Anyone went from nVidia to ATI?

In article , GT-Force
says...
Hi,

I had an nVidia (GeForce2 GTS), now I have an ATI card (9700 Pro), and I am
thinking about going back to nVidia (6800GT). Is there anyone here that went
to nVidia from ATI and regretted it? If so, what was the old and the new
cards, and what were the issues?

Went from Geforce 4 Ti4200 to a 9800 AIW. The only time I've regretted
it is when I've wanted to give Linux another go. I've dabbled a bit in
Linux and with nVidia cards its a breeze. ATI support for Linux is a
joke.


--
Conor

Opinions personal, facts suspect.

Every day I regret giving up my TI4400 for a 9700Pro. The DX9 support is
nice, but driver issues and some weird screen refresh issue have hurt my ATI
experience.

"GT-Force" wrote in message
.. .
Hi,

I had an nVidia (GeForce2 GTS), now I have an ATI card (9700 Pro), and I
am thinking about going back to nVidia (6800GT). Is there anyone here that
went to nVidia from ATI and regretted it? If so, what was the old and the
new cards, and what were the issues?

Thanks.

GT

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 19:21:12 GMT, "Philburg2"
wrote:

Every day I regret giving up my TI4400 for a 9700Pro. The DX9 support is
nice, but driver issues and some weird screen refresh issue have hurt my ATI
experience.

The 4.4 drivers work with every game/demo I play and refreshforce
sorts out the OpenGL 60fps issue.
--
Andrew, contact via interpleb.blogspot.com
Help make Usenet a better place: English is read downwards,
please don't top post. Trim replies to quote only relevant text.
Check groups.google.com before asking an obvious question.

IMHO (in my humble opinion):

(4) nVidia generation 4 (like the Ti4200) series were superior to ATi cards
of the same gen.

(5) ATi cards of generation 5 (especially 9600-9800) were superior to
similar priced nVidia cards of same gen (FX5700-5900 etc)

(6) nVidia cards of generation 6 (FX6800, etc) are superior to similar
priced ATi cards of same gen (X800, etc)

Now "superior" is a subjective term, heh. This "generation 6" of ATi cards,
are horsepower monsters. But as far as technology goes, they are slightly
behind nVidia in the Shader Model 3, DirectX 9.0c, and 32bit precision. In
some applications (Half Life 2, supposedly, for one) you may get a FEW
frames per second more out of your ATi card of this generation than
comparable nVidia BUT there are also just as many (maybe more) games out
there where the 6800 series is faster. And I'm talking about EXISTING GAMES.
One reviewer described the latest ATi cards as "souped up 9800's". So yeah,
for existing games, ATi and nVidia's latest are neck and neck with frames
per second and image quality. But if you want to buy a card right now that
will be usable further into the future, go with nVidia just because they put
a bit more foreward-thinking technology into this generation.

But if you are in no hurry, then wait because maybe ATi will leapfrog nVidia
again, as they both seem to be doing lately.

I'm just going from nVidia to ATI now, having been an nVidia kid for the
last couple of years. The experience has not been good so far, but I am
hopeful that all will turn out well in the end. Here's my Top 4 of things
to watch out for, all of which are missing from the instruction manual:

1 - The ATI 9800 Pro (and probably any similarly powerful card) is a power
hog. You'll need a big Power Supply Unit to get it to work, especially if
you have a handful of peripherals such as more than one hard drive or CD/DVD
drive. I'm upgrading my PSU from 300W to 450W and hoping this fixes it.
This is just a theory though - you won't get a message telling you about
this if you lack enough juice and you'll certainly find nothing in the
manual on this.

2 - The installation instructions are seriously deficient. Perhaps they
were written by someone in a hurry. There is NOTHING said at all about
power, despite the fact that the PSU must be at least 350W, and especially
given that there is a power socket on the card which needs to be plugged in!
You just have to work it out for yourself.

3 - If you get any error messages during the install, good luck! They can
be extremely cryptic, and ATI's support pleads total ignorance about them.
I tried googling one ('SEVERE - Zero display service error'), and it seems a
common error that nobody understands. Lots of people get it, but I have not
found a single explanation as to what it means and how to avoid it. The
error has been knocking around with ATI's drivers for at least 18 months, so
the lack of resolution is very disappointing.

4 - General opinion seems to be that the drivers are buggy and unreliable.
If the latest version doesn't work, Google for the previous version. If
that doesn't work, Google again for the version before that. If that
doesn't work, I've been told to try some Omega drivers for the card.

As you can tell, I'm a bit frustrated by the gap between reality and hype
here. Maybe I've just been unlucky. Maybe my card is actually broken. If
it doesn't work by this time next week, I'm going back to nVidia...

In article , Ben C says...

1 - The ATI 9800 Pro (and probably any similarly powerful card) is a power
hog. You'll need a big Power Supply Unit to get it to work, especially if
you have a handful of peripherals such as more than one hard drive or CD/DVD
drive. I'm upgrading my PSU from 300W to 450W and hoping this fixes it.
This is just a theory though - you won't get a message telling you about
this if you lack enough juice and you'll certainly find nothing in the
manual on this.

2 - The installation instructions are seriously deficient. Perhaps they
were written by someone in a hurry. There is NOTHING said at all about
power, despite the fact that the PSU must be at least 350W, and especially
given that there is a power socket on the card which needs to be plugged in!
You just have to work it out for yourself.

3 - If you get any error messages during the install, good luck! They can
be extremely cryptic, and ATI's support pleads total ignorance about them.
I tried googling one ('SEVERE - Zero display service error'), and it seems a
common error that nobody understands. Lots of people get it, but I have not
found a single explanation as to what it means and how to avoid it. The
error has been knocking around with ATI's drivers for at least 18 months, so
the lack of resolution is very disappointing.

4 - General opinion seems to be that the drivers are buggy and unreliable.
If the latest version doesn't work, Google for the previous version. If
that doesn't work, Google again for the version before that. If that
doesn't work, I've been told to try some Omega drivers for the card.

As you can tell, I'm a bit frustrated by the gap between reality and hype
here. Maybe I've just been unlucky. Maybe my card is actually broken. If
it doesn't work by this time next week, I'm going back to nVidia...

1) No it isn't. I'm running a 9800 AIW on a Shuttle 200W PSU. It
previously ran on a 350W PSU on a PC with 7 fans, 1GB RAM, XP3200,
2HDDs, 2 optical drives and neon lighting with a Coolermaster Aero 7
HSF.

2) Sorry but everything is like that. nVIDIA tell you because their
latest gen cards are stupidly power hungry.

3) Situation normal for most hardware.

4) Situation normal since Win95 for most hardware.

--
Conor

Opinions personal, facts suspect.

Going from a Ti4200 to a 9800xt should have made a big difference.
Something is definitely wrong with your setup, regardless of your cpu.

"Richard Cavell" wrote in message
om.au...
On 22/10/04 1:04 PM, GT-Force wrote:

Hi,

I had an nVidia (GeForce2 GTS), now I have an ATI card (9700 Pro), and I
am thinking about going back to nVidia (6800GT). Is there anyone here
that went to nVidia from ATI and regretted it? If so, what was the old
and the new cards, and what were the issues?

I went from a nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4200 to an ATI Radeon 9800 XT, and I'm a
bit disappointed. CounterStrike doesn't look one iota better, and my
frame rates are only marginally improved and equally likely to slow down
to a crawl during much activity. Softimage also doesn't appear to have
improved much.

"Inglo" ioo@??.¿¿¿ wrote in message
. com...
On 10/21/2004 8:04 PM GT-Force brightened our day with:

It's not like your divorcing your second wife to go back
to the first.


You also don't have to pay off the second company just to get it out of your
life.

"GT-Force" wrote in message
.. .
Hi,

I had an nVidia (GeForce2 GTS), now I have an ATI card (9700 Pro), and I
am
thinking about going back to nVidia (6800GT). Is there anyone here that
went
to nVidia from ATI and regretted it? If so, what was the old and the new
cards, and what were the issues?

I recently replaced the Radeon 9500 Pro in my main PC with a GeForce 6800.
Performance in games is good, but I have had to use beta drivers to achieve
this, the 61.77 drivers on nVidia's site wouldn't even work with all of
their tech demos, on my PC at least. Fine with the later betas. I have
also had issues with explorer hanging since I installed this card. My last
nVidia card was a GeForce 3 Ti200, which was superb - I had no driver issues
with that. Since my first 'modern' ATI card, the original All In Wonder
Radeon, my experience only is that ATI drivers have improved greatly, while
I've not been so impressed with how nVidia are doing on that front right
now.

No flames please, just my experience... And I'm not intending to get rid of
the 6800 any time soon. It's a good card, just not quite as reliable with
current drivers than the 9500 Pro.

JB

GT-Force wrote:
I had an nVidia (GeForce2 GTS), now I have an ATI card (9700 Pro),
and I am thinking about going back to nVidia (6800GT). Is there
anyone here that went to nVidia from ATI and regretted it? If so,
what was the old and the new cards, and what were the issues?

This could be nice troll. ;-)

OK. I went from Club 3D ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128 MB to this new Gainward
GeForce 6800 GT 256 MB Golden Sample. Believe or not but not so huge
differents on FPS in UT2004. My computer is P4 2.8 GHz and I have 1 GB
dual channel memery.

I had problems with ATI. Huge problems. But I find whatta do to get
work. After tree month!! You had to disable Fast Write on display
settings. OpenGL was poor and DirectX9 some weird bugs on UT2004. Worms
3D crashed if I used Fast Write on blimp view. UT2004 crashed: I got
black screen, went back to Windows Desktop, wait about 10 sec. and back
to game; if Smart something was enabled. But after this
bug-flashing-error I was dead man - of course.

So, in Worms 3D: disable Fast Write

In UT2004: disable Fast Write, use DirectX8 and enable trilinear
filtering on games settings

-- no probs.

This 6800 is so new for me that I cannot say nothing bad - yet. Only it
is very noisy when using both fans on full speed. This is now like a
nuclear power station or something. =)