce cards. I'm thinking about buying either the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800 XT Could anyone tell me which one is better? I checked the specs and the geforce does better on all fronts. Oh and why do I see that the 9600 engine beats the 9800 engine by 88 Mhz. It's a lot of money and I don't want to buy anything if it's not going to work well with the games I play. They require the best of the best!
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 :sick 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. 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.
