Azure Sky said:
Treblaine said:
"Top of the line" more often than not mean 4x as expensive for only 50% improved performance.
Like GTX 480 is TWICE the price of the Radeon HD 4890 ($450 vs $225) yet gives only 25% better performance with game like Crysis. So you can see how if you aren't very smart PC gaming can be a lot more expensive than is really needs to be.
But ATI is ATI, and not everyone is willing to deal with the driver problems that come with it.
Also, Name change. ^^
ATI is AMD now.
Their drivers have been superior to nvidia's, ever since they worked with M$ to make GPUs for the xbox360.
Back when I still had my old nvidia gf6800 I could compare it to ATI cards (1950pro back then) and less popular and old games would have more problems with the 6800.
Medieval TW would frequently crash. Rainbow six was always stuck in 640x480. Swapping it with the 1950pro immediately solved those issues.
When the 1950pro had a problem it was always the way it rendered shadows in some games (or didn't).
New and popular games would (and still do) run great on nvidia and ati gpus.
The non-enthusiasts are always stuck in the past, but the industry is always in motion. ATI drivers had been poor, back in days of the radeon8500 in 2001 and improved since then.
For a long time nvidia also had a big lead in OpenGL games, but OGL had been pushed out of the PC gaming scene by M$ d3d since then.
Nowadays benchmarks and pricing are the only important factors left.