I've now written about the great video card wars three times, the first time explaining that the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro beat the tar out NVIDIA, the second time taking NVIDIA to task for their awful benchmark cheating., and the third time talking about how ATI had shot itself in the foot and lost my business to NVIDIA. Today's little article should be mercifully short by comparison, for I have only one thing to say: I went back to ATI after all.
There were a lot of nice little things I really enjoyed about the ATI card I had purchased, but, as I wrote before, I couldn't get anti-aliasing (AA) to work with my favorite multi-player game, Raven Shield (RS). I also had ongoing texture artifacts when playing Prince of Persia (PoP), and I couldn't get the refresh rate overrides or driver profiles to work properly. I just kept trying driver version after version, getting more and more tired of all the niggling issues.
So finally I had had enough. The ATI Radeon X800 XT cards had entered retail channels in volume by then, and I saw that I could still get a lot of money for my card by selling it on EBay, so I bought a Gigabyte X800 XT card to give it a try. Not only was it significantly faster than the NVIDIA 6800 GT card I had been using, I didn't have one single problem with its drivers. No more did I have freaky, green, glowing artifacts when playing PoP. Better yet, I could again crank the AA when playing RS.
So in the final analysis I went back to ATI. I wish the card supported shader model 3.0. I wish I didn't have to go back and forth on video cards. But I have to give the final nod back to ATI for this round of video card technology. NVIDIA's hardware is nice enough, but what good does it do me to have great hardware without good drivers? I hope NVIDIA will do better going forward.
01/07/2005