ATI cards

This is quite a complex subject with a lot of differant view points and has been hotly debated on these forums before.
Image quality is a very subjective thing,what i find pleasing to the eye may make you wince and wonder how such an awfull picture was created. Ok so thats a little over the top but the basic premiss holds up.
The thing is the way the cards render the image is differant so its not really sensable to compare them side by side.
What generally comes out is that the people who say they prefer the ATI image say its down to sharpness and colour.
Its important to bear in mind that your monitor is going to play a big part in what you see also and they can be set up in many various configurations. As an example, have you ever walked around a TV store and wondered why all the sets showing the same picture look so differant? well it down to how they are set up, one may look washed out so maybe the brightness or contrast is set high ? So at the end of the day image quality comes down to your personal preferance.

As far as the performance is concerned it is true that the Nvidia cards are Genarally faster as far as FPS goes also they seem to cope with AA better than the ATI cards. This does vary from game to game with some games showing the ATI cards faster than the Nvidia offerings in benchmarks and reviews.

Mactronix

9800gx2 is almost always faster than the 3870x2. Some games look better with nvidia (opengl a lot of times) and some look better with ATI (Oblivion and HL2), but this is only my opinion from my personal experiences.

The most important deciding factor is your monitor I wouldn't chase image quality too much when deciding, Find out what best suites your needs and whats in you budget.

Everyone knows that bananas are better

uhh, excuse me, but I'll be voting for the strawberry.

IQ is very subjective. In reality, you should just get the best performing card you can afford.
It won't matter much if images are pretty if they're flowing past your eyes at 12 frames a second.

Heres a simple answer. Do all TVs look the same when played? Youve seen em side by side at wally world, all showing the same content? Isnt one darker, redder, whiter etc? You have controls to change these things, even if it is the same thing, and each monitor is going to show different as well, regardless of the gpu. It used to be that nVidias way of displaying its content was somewhat inferior to ATIs, but its been shown thats no longer the case. Now its just more a matter of more red?green?white or overall color depth, which you can adjust within your graphics console