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Does scene coders still favor nvidia or is it safe to buy an ATI card?

category: general [glöplog]
So my trusty old 8800GTS 320MB is having a hard time keeping up now that I bought a 24" 1920x1200 screen.
I've been looking at the ATI 4870, the nvidia GTX260, and what to me looks like most bang-for the buck - the ATI 4850.

So does the highend demos nowadays work with ATI, or is nvidia still the only safe bet?
added on the 2008-10-20 17:05:47 by Sdw Sdw
nvidia
added on the 2008-10-20 17:07:39 by EviL EviL
s3
added on the 2008-10-20 17:13:15 by Zplex Zplex
I want to buy a 4870 soon but I am wondering about this too.
Sdw : most issues I had were with ATI, with both OpenGL and DX. Of course it would be unfair to say that I never had any with Nvidia cards but on average ATI caused much more pain.

Experience taught me that ATI always support features properly later than Nvidia so I tend to remain a faithful Nvidia customer although I bought an ATI 2600 during the making of Stargazer to make sure it was compatible - and also because my GeForce 6600 fried :)

When people have to make special patchs, jump through hoops or special codepaths for compatibility reasons, it's often because of ATI ;)

However, the 4850 seems to be a very good card, especially for its price and it seems to support properly all the features it's supposed to support. We did not encounter any issue at work with it.
added on the 2008-10-20 17:38:35 by keops keops
ATI works very well, I never had any problems with it. I would add also that 90% of the times is demo coder's problem, not ATI's.

But this discussion rings a bell already, didn't we have it few months ago?
added on the 2008-10-20 18:04:08 by iq iq
meanwhile newer cheap cards from ATI shown up :D
added on the 2008-10-20 18:05:09 by EviL EviL
Shifter or Videl!
added on the 2008-10-20 18:14:12 by evil evil
For demowatching on laptops I've been happy both with NVidia (9600M GT) and ATI (Radeon 9700m).
The eventual glitches with the ATI card usually where resolved after installing the latest (DH Modded) Catalyst drivers.
added on the 2008-10-20 18:15:59 by bdk bdk
Nvidia 9600 mobile!
added on the 2008-10-20 20:34:44 by pantaloon pantaloon
the GPU is dead.
added on the 2008-10-20 20:37:21 by Zest Zest
long live the gpu!
get Nvidia, fuck ATI - last week they made a new brand drivers which magically drop the performance of "Into The Pink" by about 20%. And I can't do nothing about it. Screw them deep in their red asses ;).
added on the 2008-10-20 21:20:25 by bonzaj bonzaj
But into the pink doesn't even work on my nvidia 7600gt, so that doesn't say much :)
What about GUS?
added on the 2008-10-20 21:36:04 by marlowe marlowe
Barrio: have you tried the new version?
added on the 2008-10-20 22:02:59 by bonzaj bonzaj
VIC!
added on the 2008-10-20 22:12:53 by vscd vscd
Larrabee!
added on the 2008-10-20 22:54:05 by the_Ye-Ti the_Ye-Ti
keops: Yeah, I think your experience with having more ATI issues is common.
I took a look at the top-rated windows demos for the last 365 days and scanned through the comments and there seems to be more ATI related problems, and in one case (Metamorphosis) an ATI patch was released.

bonzaj: If only nvidia had offered a card with good performance at a reasonable price, I wouldn't even hesitate...
added on the 2008-10-20 23:01:33 by Sdw Sdw
Sdw: yes, it would be nice if they were cheaper. Another problem is power consumption.
added on the 2008-10-21 00:09:27 by bonzaj bonzaj
ATI is the pain.
added on the 2008-10-21 00:23:16 by faraday faraday
I think the main poblem is coders being happy with their (incorrect) code working on the too forgiving nvidia drivers, but nevertheless the result is a problem, and you'll see more demos running on nvidia cards. The 4850 drivers have been very solid for opengl so far btw.
added on the 2008-10-21 00:25:42 by Psycho Psycho
MOTOROLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
added on the 2008-10-21 03:43:22 by xernobyl xernobyl
ATI + OpenGL is just :(
added on the 2008-10-21 07:42:45 by pommak pommak
I have both NVidia and ATI and both rock. Overall I would buy ATI at the moment as we got several 4870 cards in the office and they simply ROCK.
added on the 2008-10-21 08:12:52 by Raven^NCE Raven^NCE

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