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Num3 wrote: a) ATI has much less power consumption than Nvidia
b) ATI has hardware acceleration for mp4 decoding / encoding / transconding
c) ATI has basic support for Win7 DX11 (DXVA - which makes Firefox 3.7 Alpha and Mplayer HC fly)
d) ATI has some good muscle cards for money they cost

All this are no general facts. It changes with every generation especially the power consumption. If you care much about power consumption you have to take a look on both ATI and nVidia and pick the current best. Which is the best for that changes from time to time.

Currently, technical and performance wise, ATI seems to be in the lead. If I would be a single screen user, I'd probably be using an ATI card.

Unfortunately, thus far all ATI cards have been severely disappointing when it came to multi-monitor setups. At least the ones I tried, it doesn't mean they're all bad, just that I personally didn't have much luck with them

So, just to be save I'm for now stuck on NVidia, but honestly the next machine I'm going to give ATI another chance. Then again, that's going to take a while as I'm pretty comfortable with my old Quadcore Dell XPS with the old 8800GTX 'personal heating system with video output'

nVIDIA cheats the ressults of 90% of those BENCHMARK tests!

I know this because my wife works for FOXCONN and they build nVidia's boards and had a huge hand in programming the drivers. nVidia is designed to cheat.

They have very short timeouts on texture and bump map loading that signals a success no matter what the actual status is.

They are highly touted in the PC magazines because they buy HUGE adspace! It is kind of like restaurant reviews... You buy a lot of ads and you get a great review!!!

ATi has never had a problem on any machine where the graphics bridge was ATi as well... the one board that had nVIDIA on board burned OUT the ATi card (INTENTIONALLY!)

both of them are overpriced and silly now. ATi is more stable though and has a company that is growing... nVIDIA has a company run by a Kim Jong Il wanna be!!!

Quadcore Dell XPS

Hey Blue did you read on slashdot abou tDELL selling all those systems they KNEW would fail??? As last hereditary King of Ireland I hereby defrock Michael Dell of his Irish boy status and excommunicate him from the culture of Ireland!!! Let him be a man without a culture as he apparently has no culture!!!

Num3 wrote:c) ATI has basic support for Win7 DX11 (DXVA - which makes Firefox 3.7 Alpha and Mplayer HC fly)

If I recall correctly, this is also possible on DX10 hardware and Vista+ if you have the platform update. (DX11 for Vista basically)
It's the new Direct2D API that Firefox 4 (aka 3.7) is taking advantage of I believe.

Rook Zimbabwe wrote:nVIDIA cheats the ressults of 90% of those BENCHMARK tests!

I do not know if NVidia cheats, but I do know that NVidia cards have much more better performance than ATI's. I have an ATI 5770. A friend had it and gave it to me. Now he has Nvidia 285GTX. He played some games with these cards and told me this: "With 285, graphics are much more realistic than with ATI. With 5770, gameplay is about the same with my older card, a NVIDIA 7900GS. With 285 is like watching things for real, people are alive in front of me." These days I started playing Lara Croft Underworld. After, I went to my friend's apartment and saw the same game with 285. No relevance!

performance is also something that changes from generation to generation.
remember the first DX9 cards? ATI was far better on performance on that generation. So you allways have to compare testresults.

I don't bother with coparisons between ATi and nVidia because I already know I'll pick nVidia.

I do compare newer cards to what I currently have to help me decide if the cost of an upgrade is justified.

There are some newer cards I looked at but for one I'd loose some main memory access because it would push me over 4 GB and I'm still running a 32 bit Windows. Another card would have topped the system off at 4 GB of memory but would have also required I upgrade my power supply.

I passed on both because I'm happy enough with my current set up to keep it and it doesn't have either problem the new cards would have had.

My legendary -97 box had an 8mb ATI 3D Pro Turbo PC2TV card, with an ATI tuner that plugged directly into it
through a ribbon cable.

It had 120 TV channels, and was able to show live TV as a fullscreen desktop behind the icons or programs you
ran.

And record/replay them just like a VCR too.. The box ran 95 OSR 2, and had a 200MHz processor.. ATI rules

have ati, but prefer nVidia. Much better.

What is ATI?

Fluid Byte wrote:What is ATI?

ATI

some stats from Steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I'm quite concerned for the future of nVidia as a company.
As I said I prefer them from the software point of view (drivers/documentation), but they are getting kicked by competition on many other fronts.

Recently Apple started to phase out nVidia cards from they computer, choosing ATI over them.

The integrated graphics solution are becoming more powerful generation after generation, and in that space intel rules and amd/ati will probably co-rule with intel in the future.

When amd bought ati, intel and nvidia should have strengthened their relationship, instead they are at each other throat, in large part thanks to the CEO of nVidia who is, I'm sorry to say, short sighted and very arrogant. He demonstrated that on many occasions.

Maybe in the future, if all goes as they hope (and it's a big if) they will have a relevant space in parallel computing, supercomputing, etc., but if something doesn't change soon I see their past dominance in the consumer and oem markert to become a distant memory.