ATI or Nvidia

In the past 2 years I've been leaning towards ATI even though I am neither a fanboy of ATI nor NVIDIA. I am on the customer's side since I am a customer and I will choose the product with the price that I think it is best suitable for me. Maybe it was because of the ATI's lower price and they tend to adopt newer technologies before NVIDIA like the GDDR4,GDDR5 Ram and die shrinking the GPU to make it cheaper and reducing power comsumption so it would produce lesser heat and the DirectX 10.1 as well. It is pretty obvious that as a customer, I wanted something "newer". I was willing to sacrifice even about 2-5 fps for paying lesser or getting a better deal. For example if you get 2x Geforce 8800 GTX then you will have to pay for $1000 and getting only 2 GPUs but with 2x Radeon HD 3870 X2, you pay only for $800 and getting 4 GPUs instead of 2 (Crossfire X). NVIDIA has been having problems with like lowering the price than ATI, maybe due to the cost of making a card with bigger die size GPU since NVIDIA normally use bigger die size GPU and die-shrinking their GPU after ATI. However, I do admit that at that time, multi-GPU solution might not be very stable and had problem like microstuttering effect issue but it will still out perform single GPU. ATI's price is normally interesting for me and I also think that ATI's ideology path was more correct like in the future, we will use smaller GPU or multi clusters of GPU or multi-core GPU rather than one large monolithic GPU. Despite that, NVIDIA still believes in 1 Large monolithic GPU which gave NVIDIA a different approach from ATI but that made NVIDIA paid dearly like when it comes to HD 4800 VS GTX 200 series. NVIDIA should have die shrink the GTX 200 series to 55nm and they should already have gone for GDDR5 and DirectX 10.1 which they never did. NVIDIA was a little late to a party, let's say and they just began to die shrink to 55nm when ATI already had sold millions of their 55nm GPUs.

NVIDIA's naming scheme is another thing I hate. NVIDIA tried to confuse its customers by changing the naming scheme like the case of Geforce 9 series which was suppose to be a rehash/refresh of Geforce 8800 GT. That should have been call as Geforce 8900 series instead since there were little changes and they all use old G92 core. ATI's naming scheme is lesser confuse and it is still better and made more sense. ATI tried to come up with new architecture or new innovations but NVIDIA kept on rehashing the old stuffs again and again.

However, I hope that NVIDIA will become more competitive again and using a better naming scheme. Competition is good for customers like me and it forced 2 companies to lower the price. It hurts the companies but it is good for customers. This is why I am not a fanboy or a spokesperson of these companies unless if they hire me and pay me the money. I also owned both ATI and NVIDIA video cards such as the old ATI Rage Mobility, Radeon 9600SE and NVIDIA Geforce FX 5200, Geforce 7600 GO, Geforce 8400 GT since they all come with pre-built PCs and notebooks. I am looking forward to buy any of these products from both ATI and NVIDIA. At the end, it all comes to who offers the best deal and depending on how much money you have and how much money you are willing to spend.

I like them both. I've been using Nvidia for the last 8 years and I just went back to ATI.
ATI at the moment seems to offer better price/performance ratio. Also ATI drivers and software support has improved greatly over the years.
I hate fan based reviews and opinions since they are biased, incorrect and they don't show you the real value and performance of the product.
I think we need another big player in the graphics market so we can get better pricing.

Cheers


Oh yeah, I can see this thread turning into a flame war.....

Relax, I don't see any flame war for the moment but I was just editing my post since I haven't really finish posting. Sometimes due to spelling mistakes or i mistakenly dropped out some words. It is just my style of posting like I love to post a little comment and then re-clarify myself better so others will understand me better. So my posts will definitely get bigger and bigger after re-editing it for many times. Sometimes I forgot to add some important phrases to my post and I don't mind to re-edit again.

Yesterday, it took me for hour to edit my giant post on my thread! Really.  

However, I do agree with you that this kind of thread can easily spark a flame war. I just hope that nobody will flame me in the future. Lol!  


(For example this reply took me like 7 minutes to re-edit)

Depends on which has the better deal at the time.

Fanboys are retarded.

I purchase the better product for the money. My personal experience with both are great...

Nvidia historically at least do have a more reliable and stable software.

ATI hardware form time to time is compromised by driver issues.

For both brands when I join the early adator for new cards i go through the growing pains and deal with the bugs associated with "The Latest and Greatest". Part of the fun.

I'm actually about to upgrade my 8800GT which I'm very happy with since i got it in Q4 2007.