Graphics Cards Overview

Well, in the 4 semesters ive spent in Windsor, i look back and realize ive had the chance to taste 3 different graphics cards over tha period of time. Each card with its wown strengths and weaknesses were deffinately major upgrades from the previous ones.



Geforce FX 5700LE (MSI) : Starting from the begining, there was the Nvidia Nvidia GeForce Fx5700 by MSI. it was a good card until i saw what the ATI brands had to offer in the same price range. reason being, the Nvidia FX chipset at the heart of the card was brilliant, just implemented poorely by MSI and at CAD $210 it was not worth the money. The reason i went in for MSI specifically at the time of purchase was because the previous card i had bought in Australia was also MSI and was one of the best in the market at that given time.



ATI 9600 Pro (Saphire) : The next card was an ATI 9600 Pro that i got as a free upgrade as my previous card was having troubles with the fan. Overall i was pleased with this card, not only was it cheap but the performance boost it gave was almost 3x compared to the previous one.the card was made by Saphire which being a good company had properly implemented the 9600 Radeon chipset. The only down side i saw at that time was the Ram. Unlike the Geforce i had earlier with Samsung ram, this saphire had some cheap ram on it which i believe led to an underuse of the card.



Nvidia Geforce 6600 GT (EVGA): Things were good, until i made the switch from Windows XP to Linux Fedora Core 4. then everything went down-hill, the biggest reason being ATI's poor driver support for non-Windows based operating systems. infact, when i upgraded from Fedora Core 3 to 4, the ATI drivers refused to install due to their not being capable of supporting the new kernel in Fedora 4. The end result was games would not run, video would lag and overall i just couldnt enjoy the eye candy that Linux provides over Windows. Also, i realized, ATI's poor support for Linux was part because of the fact that their cards are built for Direct-X processing. As linux is based on the Open Source Graphics Library ( OpenGL ) i felt the card was under-performing. Being a Linux enthusiast and an OpenGL programmer i felt it necessary to go back to Nvidia, reason for this was not only the extensive support Nvidia offers for Linux but also because they can support OpenGL as well as DirectX without any partiality. All this and almost 4x the speed of the previous ATI card all wrapped in a Doom3 ready package costing under CAD $200 was more than i could ask for. Ive been able to take all my games to a higher resulation ( without comprimising gameplay ofcourse ) and the results are astounding. infact in this budget range, the Geforce 6600GT is said to outstrip the ATI X700 Pro in just about all the games ( excapt Half Life 2, which is totally DirectX and both cards display the same performance ).

All in all its been a round trip from Nvidia to ATI and back and im glad i went full circle. For now thou, i think i'm going to stick to Nvidia, but, you never know.........