ATI vs. NVidia

The wonder of technology. And its innovative genrations. NVidia will soon begin releasing its series 8 graphics chips. In the mean time, while growing its product line with SLI (scalable link interface) support, ATI just recently hit the dual card scene with Crossfire, a desperate attempt to cushion its sudden loss of PC market share to NVidia. In 2005, NVidia introduced SLI for the new PCI Express motherboards. Since then, a number of cards, such as the GeForce 6800 GT and 7800 GTX are a few of the cards that can double up with a matching card for some real horsepower under the hood of a PC. Wait a minute, haven't we heard this story before?

Yes. We have. It was NVidia who was the loser on the scene in 2003 and 2004 while ATI pulled ahead at full speed with its moderately priced but well-performing graphics cards. ATI does continue to be the leader in its All-In-Wonder series cards, featuring video capture support within a card. And Apple latched onto ATI for the Mac Edition graphics cards enjoyed by Mac enthusiasts. But during ATI's long-lived hey-day, NVidia had committed itself to Microsoft's XBOX gaming console, now known as the king of gaming consoles with kick-ass network capabilities and one hell of an online community, specifically Halo 2 Online gamers. As a graphics chip manufacturer, you have to be careful who you get into a relationship with, because in the technological world of polygamous relationships, someone always gets hurt.

Now that NVidia has severed ties with XBOX after recommitting itself to PC platforms, and ATI stepped in for XBOX 360, ATI now surrenders its title as king of graphics cards. While heavily supporting XBOX 360 and Apple, its PC edition of the X1800 cards and the 'Crossfire' capability is one that will only win the hearts of hardcore, die-hard ATI fans. NVidia's SLI capabilities are much cleaner, less complicated and receives better support on the PCI-Express slot. After all, each PCI-Express slot's bandwidth is better utilized by the GeForce card, while ATI forces just one PCI-Express slot to carry the juice of both cards on a single channel. I smell issues. But the new NVidia GeForce 7900 series is an engineering wonder to behold. With 512MB of dedicated RAM and 1.4 billion vertices per second, this card puts serious juice behind gaming. The card also clocks in at 700 to 750 MHz on the GPU and more than 800 MHz on memory. If you had deep pockets, clustering several PCs together equipped with this weapon and you have yourself one helluva render farm. My criticism of ATI always has been lack of specs. You can get them, yes, but they are hard to get. With all of the features readily available in my hands at the point of sale, I'll go with NVidia.

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