To be brutally honest, ATI hasn't had anything that even began to compare favorably to NVIDIA's line of cards for some time. I know there are plenty of ATI zealots out there who wish to maintain, in spite of virtually all benchmark data, that their Radeon 8500 or Radeon 7500 cards are just as good as anything NVIDIA makes, but such folk simply live in a dream world. There are some very specific cases in which those Radeon cards could outperform comparable offerings from NVIDIA, but they do not include the most relevant, real-world performance figures from games such as Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and other popular offerings.
To be honest from the outset, I am a "fanboy" neither of ATI nor NVIDIA. To date, no instrument sensitive enough to record my indifference to which video card is in my system has been designed. I just couldn't care less. I've always looked at the benchmark data, talked to people who own the cards, and then made my purchase decision in light of that data and the prevailing prices. In the past, ATI has always lost my business for two reasons: (1) their cards have always performed underwhelmingly compared to comparable NVIDIA offerings, and (2) their driver support has always been lackluster at best compared to NVIDIA. The only reason I've even been tempted to buy an ATI card in the past is that the quality of images produced on their cards is noticeably better than that of other vendors' cards.
My how times change. When I started reading the industry buzz about the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card, I found it all very interesting. I followed the previews with increasing interest, and I was pleased to see that the reviews of the shipping product spoke in glowing terms. It sounded as if ATI had finally gotten their act together. What's surely more impressive is that it sounded like ATI had not merely made a competitive product; rather, it seemed that they had actually stolen the performance crown from NVIDIA, as an article on Anandtech put it.
I found that quite exciting for the simple reason that competition is always good for the customer. NVIDIA hasn't had any competition for quite some time, and for ATI to leap-frog them at their own game can be only a boon for me and every other gamer. Unfortunately, I considered the entire thing rather in the abstract; i.e., given the price of the Radeon card, and given my system's relative stability, there was no way I was going to fork out the money for something new when I had something that worked well enough. If it ain't broke, I ain't gonna fix it. I figured I would wait for a year or so, then pick up a new video card on the cheap after it was a generation (or two) out of date.
Unfortunately, as I've written elsewhere, my system up and died. Suddenly, I was faced with the prospect of acquiring a new case and power supply, a new motherboard, and new memory. I figured that as long as I was spending the dough to rebuild the system, I might as well go all out. A 20% coupon at Best Buy merely sealed the deal. I picked up one of the new ATI cards and took it home, expecting to have much more trouble on its behalf than I eventually did. I had all kinds of problems, mind you, but most of them weren't due to the ATI card. I did have some serious problems with three specific games, as described in detail elsewhere, but aside from those framerate issues the ATI card has worked nicely.
As such, I find myself in an interesting position. I've used NVIDIA cards for a long time, largely because of their previously unmatched speed. Today, I have an ATI card in my system, and I'm loving it. As such, I think I'm qualified to say a couple of things about the current offerings from both companies. Thus, I'm writing this brief article to spell out exactly what one can expect from either of the two when buying a video card.
First, let's get something straight about NVIDIA graphics cards: they've always been the fastest out there, and they've enjoyed the best driver support for quite some time. They also enjoy a far greater selection of third-party, tweak-your-video-card utilities than any other card (at last count). In short, if you're buying an NVIDIA card, you can be assured of good performance, good driver support, and lots of options for tweaking around.
Unfortunately, they aren't without problems. In my own case, the veritable plethora of different driver versions became a hindrance for me, rather than a boon. I would frequently try new releases from NVIDIA, finding that they gave me a noticeable performance boost in games A, B, and C, only to discover that they also rendered game D unable to run. I had to fuss around with about half a dozen different driver versions, for example, before I could find a version that would allow Ghost Recon and Freedom Force to run on the same machine. The solution, incidentally, was to use the older drivers that came with my video card, which were based on the v28.32 release from NVIDIA.
Worse, the image quality with NVIDIA cards has always been suboptimal. I'm not sure why (cheap components maybe?), but the images from an NVIDIA card have always (1) been too dark overall, (2) had poor color balance, and (3) needed heavy-duty gamma-correction tweaking to achieve video playback of acceptable quality. I've always had to fuss with my monitor and video driver settings at some length to bring the image quality up to par. Still, it has previously been worth the trouble. If you're a gamer, nothing else has given the kind of butter-smooth framerates that NVIDIA cards deliver.
Like I said before, times change. ATI is not only the clear performance winner these days by any benchmark—even those benchmarks allegedly biased toward NVIDIA (e.g., MadOnion)—they're also the clear winner in terms of image quality on all counts. The ATI card suffers from none of the problems plaguing the NVIDIA line. That is, the images on my monitor are substantially brighter, far more vibrant in terms of color saturation, have clearly superior color balance among the channels, and need no tweaking whatsoever for beautiful video playback. This is particularly noticeable with The Matrix, for example, as my old GeForce3 Ti200 card rendered everyone's flesh with a positively awful tint unless I tweaked the heck out of the settings. In contrast, my Radeon 9700 Pro does a beautiful job with that and every other DVD I own.
Though it's not enabled by default, and though it seems to require special support from games to make any difference, I have to make special mention of ATI's Truform technology. For those not familiar with it, Truform essentially adds more detail to in-game models directly in the transform and lighting (T & L) engine of the graphics card. For those who are interested in the specifics, I suggest reading the initial Anandtech writeup on the technology.
For those who could care less about the technobabble, let me say simply that it makes a very noticeable difference in games that support it. Return to Castle Wolfenstein looked great, for example, when I played it on my GeForce3 Ti200 card, but it looks utterly stupendous with the new ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. The character models are so much better looking with Truform enabled; it's really quite stunning. With all of the graphics options maxed out, and with the resolution set to 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp, my new Radeon card gives smooth-as-butter framerates, and the game looks positively amazing. The ATI card would trump the GeForce line on this basis alone if more developers supported Truform. I'm sure they will eventually, as it's simply too amazing to pass up.
The only disadvantage I've found to date with the ATI card is that I miss the ability to tweak stuff. With my old video card, I could overclock it. I could adjust all kinds of hidden settings in the registry. I could independently adjust the default refresh rates used by DirectX for every resolution, so that I could customize the rates at which all my games play by default. Heck, I could even tweak the card's BIOS settings, if I felt like risking nutty things, using a number of different third-party tools. With ATI, it seems my options are limited to whatever ATI gives me in the driver options.
| NB: | Since writing this originally, I've discovered a couple of different utilities that allow tweaking. Of those that I've tried, I would have to say that Rage3D is about the best. I haven't been able to get it to apply game-specific profiles successfully on the fly like it's supposed to do, but for regular tweaking stuff it gets the job done. |
Of course, not having a tweaking utility isn't all bad, mind you. Because I don't have nearly as much to fuss with, I don't spend nearly as much time fussing. I spend a lot more time using my computer instead of tweaking it. Still, the technology enthusiast in me wants to be able to at least overclock the card a little, to push it to see exactly how far it can go and remain stable. Hopefully this "need" will be addressed by the larger community at hand if not by ATI. Heck, maybe I'm just not using the right tools? I've always had so many options in the past, I might well just be missing the obvious with the Radeon.
The bottom line is pretty simple, I think: if you're looking to buy a new video card, buy the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. It's got the best framerate for gaming, it's got the most beautiful display quality of any card, and it's got a solid set of drivers to boot. For what it's worth, I've even found their technical support to be both helpful and competent the one time I had to call (I couldn't figure out how to make the advanced settings available in the display control panel applet). ATI has clearly made the better "mousetrap", and I doff my virtual cap in their general direction. Nicely done, folks!
10/18/2002