My NVIDIA History
I am often in the discussion why I prefer NVIDIA graphics cards. After posting about my new MacBook Pro a guy came to the chat and told me, that I am an idiot, because I talked so negative about ATI cards and those cards where much better.
Well I grow up with NVIDIA cards. When I was in my gaming age, I began with a Riva TNT until the Geforce 4 series and I was always happy with the performance and stability. So there was no reason to switch.
In the year 2003 I got the first contact with Cg. From there on the features of the graphic cards became more and more important for me. This is the main reason that I am loyal to NVIDIA cards today. Take the features of DirectX 10 as example: it was possible to play around with geometry shaders over a half year earlier than with the ATI cards. And when they finally released a DX10 card it still was not competitve with the NVIDIA models.
In my PowerBook I had a Radeon 9600 card and the main reason why I was unhappy with it was the lack of Multiple Render Target support, which is one of the nicest features since the Geforce 6 generation.
Funnywise I only had NVIDIA cards with an even generation number. So did not have one of the disastrous Geforce 5 (alias FX) cards and the Geforce 7 did not offer more features, except alpha blended antialiasing. The Geforce 9 series will only support DirectX 10.1 so there will be no reason to break with this scheme. Call be a fanboy, but recapitulatory I can say, that I as a coder and a gamer always was comfortable with NVIDIA graphic cards.
on December 1st, 2007 at 23:13
We’re in two…i use too NVIDIA cards…i’ve got a Sapphire ATI 9550 in my system,sometime ago,and i wasn’t satisfied from it’s performances…then i buyed a 7800 GT,and i’m still using it…it’s a good card…
But i hate a little NVIDIA because of the really highest prices she have….i don’t want to spend 600 euros for a Video Card….a good price must be 300 euros,at least…and because of this higher price that i’m waiting for the ATI/AMD new DX10 Video Card(the piece that they have produced didn’t satisfy me too),for seeing if it’s a good or a bad waiting
on December 4th, 2007 at 9:44
fanboy! =)
on December 8th, 2007 at 16:24
We’re in 3 ))
I prefer nVidia cards too for their most advanced technologies (latest graphics features as new shader models nV always implements much earlier then ATi), high perfomance (most powerful GPUs) and stable drivers (instead of ATi).
Btw, my video cards/accelerators history:
92′ - S3 1 Mb PCI in i486 (of course, not accelerated)
95′ - Matrox 8 Mb PCI in P1 (unaccelerated, was good in 2D in SVGA…)
96′ - 3DFX Voodoo 4Mb with the same Matrox (no comments =))
98′ - 3DFX Voodoo II 12 Mb in P2 (again =))
99′ - nV RivaTNT 2 (M64) 32 Mb (cheap and fast card, my first nV…)
01′ - GeForce 2 PRO 64 Mb (again awesome card)
02′ - GF 4 Ti4200 64Mb (o/c 300/600) (cheap, advanced and fast!)
04′ - GF 6800 GT 256Mb (o/c Ultra =)) (again not expensive, advanced and fast!)
Now thinking about the 8800 GT 512 Mb - best choice for this season, but i don’t really play modern PC-games anymore, so 6800 is still not bad for me…
Another history - my mobile chipseps: i had non-accelerated integrated chip in the first laptop, then ATi Radeon 9000 Mobile 64 Mb in the previous notebok - i don’t play much/run advanced 3D applications on the laptop, but i hated ATi’s drivers for that chipset! It had huge problems with shaders, bumpmaps, sometimes with geometry, so the visual quality was really bad with many artifacts… In the current laptop i have GF 7300 128Mb - again, i don’t use much 3D on the notebook, but it’s not bad for the previous generation 3D apps (for example, runs my fav modern PC game Enclave with smooth framerate on max settings, such as my fav multiplayer game - Warsaw (based on modified Q3 engine)) and i don’t have any probs with it!
If you wanna, u may call me “fanboy” or smth =))