Of course, but any video card can only behave as stable as the system its plugged into.

??? I don't understand... have you bought a card at that price, and it hasn't been "stable"?

??? What did you have to change at "system level"? If you're talking about having to drop the detail levels to get it to run smoothly on the 9800, you shouldn't be too surprised... it's 4 year old card after all.

I've got an ATI Radeon X850 with 2 gig of system ram and the game runs ok. Unfortunately my CPU (AMD 2600+) lets the side down and the game does bottleneck and slowdown as a result.

Yes Vasmann,

Our systems are soon to go the way of the dinosaur.;)

BFG7800GS here, no complaints at all.
Using beta driver Nvidia 93.81
Game runs 40fps. Everything looks great.
:up:

okay Antrodemus, what's with the shots? I could only afford $50 for a new vid card, so I had to go with old stuff. I've had friends pay lots of cash for cards whose chipsets were flops or drivers were poorly designed. It was more of a statement of fact that anything else.

But I simply stated my opinion with the experiences that I have had. If you do not understand that, and wish to nit pick at everything that I and everyone else in this forum says, then you have that right. But no one here has to prove anything to you.

Deal with it.

^^ Antrodemus is on the mark. You're complaining about a card you didn't buy and lamenting the lack of performance you can't expect to have. :roll:

I would recommend that you try the Omega drivers. I used them on my 9800Pro and would recommend them to everyone, especially if you don't want to install the Catalyst Control Center.

The Omega drivers are kinda neat, so I might play with them a bit. But let's try reading things accurately, shall we. Refer to my posts. I bought the card, unlike what you suggested. I'm not complaining about performance issues and game settings, but rather system stability problems ie. crashes, reboots, even when games are not running. My rig is very stable as I built her myself with much care and research. The 9800 runs fine now, but I simply wasn't very happy with the journey to get there. Am I entitled to my opinion without having to explain everything ten times over?

I wish to keep things friendly here, but I don't see the need to pick apart people's posts and insult their machines or aptitude, regardless of your personal opinions. I am always willing to listen to advice on how to make my pc run better, but only when it is constructive and in good nature.

Doggy,

What 9800 did you get exactly?

9800, 9800 se, 9800 Pro, 9800 xt.

Also how much Ram do you have and what cpu?

My ATI X800XT runs SH4 beautifully... Personally, I wouldn't buy anything but an ATI card...

Well, you wrote:

which implies that you bought a ~$200 card which you didn't. :roll: I tried running my 9800Pro with SH4 too and I crashed a few times as I was tweaking the settings. In the end, it wasn't good enough for me so I went out and bought a 7900GS. :rock:

Edit: Oh no! The Medic!!

I have owned both (Old card ATI Radeon with 256 MB of memory and a new PC card Nvidia 8800 GTW with 768 MB of memory. You know I would have never guessed that a video card witrh 256 MB of memory would start dragging when playing PC games. I only own my PC to play games and what I am finding is that I am having to upgrade and build a new PC every three years :damn: Now I am going to date myself, but I remember the first PC I bought was a 386/33 with 4 MB of memory and a 256K video card!!!! In fact the salesman told me that I would NEVER need more than 4 mb of memory lol....Now I'm running 2 GIGS, for at least three years.

Anyway, both cards rock and are great for games...ROCK ON DUDE:ping: :rock: :rock: :rock:

I would assume now that since ATI and AMD are one in the same company that if you get an AMD processor then there is a better chance that ATI cards would have a little edge, at least on the newer processors and cards since testing of said newer hardware can be done in house, simultaneously. :yep:

interesting.......

I used to have an ATI 9800 pro 256MB. Swore by ATI and the 9800 pro was a lovely card, bought it brand new and it kept up for years, and yeah I used omega drivers.

Finally decided to replace it as it was beginning to struggle, about 18 months back or so.

After long studies went for the Nvidia 7950gx2 (1 gig ram), basically 2 7900's strapped together in the factory. Bought that becasue, at the time it was faster than anything ATI had (in the majority of the benchmarks test attributes) and to buy an ATI SLI system, would have cost nearly twice as much.

On XP the 7950 was/is great, stable and mind blowing performance. I can crank everything up to full easily. Running Vista now and I admit I have had problems in SH4, the externa cam doesnt like going underwater, although for that, I soley blame MS and Nvidia for not talking to one another, not Ubi. Its a known fact the nvidia vista drivers are beta and not entirely stable.

Some games under vista run flawlessly some do crash a bit.

But overall, I love my nvidia card, and woldnt swap it for an ATI....

Reading this thread gives me the impression that it could be right that ATI users tend to have more trouble with their video card, and that´s what I experienced, too.

I´m not saying these are overally bad, but the two times I tried them I had nothing but trouble, and it seems that those still aren´t really solved for everyone.

Of course it might be the case that they run fine in some or even most cases or configurations, but looking at the number of complaints of users with ATI cards in this thread alone, compared to the complaints of NVidia users, it´s safe to say that you have a lower risk of running into trouble when buying NVidia.

Well, i was in this dilemma myself this week. Was going to upgrade my system. ATI or Nvidia... Well, i caved in and bought the Asus EN8800GTS 640mb card and man what a difference this was to my old 7900GT. More depth and more colours. I'm very happy with my choice. ATI has a good range of cards. But for now, performance wise, i think Nvidia is one notch ahead untill the new range from ATI is released.

btw, both Nvidia and ATI has troubles with their drivers. There is no "the one is better than the other" here.

My 2 cents and experience :)