Which GPU do you prefer?

doctorized · Post by **doctorized** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:13 pm

I would like to know which graphic processor do you prefer, NVidia or ATI. And by saying which do you prefer, I do not mean which do you have, I mean which do you believe it is better.
The new ATI 5000 series sucks. I have a 5770 and I want to get rid of her! The driver is the worst ever! From the other hand, NVidia makes a little buggie hardware but the drivers are all the money!!

moogle · Post by **moogle** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:49 pm

Nvidia, just like them because of the green pcbs and the drivers. Plus bought an ATi card once and it didn't last very long, but my Nvidia ones have been going for ages.

GWarner · Post by **GWarner** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 1:05 am

nVidia all the way!

My one and only experience with ATi the drivers were so unstable they rendered the system unusable. Have never had a problem of any kind with nVidia.

Can't say the same for their motherboard chipsets though. I have an nForce 2 based motherboard for a while and it was flawless, then while upgrading to 64 bit hardware I bought an nForce 500 series based motherboard only to discover the chipset had a flaw with SATA optical disc burners that caused a solid system lockup at the start of burning a disc so I switch to an AMD 770 based motherboard and have had no problems with it.

I'm thinking nVidia should just stick to what they know best, GPUs, and leave the motherboard chipsets to the CPU makers.

Years ago another company that made graphics chips, Trident, tried their hand at motherboard chipsets, it was a total disaster, the worst montherboards I've ever had to deal with.

Thorium · Post by **Thorium** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 1:36 am

nVidia
In my personal experience nVidia GPUs are more reliable than ATI GPUs. Don't know if its because of the drivers or the hardware but i have much less problems with nVidia graphics cards. Both on the user side and the coder side.

J. Baker · Post by **J. Baker** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 3:35 am

Never had any issues here using Nvidia or ATI. And I do both 2D and 3D graphics all the time. Currently using a GT220. It works!

Mr Coder · Post by **Mr Coder** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 5:55 am

nVidia.

luis · Post by **luis** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 1:20 pm

ATI drivers were absolutely crap some years ago (until 2000 or so if you were using them at that time), then started to get better and better but I feel they are still not at the same level of nVidia.

About the HW... nVidia was about to crush ATI in the same period, on every level. Then ATI started to play on price and making better drivers. That gave them time to reduce the distance and make better GPU (at the price of staggering financial losses, but they always found someone to inject capital to keep them afloat).

Now (last 3-5 years) ATI/nVidia GPU are usually comparable even if ATI right now tend to give a little more power for watt consumed especially in the middle-range cards.

Bot have a CUDA-like API (CUDA and CTM/Stream) but CUDA seems to get a little more traction to me.

All in all, I would go with nVidia for their generally less problematic drivers (more stable and working like stated in the docs) and the excellent documentation available.

My direct experience on ATI cards is limited, though.

GWarner · Post by **GWarner** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 1:30 pm

nVidia also has PhysX on the GPUs, as far as I know the only way to get PhysX with ATi either to try and get two very different video card drivers to work together or to find an original Ageia PhysX card.

From what I understand the problem with the Ageia PhysX card is that nVidia's CUDA doesn't support it and most games using PhysX are doing it through CUDA.

luis wrote:at the price of staggering financial losses, but they always found someone to inject capital to keep them afloat

Dangerous strategy as that only works once or at most twice. Other companies will see the trend towards consistant losses because they apparently can't compete profitably and won't touch them. AMD is big enough to support them for a while but even that resource isn't unlimited and eventually AMD will tire of the constant drain on the wallet.

Thorium · Post by **Thorium** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 6:03 pm

GWarner wrote:nVidia also has PhysX on the GPUs, as far as I know the only way to get PhysX with ATi either to try and get two very different video card drivers to work together or to find an original Ageia PhysX card.

You dont need a card for PhysX. Just dont activate HW acceleration and the engine will only use the CPU.

DarkDragon · Post by **DarkDragon** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 6:17 pm

I have graphicscards of both, ATi and nVidia and I think I'm right if I say nVidia has a better development style than ATi. ATi seems to be garageware and not professional produced as hobby programmers can find so many bugs in it. A few years ago when GLSL appeared ATi said they support GLSL, but that wasn't true. They had a bad lexer- and parsercodes for GLSL and it resulted in errors everywhere. For example you couldn't call a function with an element of an array as parameter.

GWarner · Post by **GWarner** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 1:03 am

Thorium wrote:You dont need a card for PhysX. Just dont activate HW acceleration and the engine will only use the CPU.

That's true but you take a rather large performance hit on games that use PhysX when all you have is the CPU.

It's a pity CUDA doesn't support the Ageia PhysX chip, that would have been an ideal solution for ATi users or nVidia users who didn't want to load down the GPU with PhysX calculations. But by not supporting it, they force people that want hardware PhysX to buy their GPUs so it was as much if not more a marketing strategy than it was a technical decision.

Rescator · Post by **Rescator** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 7:51 am

Well as to CUDA and and Physx etc.
Isn't the new drivers made so that some "cores" of the GPU can do physics stuff and the rest GFX? At least that is what I'd do.

Also AMD (ATI) have always been a technological halfstep ahead of Nvidia, take tesselation for example which is part of DirectX 11.
ATI had a tesselation variant on some of their really old cards surprisingly enough.

(going somewhat off topic here)

I just wish that ATI would have been more pro-active on 3D support which NVidia has been.

Then again, 3D isn't new either (a decade +?). 3D Visors (with head tracking) is the best way IMO.

The head tracking on them is pretty good, and luckily the visors have gotten smaller.
Sadly the resolution isn't all there yet, so I hope visors get 1920x1080 soon.
The other drawback is the cost of these things, damn expensive.

I kinda wish (and hoped) that one of the 3 major console makers would mass produce a "modern" 3D Visors (using maybe USB 3.0 or similar standard?)
as that would have made 3D Visors affordable to the masses.

Shutter glasses and polarized glasses ain't that bad, nor the new 3D monitors/TV's, but they still can't beat the immersion a Visor can give you (and probably never will).

Num3 · Post by **Num3** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 9:56 am

I recently bought a ATI 5670 DDR5 1 Gb board.

In my past experiences i really wasn't well impressed with ATI and always prefered Nvidia, but i decided to take a shot and i do not regret it one bit...

I wanted a 1Gb DDR5 board and i made these comparisons:

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

I did a series of tests with some intensive games, and in real world playing i couldn't care less ATI was 8-15 fps behind Nvidia, has the games where running at 50 - 80 fps.

I did save 70 euros, in comparison with the Nvidia model i was aiming and i'm quite satisfied.

I had no driver issues whatsoever and i'm quite impressed on the driver update frequency too!

Now days it's not a question of muscle power anymore, you have to be very aware when it comes to what type of memory and BUS width the board you're buying has.

So for me it's a tie:

Nvidia still has more stable hardware, ATI has better money for hardware value.

@doctorized

If you want i'll trade my 5670 by your's 5770

if it has DDR5!

Kuron · Post by **Kuron** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 12:05 pm

I can't vote in the poll. My preference is Nvidia. If I could not get Nvidia, I would use Intel over ATI.

GWarner · Post by **GWarner** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 1:22 pm

Rescator wrote:Isn't the new drivers made so that some "cores" of the GPU can do physics stuff and the rest GFX? At least that is what I'd do.

That is in fact the most common mode of operation. You can however install a second graphics card and configure the drivers to use it for PhysX and thus leave your primary GPU entirely for graphics.

Num3 wrote:ATI has hardware acceleration for mp4 decoding / encoding / transconding

So does nVidia, just like with PhysX, some of the cores can be used to do video decoding / encoding / transconding. Badaboom is a video conversion program that takes advantage of this.

And as far as 3D goes, I couldn't care less. In order to see in 3D you have to have good vision in both eyes and my left eye is blind so all this 3D stuff would just be a useless hassle for me.

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