I remember the days in school when i heard other kids talking about games like pitfall, Dangerous Dave, Doom and a whole bunch i cant recall. And then went on to boast about their Dad's getting a new 3dfx Voodoo card for thousands of bucks and clearly i couldn’t relate to that. No not the price but the specification’s of the card were ridiculous. The gaming universe had just taken off.
As time went by, newer and faster processors came out alongside newer technologies and feature sets. I clearly wasn’t impressed with any of the offerings as years went by and even today buying a new electronic fancy new gadgetry takes me almost six months by a process of dead reckoning.
Nowadays things are more interesting. Clearly i knew i would never by an overclockable GPU with a 300 Mhz speed over today’s 4.8 Gbps GDDR5s rate. Heck i still feel boxed and can’t wait for GDDR7 and GDDR8 having over 16 to 32 GB of dedicated video memory along with implementing a flamboyant multi-core architecture.
A few years ago Nvidia faced problems of heat and found it hard to compete with AMD ATI. Today most problems have been tackled with and both manufacturer’s compete on a single level of price and performance. As of late AMD’s 6790 and Nvidia GTX-550 ti have taken each other on. On the performance front both card’s are powerful but the 6790 clearly stand’s out by a small amount as shown by different benchmark test’s scattered all across the Internet. To compliment this the 6790 and the 550 have almost the same price tag with the 6790 being a few dollar’s cheaper. So which exactly should you buy.
One thing everyone who has used Nvidia card’s including me will tell you that it stand’s out better than ATI. On the usability front it just works, the drivers are’nt buggy unlike ATI, it support’s Linux extremely well (but it’s not GPU accelerated) and has a feature set that include’s it’s Phys X engine and and CUDA cores (Compute Unified Device Architecture). These two technologies make it superior on the visual and gaming front and incomparable to ATI although ATI data processing is radically more powerful. PhysX and CUDA provides the user with eye-candy and deep textures which always stand’s out during game-play. Another thing to note is that the 550 performs dramatically better in certain test’s as compared to the 6790. Also Nvidia card’s perform very smoothly with no screen tears and the Desktop graphics are somewhat like river flowing water.To add to this the 550 consumes less power. Nvidia cards handle higher resolutions much better with no visual loss -- but this shouldn't be a problem as all modern GPU cards are inherently built to not be a problem on this front. A note to mention-- Nvidia cards are preffered over ATI in Supercomputers - the discussions of which go beyond this article.
The Nvidia 560 ti is a monster from a different earth incomparable to both of the above card’s. And boy the price is hilarious. It's too damn expensive. Yes it is a high end card but not competitively priced.
Yet the Radeon 6790 still dominates. Simply the mid-range 6790, straight outperforms the 550 as a comparison. Higher end card's tell a very different story. The price is remarkably affordable and you get a very powerful card. Not to mention the SLI caveats of NVIDIA cards. So you can buy another ATI card and crossfire it and smile in an evil way and be happy. ATI leads in using multiple graphics, so much so that if you invest in another 6790 graphics card you are bound to get your money back in terms of performance and there is absolutely no substitute for powerful processing. ATI cards shine out in all aspects when gauging dynamically different tasks over a period of time. ATI cards do produce more heat but never overheat and manufacturers take care to dissipate any excess heat which renders this problem invalid.
So are you willing to blow a hole in your pocket if you aren’t getting the value over a period of time OR get a best buy at best rate along with best performance at that point of time?? Well that depends on you and if getting cash is easy for you then go ahead and buy the Nvidia 550ti/560. If you want to save money nothing beats ATI in price to performance ratio.
Please note that including the models I’ve mentioned the same analogy can be applied to the higher end and lower end graphic cards. So you could buy 2 Radeon 6990's and fully benefit and if you need Nvidia CUDA and PhysX buy the gtx-590's.
Now as to which brand to choose-- As of now Gigabyte, Sapphire, MSI and XFX are evidently leading in circuit board manufacturing quality along with good built all over the spectrum from lower end cards to the higher end.
Powercolor, HIS, EVGA, ASUS follow thereon and an obvious fact is that higher specifications demand higher quality manufacturing and so other companies too make high quality high end cards.
Another major factor to consider is the type of monitor you will use i.e. what kind of ports are available behind your flat-panel monitor. Older monitors have VGA ports (D-sub connector) and newer models have DVI or DVI-D, HDMI and Display-ports. These graphics cards support all but you wont get the best quality using VGA connector. You will need a DVI, HDMI or a Display-port enabled monitor if you want high quality visuals and smooth graphics. If you are using a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch you are most probably stuck with VGA. You could use a DVI to VGA adaptor.
Nvidia---High price/ good performance/ best visual effects
ATI------low price/ very good performance/ good visual effects
