| Mummelmann said: If they want consumers back, maybe its about time to offer prodcuts that can match or perhaps even best Intel. ATi cards used to be amazing, not only for its price (which was considerably lower than Nvidia) but alltogether! Their proccessors are horrible imo, they can't stand overclocking and need tons of cooling for less performance.  I really don't know which graphics card to get this year, any suggestions, anyone? |
Um, ATI had the lead up until about two weeks ago. Even then, their top card still competes at the ultra-high-end.
Their new processors are much better at overclocking (3.8GHz is normal on air, and over 6GHz on liquid nitogen.) and are much more power efficient now - they are competitive with Intel on price, performance and power especially when you consider the whole platfrom (CPU+MB) because their MB chipsets are much cheaper, faster with regards to IGPs, and cooler. Okay, so they aren't competing in the high-end but it's a toss-up where they do compete.
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As for a new graphics card, what price range and when do you want it? For recent games on a moderate resolution, I would recommend the HD4830 and HD4850, neither of which Nvidia really competes with. If you're prepared to wait until the middle of this year (say April/May), AMD and possibley Nvidia are doing a 40nm die shrink which should be a solid 25-50% boost in performance at the same price and power consumption as they can add more stream processors.
