Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Godalmighty83
i would go with a ATI card, they seem less buggy in SH3 compared to nvidia. although the opposite seems to be true in doom 3.
|
ATI cards are less buggy for games it would seem. I am in the enviable position of having a GF 6800 GT (my brothers), an ATI X800 XL (bought by me) and an ATI X850 XT PE (free from my company
) in my possession... er, well to test out on my rig if I want. All the cards have 16 pixel pipelines and 256MB GDDR3 memory.
In my initial comparisons, and I will only compare the 6800 GT and X800 XL to be fair, I noticed off the bat that the ATI card has much better visual quality in games. SH3, The sims 2, Dungeon Siege 2, Guild Wars, KotOR 2, Rome: Total War, and Panzers: Phase Two are the games I'm currently playing a lot; and they all look better on the ATI card. Also, certain games - SH3, DS2, RTW and Guild Wars - all suffer from graphical glitches with the NVidia card on normal non-OCed operation without AA and AF turned on and at 1024x768x75; and it only gets worse when you do turn up the AA and AF. The NVidia card does outperform the ATI card slightly fps-wise when AA and AF are turned off in all of the above mentioned games; even with the graphical glitches. The ATI card does have some graphical issues, but they're all very minor when compared to the NVidia card.
Now turning up the AA to 4x and the AF to 16x and I saw the NVidia card start to struggle through games with horrible fps... while the ATI card just seems to breeze through them with decent fps. SH3 for example: with AA and AF off, the NVidia card was giving me an average of 92fps, while the ATI card was giving me a 89fps average. With AA to 4x and AF to 16x, the NVidia card was giving me an average of 37fps while the ATI card was still chugging out a 62fps average. This was indicative of all the above-mentioned games except for KotOR 2, which had the ATI card only getting 51fps on average while the NVidia card was doing 54.
I then overclocked both cards to +20% of their factory settings and started to do my tests again. Unfortunately, even with an extra PCI fan, 2 120mm slot fans
and a 120mm side fan, the NVidia card was running way too hot and was rebooting my system. So, I started again with them OCed at 10% factory settings and didn't have the NVidia card crashing my system. This time, the ATI card outperformed the NVidia card on all settings, AA and AF on or off and in all the games. I've been able to overclock the ATI card to almost +30% of the factory default with only a small increase in gpu and ambient temperature... really amazing card.
My verdict: the ATI card is the better buy. As I mentoned earlier, I think the X800 XL is the best video card for it's price hands down. I am not an ATI fanoby, quite the opposite; the X800 XL was my first ATI buy since ever, but I was just getting fed up of not being able to play some of my older games with my NVidia card... or not getting good performance on my newer ones.
My tests were ran using the same computer, just with the different video cards. The NVidia drivers used were the official ForceWare 77.77 while the official Catalyst 5.8 drivers were used for the ATI card. The NVidia card was an eVGA GeForce 6800GT 256MB, and the ATI card was an ATI X800 XL 256MB; both bought from Newegg.com.