Hello everyone......... After a long time of debating what to do, (either buy a PATA hard drive along with an AGP video card, or a new motherboard with a PCI Express slot so I could buy a PCI Express video card along with the motherboard) I finally made my decision that buying a new motherboard with a PCI Express slot and buying a new PCI Express video card to go along with it was a better idea. I have my motherboard selection ready, but all I'm deciding on right now is what video card to buy. My price limit is around $550..... I found these two really good video cards... ATI RADEON X1900 XTX 512 MB PCI EXPRESS NVIDIA GEFORCE 7900 GTX 512 MB PCI EXPRESS Which one do you think is better? Are there any other good video cards out there that match up to these two?
Those 2 cards are basically the best of the best from both ATI and nVidia. You may find overclocked versions of each and extreme editions etc etc, but those 2 GPUs are todays fastest. Which one you choose is complete personal preference. There are numerous sites that have benchmarks, some will have ATI winning, others nVidia. Some will say ATI drivers suck, some will say there picture quality is better. It goes on and on. Which ever card you go for, it will easily handle any of todays games at a nice high resolution, so I don't think either will dissapoint you.
I think I am leaning towards the ATI RADEON X1900 XTX 512 MB PCI EXPRESS, but now a question has came to my mind.... Will the ATI RADEON X1900 XTX 512 MB be able to handle DirectX 10 when it comes out? If the video card won't be able to support DirectX 10, I guess I will have to wait just a few more months...
Just built a PC, with a 7900GT Gainward, 256MB. She got 18880 on 3D Mark '03. 9000 for '04. I like the Nvidias' due to good driver back up. I only use Nvidia drivers too, had a few probs with Betas once - had to flatten my PC! The frame rate on Far Cry is amazing, even with 8x Anisoptric & 8x anti-aliasing. Pissed off I can't keep it! It does have 2gig RAM (Geil-CAS 3) & a 3700 Athlon (1Mb L2 cache), all stuck on an Asus A8N-SLI Premium MOBO.
Unfortunately, neither card is DirectX 10 compatible. Until an SDK is released, it's difficult for manufacturer's to release compatible cards. I hear the next gen cards are in the wings at this point, waiting for more spec information to continue finishing up the designs. However, most of the side by side comparisons in bench testing have shown the 7900GTX to have a slight edge over the X1900XTX. As well as better driver support. If you plan on going dual card, CrossFire (ATI) is not doing so hot. In fact some tests shown that it's more of a deficiency than it is a gain. Some DVD movie programs for instance must have Crossfire disabled in order to run. It will really boil down to any other reason you would want one card over the other.
