Which Video Card!?

[SiM]

If you want cool then 9800GTX+ is your best choice. When you get it, underclock it to the speeds of a normal 9800GTX. Should be very cool and quiet, and play all your games no problem!

Why underclock it? It will be cool and silent at stock speeds with the stock fan unlike ATI

[Zhaoman]

Lol, the 9800 Pro is more than twice the card the 9800GTX+ will ever be

Haha, ironic thing is, back then I really liked nVidia coz they made the GPU for my beloved Xbox

[Ommid]

Yes, but is that the one on Overclockers?

I'm about to buy a GTX260 over a ATI4870. I would have gone for the 4870, but the much lower idle power usage of the Nvidia card wins it for me. I don't play games all that much, and often have my computer on all day.



You can't compare the number of stream processors in an ATI card and an Nvidia card and then say "800 is greater than 192/240, therefore ATI = better". Very roughly speaking the nvidia stream processors - due to their greater complexity in logic - have about 4-5 times the processing power of an equivalent stream processor in an ATI card.

No it is at PC World and I was going to get discount

[Ommid]

What would you get for a hundred quid? 9800GTX or 4850?

[SiM]

Neither, both are over £100

[kalniel]

You can't compare the number of stream processors in an ATI card and an Nvidia card and then say "800 is greater than 192/240, therefore ATI = better". Very roughly speaking the nvidia stream processors - due to their greater complexity in logic - have about 4-5 times the processing power of an equivalent stream processor in an ATI card.

Well it depends what you're asking them to do. If you can fine branch the shading then each of the quin shader grouping can do 5x the workload of the nVidia shader, hence use the full 800, but if you are doing a calculation that requires the 'fat' shader in the grouping then your workload is only 1/5 of the 800 shaders.

There was a very good article at anandtech I think that explained this nicely with pretty pictures

[Ommid]

Well it depends what you're asking them to do. If you can fine branch the shading then each of the quin shader grouping can do 5x the workload of the nVidia shader, hence use the full 800, but if you are doing a calculation that requires the 'fat' shader in the grouping then your workload is only 1/5 of the 800 shaders.

There was a very good article at anandtech I think that explained this nicely with pretty pictures

That would be good Because I didnt get a word of that

[kalniel]

LOL, here's the link:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=6

and the nice pic from that article:

[Zhaoman]

You can't compare the number of stream processors in an ATI card and an Nvidia card and then say "800 is greater than 192/240, therefore ATI = better".

I made an assumption that ATi cards might be more futureproof based on the fact that all nVidia cards are roughly based on G80 technology and that the 800 streams are clocked very modestly compared to the high speeds of the nVidia cards. This may suggest a higher number-crunching power and better overclocking potential in future.