nVIDIA 6800 Ultra vs ATi RADEON X800 XT

common Skunk dont b fan of vendors for gpu's stick with the ixbt and benchmark resaults, though it wasnt hard for me to go from Nvidia to ATI - i remember when those bastards killed 3DFX and i got stuck with my Voodoo 3000 without no Drivers shit man shit :/

bah if u ask me its the best to stay in the state of "my next buy" ;)

Yeah I know what you mean, so I am going to wait until July until I really decide... Interesting battle though, should keep the industry buzzing for another year, which is alwaysa good thing.

Bah, screw benchmarks and all that. What you really need to know is how cool each card is gonna make you :dennis: B)

The "cool" Showdown

haha, that's a good one

rofl , google search

nice, very entertaining.

I posted this in another thread before I realized this was the 'real' X800 vs 6800 debate.

I'm gonna have to go with NVidia simply because they've never let me down. Every computer (with the exception of my laptop) I've 'owned' for the past several years has had an NVidia chipset of some kind, and I've had absolutly no problems with any of them.

As far as the double slot thing and extra power supply goes (this seems to be a pretty big issue), I really don't mind it. NVidia uses a more aggressive cooling method than ATI does, which really has two implications. One being that you really won't get any kind of slowdown in your games due to the GPU core being too hot (mine has never risen above 75 degrees C even in an 8th floor dorm room with no AC ). Two, if ATI cards should actually be getting more power for their cooling system, it has the potential to damage your whole system. As to my understanding, when the card isn't getting enough voltage, it, and all the other parts of your computer, will self-correct for this lack of voltage by drawing more amps through the power supply. During a short time, this won't really effect too much of the computer equipment (unless you're really unlucky), but, over the long run, this carries the possiblity of burning out certain aspects of the system (it's a pretty big concern in hard-drives because of the motor used spin the disks).

ATI 9700 and 9800 did beat out NVidia's 5800 and 5900, but in this new race (6800 and X800), I'm gonna side with NVidia for two reasons. First, ATI was originally shooting for a 12 pixel pipeline until NVidia announced the 6800 would be given a 16 pixel pipeline, which really comes in handy during the rasterizer stage of the pipeline (NVidia gets props for innovation). Second, the 6800 is completely DirectX9.0c compatable, while the X800 'only' supports 9.0b. This won't really come into play until the new Unreal Engine hits the shelves, but, if you don't plan to upgrade again for a couple years, the 6800 is the one you'll want.

Finally, yeah, NVidia did cheat in benchmark programs, but so did ATI. ATI just didn't do it as... 'much'. Once all was said and done, NVidia's scores dropped about 90%, but ATI's scores dropped 10%. Keep in mind, though, cheating is cheating. ATI cheats in other ways that aren't immediatly as noticable. Before I start out on this topic, I'd like to point out that I'm not entirely sure how this works. My limited research (these articles aren't really as plentiful as they once were) has shown me that, in tests using (anistropic filtering?) only a certain section of the screen is actually rendered using this algorithm. NVidia's area is a circle covering about half the screen, while ATI's is more of a 'star' shape covering about a third of the area that NVidia's cards do. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the new cards. That was with the 9800/5900 generation of video cards.

I'm gonna step off my soapbox now, but, if you're gonna post about a preference, please give your reasons why, not "Teh Nvidia cards is for n00bs". I'm sick of reading flame-wars between ATI and NVidia fanboys.