Which do you like better: ATI or Nvidia

[whiteleppard]

As a owner of both, I much prefer the Nvidia graphics card to ATI.  Right now, on one computer i'm using ATI Radeon 4870, and on the other, Geforce 9500GT.  With my ATI, I had to upgrade the power supply, and found some games have trouble with it.  My Nvidia however, no upgrade at all, and plays all my games perfectly.  So, which graphics card company do you like better?

[Slack]

Like you said, ATI has had a history of compatibility problems.  I understand it's not anywhere as bad now as it was before, but I've personally witnessed too many compatibility problems in the past to leave a positive impression.

I understand that they tend to switch places for top performance every year or so, but I just feel more comfortable with nVidia.

[Amplifier]

ATI 4 LIFE

[Yuna]

I was about to say the some thing as Slack, ATI have too many compatibilities issues.
If you wanna play a game you want to have fun right ? Let alone using a PC there's already many things that could go wrong (comparing to consoles) as your OS needs to be one, than your RAM, GPU memory, etc.

I've had an ATI, it was a good GPU and somewhat cheaper than NVidia, I think, but had some troubles too. Sometimes relying on patches made by players, not the developers themselves.
And for once, most games are built on a Nvidia structure (whatever that means), so it's only natural it has much less issues on an Nvidia card.
Just to exemplify, the Unreal Engine. It is optimized for Nvidia, and that doesn't mean that it won't work well on ATI, but if a problem is to show up, it's more likely an Nvidia card to be fixed sooner.

[jeffry82]

ati is the best, until now i never had issues using ati, i had used nvidia, and for me it's nothing different from ati

[Slack]

For ATI, like I said, it's better now, but a few years ago it was pretty bad.

Maybe when they got bought by AMD, they got their act together a bit.


In any case, assuming the drivers are at the same level of compatibility and reliability, I have no particular brand loyalty.
Whichever gives the bigger bang for the buck at any given time varies like I said.  They switch off periodically just one-upping each other.
Really though, that kind of competition is better for the rest of us.

[Asmodai]

nVidia's got the sweet card-killing drivers though: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...g-drivers.aspx

[Slack]

Link got truncated:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/3/4/nvidia-retracts-whql-certified-gpu-killing-drivers.aspx

More support for the view that brand loyalty doesn't matter in video cards.

[zoolander]

I've always just gotten the best deal I could get whenever a new game comes out I need to upgrade for. Brand be damned. :p

[RoyMoy]

I've always just gotten the best deal I could get whenever a new game comes out I need to upgrade for. Brand be damned. :p

Exactly, the worst thing that can happen is for one company to completely dominate. Competition is what makes the GPUs faster and cheaper, year after year.

[Shuji-kun]

I used to buy nvidia only, but I will go for the best price/performance these days (currently have an ati hd4850).