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Originally Posted by TteFAboB
I have no idea.
I have an ATI, but I came from a GeForce 3 trash, well, I still have that on another machine.
It's not fair for me to compare this super ATI card with that nVidia junk, it would have to be super versus super or junk vs. junk, so I'll just end this post now and let SUBMAN have a go at it.
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Hahahah! Don't make me laugh!
I'm partial to ATI still (So you know, but I do own boards from both sides of the fence), though both companies make good cards. We all know that both top end cards from each manufacturer can deliver good average frame rates (per any benchmark), so I start to look at minimum frame rates, which are what really pop up to effect your play quality from time to time. ATI's minimum frame rates are constantly better than NVidia in almost all fronts.
As for the 7950 GTX hack job (The more I look at this card, the less I like it since you might as well get yourself a 1500 watt room heater and mount it in your case, and then add some small fans which equals big noise to remove the heat from the card itself - I like custom silent video card cooling devices instead - I can't hear the ATI in my case anymore - you can't do that with the 7950), I'd pass. If you're looking at NVidia, you're better off getting 2x 7900 GTX's instead, if you can afford it. Besides 2x 7900 GTX's are faster that the 7950, and if you overclock the 7900 GTX's, you will have considerably more performance than the single 7950.
One thing of note, SLI, and even SLI as found on the 7950 does not always give you a performance boost in games. This can lead to a 7950 being slower than a single 7900 GTX at times.
On the video quality front you have a mixed bag. ATI has held the crown through the 9800 series, but lost out when NVidia released the 6000 and 7000 series which had better video quality and better AA settings. So the entire time practically that the x800 cards were out from ATI, NVidia had the better quality. ATI came back swinging with the x1000 series and their adaptive AA is again the best which is a form of AA that effectively doubles the quality of AA with almost no performnce hit. So if you are running 6x AA and enable adaptive AA, you will effectively get 12x AA with nearly no FPS loss. It does this by randomizing the patterns so they alternate. The only down side is that you mus maintain 60 FPS or better for it to work right (Both pics need to alternate at greater than 30 FPS to fool your brain correctly)
If you want, I can post an article or two to show off the differences in picture quality. All in all though, both manufacturers look good though and it will be hard to tell the difference on image quality alone. The only difference that I can see with my eyes is that the ATI has a 'sharper' AA look while still killing the jaggies. The NVidia has a more blurry look under high AA settings, but some people like the blurry effect. I don't.
Drivers - ATI is more bloatware due to .NET, but they have improved over the years. Task manager is reproting only like 5 MB used now though, so its not bad, but you have to install at least .NET 1.1. This doesn't bother me though since I use .NET for other things, and I bet a lot of people do too, but don't realize it.
Power consumption between a 7900 GTX, x1900 XTX, and 7950 GTX. Obviously the 7950 is going to have the max power draw, but between the non SLI boards boards, the 7900 GTX will have the least power draw, which means it will also generate less heat that you need to remove from your case. Both boards come with loud stock fans though (Do not even get me started on the 7950's fans), but both boards can have a fan swap for a silent fan that actually cools better, so this is not a problem. Arctic Cooling is what I use on the ATI and at .4 sone, you can't hear it. They make an identical one that fits the 7900 too.
http://www.arcticcooling.com/vga1.php
One thing to note - as soon as I write this, Murphey's law states that NVidia or ATI will come back with something that will kill the the other guy, so all this only holds true for today, not tomorrow. This is why I love competition - I get good product for less money - Maybe Microsoft can take a note here.
-S
Oblivion:
Oblivion is the most GPU demanding app right now. The gate benchmark is the most demanding too. Both top top cards from ATI and NVidia do good on the average, so pay particular mention to the minimum frame rates. The 7950 GTX would be about 40 FPS on this list, but its minimum FPS would drop well below that of a single x1900 XTX - since you can see a 7900 GTX in SLI drops way down to about the same as a single x1900 XTX.
Of particular note - only the x1900 XT is tested in Crossfire here. My card is an x1900 XTX that is crossfire capable so I would probably top 48 to 49 FPS here if I added a second board since the XTX is about 5% faster than an XT. On top of that, the XTX has a built in temp sensor for safe overclocking, so if you wanted, you could boost FPS to over 50 FPS in my rig and still have 30 degrees C of headroom to go even farther.
The white bars represent minimum FPS. Notice what the NVidia does in that regard. Notice a single 7900 GTX will drop below 20 on this benchmark.
