ATI vs Nvidia

Which do you prefer?

ATI. I'm more of a budget person, so money and cost matter.

This should be in the graphics and displays section >.<

/newcomer
flame bait question
oh, its a old thread to boot, snip !

hahahaha at this thread. Although it could make sense. Because he could be implying which is better at overclocking, as in the ammont of performance increase you get out of the cards rather than overall performance left at the end; Nvidia or ATI? I'd like to know this as well. Lets say comparing an Nvidia GTS 250 to an ATI 4850, and a GTX 260 to an ATI 4870. I know that the GTS 250 is rubbish in terms of overclocking; i had one, but apart from that it has one pci power connector and is on it's full power requirement with that one pci connector anyway so you can't give it any more voltage with your overclock.

Even if it wasn't about money ATI would be better because of more performance per watt; their architectural process is probably at the moment more advanced than Nvidia's is currently. Perhaps AMD buying ATI was a valuable investment that has really helped ATI to better it's technology I think. If they make a 5890 it would probably be better than a GTX 480. Does anyone think they might actually make an ATI 5890 lol, like they made a 4890 in the past? Quite surprised how they called the 5850 (x2) a 5970 rather than a 5850x2 like they called 4870x2 though. But Nvidia are a couple of months behind ATI because it took sometime for their Fermi cards to come out, surely by now ATI must be developing some new cards to wipe the floor with the GTX 480, i know the 5970 is already faster.

They already have.Sapphire-4Gb toxic 5970+++also a Saphire 4 Gb 5970.A little pricey at $1,239. and $1300+.But I would rather have the performance.But imagine these two together on a Lucid Hydra board.Even though its 1156,it still rocks.

Nvidia have the more powerful cards, cost more, uses more energy, tho when u think about it 300watt is nothing with a 19.646c per kWh down in tas. australia. but yes ati is cheaper and more value for money. but if u want the best performance without worrying too much about the minimal price increase (50 bucks for a card, small raises on monthly electricity bills) go Nvidia, and i doubt overclockers would care about power consumption anyway.

and also the cards will change with time so this answer would be different.

ok you made your own point nice to see rational answers to support Nvidia

but nvidia only gives a small amount of performance increase with their top cards over ATI's. It's not at all like comparing Intel core i7 to AMD Phenom ii x4 for doing multi-threaded applications, since Intel do extremely well in performance (but with games Phenom ii does nicely too). You know what i mean? With some games where you get a high framerate anyway with Nvidia and ATI it doesn't make sense to go with Nvidia at all, such as comparing ATI's 150 FPS to Nvidia's 175 FPS with a high anti-aliasing and aniso-tropic filtering setting. With the new games (Bad Company 2 & MW2) eitherway you will get poor framerates with both ATI and Nvidia single high end cards (with 4aa & 8af, lowest resolution 1240 x 1024, highest settings even), in that case Nvidia just doesn't make sense at all. Sensible option would be to play on latest games console until graphics cards manage to master the newer games, in terms of getting a good 80+ average FPS for those 75 hertz refresh rate monitors and ATI is best for that because they give you smaller cards, less power consumption but only slightly slower performance, but more for the money than Nvidia does.

This is a broad question that has no answer and is pure speculation with no point.
But to let you know I prefer ATI, between it and AMD they are the Ultimate combo.
Intel had it's run, and is only good for people who have thousands upon thousands to blow.
($1000 chip and 400$ mobo) (AMD Chip $300 and $240. Mobo) Take your pick.

If your feeling guilty about blowing that much on a cpu/mobo, deal with it. lol

Another wall of text, facepalm. Ok you have mentioned this point a couple times, 'smaller' cards. ATI cards are not smaller. They are about 1/2 inch bigger ,5870-480 same with 5850-470. Your point about psu's is also at best , ignorant. You buy a high performance graphic card, you check the recommended requirements and they are about the same for the top cards from each maker. The 2gb 5870 tdp went up from 181 to 227, either case, either manufacturer you need to buy a hp psu.
From AMD's web site http://www.amd.com/us/products/des [...] ments.aspx
# 600 Watt or greater power supply is recommended with one 75W 6-pin and one 150W 8-pin PCI Express® power connector required (900 Watt and 2 6-pin and 2 8-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)
# Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
Did you notice they even have a list of preferred psu's ?
Here you see the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card from AMD resting on top of the GTX 480 - a place it will not find itself often.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?a [...] ype=expert

ok i will make my leave on this topic, as no one has actually given me an answer on my question in response to the Op's question. The question about which is actually better for overclocking - being ATI or Nvidia in terms of performance gained out of the overclock rather than performance left at the end. Trying to help OP's question to go further by developing his question.

ATI FOREVER

Actually the OP's question is which card manufacturer do you prefer, but the topic is in the wrong section.

Voodoo anyone?

Definately Nvidia with better support for 3d games.But the real beatdown is about to come this fall also Zotac unleashed their #480 version. Nvidia has barely scratched the surface,holiday season will be awesome. I might add this is great that these two competitors have ramped things up this far.Last year ATI was master and earned it but we shall see.I think Nvidia will sort it out.

Got NVIDIA cards for years, but for my new pc I got a ATI 5970 OC.
It's great, though I do see the added value of Physx and 3D that NVDIA offers.

Tuff decision!! I like both v

^ ATi's had its bad days, take the HD 2900 XT. Needed more power than an 8800 Ultra but performed like an 8800 GTS.

Don't care in all honesty. With graphics, I mainly want price/performance, and last year/this year it was ATi who held that title. NVidia makes good products too, just not happy how they rebrand some cards and made PhysX work with nVidia cards only. The GF104 is a major improvement over GF100, good to see that they're back in the game. Driver-wise, I've had issues with both Catalyst and ForceWare.

In terms of features, both ATi and nVidia are pretty good, nVidia with more features though. ATi Eyefinity is nice, but apparently you'll need to buy a DisplayPort adapter which is unreasonably priced. nVidia has 3D/2D Surround, but requires two cards in SLI at least. PhysX is a good idea in theory, but the fact I can't use an ATi card as a main GPU kinda sucks, and they recommend a GTS 250 in Batman: AA, not really worth it.

^ I suppose. PhysX looks nice, but not worth the $ until more games support it.

I've been ATI since the 4xx series, but I might consider switching back to the Big Green if they cut the price on their 460, so I can go SLI.

Right now, I have a 5770 vaporX (OC to 930/1350), and it's going to get a buddy to work with most likely in the coming month. I'm pondering the idea of selling this poor guy and getting 2 460s instead... :\

arent you surprise that this thread has been going on for so long?

Well ATI snuck in a left jab with Direct X11 to the mark like 1 year ahead of its time! I'm waiting to see what revision and die shrink they have at .40nm or .28nm. AMD and ATI together fused seems really exciting due to AMD/ATI being ahead of schedule on the market. Nvidia tesla looks interesting too on the Market with its high performance! It al depends on what games you like and what software engine, compiler Direct X11 or Open CL 1.0 I would check out what games you want toplay and check out engine support and benchmarks or buy a lucid hydra chipset and put ati and nvidia on one board! Multiple solution in IT

Yeah, I think the civility is actually pretty cool.

Not to mention incredibly rare.