Gamer advice

[leichaolan]

I recently decided to upgrade to either an Asus Geforce3 ti200, or to an OEM Hercules radeon 8500. Asus has built their cards to standard Geforce 3 ti200 specs, but Hercules has clocked their Radeons slightly lower than the orignal ATI 8500's. The original ATI had a core/memory speed of 275/275 as opposed to Hercules' 250/250. I've gone through many websites and the reviews on them both seem to even out. Any thoughts?

[This message has been edited by leichaolan (edited 04-06-2002).]

[saphalline]

Ooh boy, the ol' ATI vs NVidia debate, huh? They're both good in terms of performance, darn near even probably, but the difference in the details...

ATI's driver support isn't nearly as good as NVidia's, kind of like AMD is to Intel. Windows NT and 2000 have the most problems, but XP seems to fix most of these and ATI has been getting a little better lately, or so I hear. NVidia's big weakness is poor 2D performance, I mean relatively speaking to ATI's, of course http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif. Not only is ATI's 2D performance better but their hardware DVD decoding is also quite excellent ("hardware DVD" when you use ATI's special software but why use anything else when it comes personally designed for your video card?). On the other hand, with ATI, you never know what specs you'll get as the OEM cards are clocked lower (like the one you mentioned). When you buy a NVidia card, you're almost guaranteed the stock clock speeds, in fact some manufacturers even have overclocked cards! Gainward/CardExpert for instance have what they call "Golden Sample" versions, which are usually sold retail at 5-10% overclocked.

If you're just looking for 3D gaming performance, I may not have been all that helpful, which just goes to show that it really doesn't matter performance-wise. It's all in the ATI vs NVidia debate. It's almost as bad as the Intel vs AMD debate, but not quite as bad as the M$ vs "other OS" debate. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

[iisbob]

saphalline has raised a good point; no matter where you go on the net-you'll find conflicting opinion's about which is better: ATI or NVIDIA.

My thoughts; NVIDIA-i've used ( am using ) and have built around both companies; Nvidia's alway's give the best performance for gaming, whereas ATI gives the best performance for TV/DVD decoding.

If ATI would step up their driver support, they would give Nvidia a run for their money-as it is, ATI still lags behind Nvidia for pure gaming.

Not too mention you can find just about any kind of inexpensive Geforce card out ther now.



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iisbob

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain.