- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Hi ho, I'm new here, so please be gentle...
I have a Radeon 9700 Pro 128 mb, and have no complaints. This is my first ATI after owning two nVidia's, a GeForcre 2 32 mb and a Gefore 4 with 64 mb- I still have both cards and they still both work, though they're failings are more due to not supporting DX 9 or Shader 2.0 (3.0?). And I have a Radeon 9200 128 mb in a media PC my wife and use.
Personally, a lot of the rags (PC Gamer, Maximum PC, CG, etc.) tend to go with ATI, but I have found since both companies release roughly comparable cards at each price point, you aren't going to lose out with either/or that much. I went with ATI this time around because nVidia purposely fudged their benchmark tests when the 5000 series were just being released to make their cards look better.
Personally, the competition between ATI and nVidia benefits us most, because it drives research and prices go down.
I haven't been keeping up with nVidia's tech, so I can't make any hard reccomendations there. The Radeon 9600 XT is a good mid level card, the 9800 is essentally a faster 9700 (faster core speed), and the 800 and 850 XT's are the top of the line for gaming, AFAIK.
I didn't read all of the messages, but the problem with an integrated video is Ihae neer been able to figure out what is supported by them and what isn't, i.e. pixel shaders, what release of DirectX they can handle, etc. Mostly, though, they share system RAM, which is bad for two reasons. System RAM is slower than video RAM, and it means less memory for whatever programs you're running. My wife had an 700 Mhz HP POS that couldn't run Unreal Tournament while my old 200 Mhz with an 8 meg Voodoo 2 card ran it just fine.
And for whoever had $2000 to spend on a PC- you could put together a smoking rig for that kind of cash, as long as you don't buy a name brand PC, but instead buy name brand parts, i.e. Asus/Gigabyte mobo, Kingston/Crucial RAM, Sony/Plextor DVD drive, Maxtor/Western Digital hard drive, etc. and build it yourself or get someone to do it for you.