ATI vs nVidia? which is better?

They both fit and how good they are depends on which of their cards you're looking at.

Depends on what performance you want at what price, including other factors such as the PSU wattage, what games you want to play, are you video editing or number crunching, do the games or applications you are using have PhysX or OpenCL aspects to them.
Its not just a simple answer of either one will be the best.
Though from a vast array of assumptions, I am going to assume you are on a tight budget on an old machine with a small PSU. The HD7770 is probably the best bet.
Sapphire Radeon HD7770. $130
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Also Nvidia and ATI (Which is a part of AMD, isn't technically called ATI anymore) don't manufacture CPU's (Except Nvidia's Tegra cores for mobile devices). So wrong forum.

Either will fit, they use the same slot.

To ask which is better, it comes down to price point, and application mostly.

In gaming, High end nvidia tends to have slightly better performance in most benchmarks than high end ati.

Truthfully, niether is a bad choice, but cases can be made one over the other depending on price point. We can help if you give a little more info of what your needs are and your budget is.

neither card has an advantage aginst the card in all advantage. it all depends on game set and resolution, skill of overclock, and purpose of card.

relatively tit works like:

~50-150$ just about all AMD card are better than the nvidia at this price point. 170$ the 6870 is better, except in games that are based around nvidia. ~220$ the 7850 is king. 260$ 270-330: the 7870, 660ti and 7950 are pretty decent at this pricepoint and fit their respective prices. teh 660ti is basically similar to the 7950 except it has less vram, and memory buss, so it has a slightly less dimmer future than the 7950 on heavy anti aliasing games and also shouldnt be used on extremely high resolution, at the fact that the 660ti is generally cheaper than the 7950. 400+ 7970/670/7970 ghz are better at totally different things, any of the cards are overpowered anyways.

using an amd card also tends to have the user understand basic overclocking, since most cards are extrmely underclocked(hence changes from normal to ghz models when they are exactly the same model, and amd making the reference 7950 now to 900 mhz through bios flash) to basically pump out performance in that sector.

Either will work but your CPU will bottleneck a higher end card, on your setup ideally look at a HD 6850/6870/7770/7850 or GTX 560ti/660ti

All things considered Nvidia have held the top dog performance since the Radeon X1950XT days but until GCN the balance has been shifted with GCN the far more radical architecture and along with revisions will surely win out this round.

AMD:

Pros:

AMD Zero core Technology.
Multi-Card scaling.
Eyefinity and Stereo.
GPU raw compute potential.
Overclocking on GCN is immense.

Cons:

Pricing in some countries outside North America is high.
Slower tessellation rendering.
3D is behind Nvidia.

Nvidia

Pros:

Tessellation rendering.
PhysX support engines.
3D and Stereoscopic.
Good product support.
Turboboost features.
Low power footprint at load.
Two card tri-fire setup (2 physical graphics cards running 3 way crossfire, 3 card performance with the power usage of 2 cards)

Cons:

SLI scaling still not impressive.
Limited overclock headroom.
Poor GPGPU performance.
Limited manufacturers varients.
Stock limitations in some countries.

I do believe with AMD's price drops and GCN tweaks AMD have the better all round products, the 7970GHZ Edition has disposed the 670 and 680 from their lofty perch with revisions of the 7950 and 7870 to come it should be a clean sweep at every price point, factor in the difficulty nvidia are having with the fab process it should be AMD's round with the impressive GCN architecture.

first of all, thanks to all the responses. appreciate it!  

i got cooler master extreme plus 500w with amd athlon x3 455 @ 3.3GHz and Asus M5A88v-evo. i'm more on gaming like NBA2k12, Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty

I would look at a) HD 7850, the lower 130w TPD won't stress that PSU and you will have some leverage for future games.

@ sarinaide, thanks buddy! do you have a link for this?

Just the tittle of this thread is begging for trouble lol hopefully you get the answer your looking for before this gets out of hand good luck!

Best answer selected by cReed_eRos.

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey