"Doug specifically stated that the ATI x800 was the card of choice amongst many of the testers, as it ran roughly about 30% faster than Nvidia's best cards."
Doug 'Who Stolen My Code' Lombardi, moving his mouth and making sounds come out of it, on the subject of everyone's favourite multiple-release-date-breaking FPS; Half Life II.
Just thought I'd post it, as there seems to be a 'If you brought an ATi card you made the wrong choice' undercurrent amongst some Hexus peeps at the moment, as well as a 'Doom III is the only game being released in the next 5 years and the only game anyone's going to play on their new £300+ cards.'
With this statement, as well as a few early reviews of Doom III, which seem to be saying it’s a nice looking, but rather ordinary FPS, that view seems a little false.
I've been saying all along, as have the majority of people who are seeing the whole picture, that there probably won't be a right and wrong choice this generation, as both cards are blazingly fast, and will slice through anything.
Didn't stop some going a bit over the top on the side of Nvidia though. Of course this was all a knee jerk reaction - Doom III was (and still is) flavour of the month, and HardOCP had some nice pro-Nvidia numbers.
I think most of us realised that this meant the Nvida cards were a bit faster for Doom III and nothing more, but some might have been a bit blinkered and suggested that this was the first and last round of the ATi \ Nvidia scrap for this generation, and Nvidia had come out on top.
I suppose the same people will be saying that everyone who brought an Nvidia card was wrong, when Half Life II is flavour of the month, and the ATi cards have a slight advantage in speed – and they will be just as wrong then.
So, I say once more - see the bigger picture, realise that you'll be playing a lot of games on your new fancy GPU, not just Doom III, not just Half Life II. One will always be faster than the other in X game, but unless you only want to play X game for the rest of your life, this isn't your primary concern.
You can't proclaim one company or the other as 'teh winz0r!!111!!1' every time one of them gets an extra few FPS in whatever game happens to be hot at the time.
I don't think anyone is going to be sitting there thinking they made a mistake, with an X800pro, 6800GT, X800XT-PE or a 6800Ultra in their rig.
-- That Was A Public Service Announcement On Behalf Of The Common Sense Party --
Now, to start some discussion, what do we think of Doug’s comments? 30% is a decent sized chunk of frames per second; bigger than the difference between the competing cards in Doom III?
Will Nvidia sort it out with a few driver releases, or is it the standard and long predicted ATi advantage in DirectX and Nvidia advantage in OpenGL doing exactly what they say on the tin?
Discuss...
