Graphic Card: Buying question

[Land Whale]

I'm planning to save up money to buy a new graphics card, and I'd like to which you can recommend based on these questions:

ATI or GeForce?

If ATI, which latest card is a must buy?

If GeForce, should I go for a 7950 or a 8800?

[SBKT]

You don't normally need that powerful of a card unless you don't want to upgrade for a few years, but I'd thing a 256MB would suffice for your gaming needs. You can buy cards up to like, 1GB.

I prefer ATI, but they're really buggy now I hear, and supposedly the NVidia is better, but I'd personally say ATI.

[Ian]

Um.. well I'm running an 512mb ATI Radeon x1900xt right now. It's pretty sweet, I think they have the x1950xt nowadays though. One thing you probably want to look for is how well is your card going to work with dx10 (or if it's going to work at all with dx10).

...but I think that's mainly a concern if you're upgrading to the devil's operating system. If you've got the cash, I've heard good things about nvidia's dual-core gpus...

[PHeMoX]

I prefer ATI, but they're really buggy now I hear, and supposedly the NVidia is better, but I'd personally say ATI.

I prefer ATI too and I've had about 5 different cards, 3 of which rather new (X850, X1300 and a X1600XT ) . Before you think I broken them all, no I just like to upgrade, I've never had problems with any of them. Not one crashed, no bugs, no lock-ups, no burners. Not sure why the current ATI cards would be buggy, but I haven't noticed anything about it.

As for the topicstarter's question. Are you planning to play DirectX 10 games? If yes, then I would advise to wait a little longer before you buy a new graphics card. The drivers of the Nvidia 8800 are not so good (none for DirectX 10 at the moment!) and ATI's equivalent supporting DirectX 10 isn't quite released yet. I love the way their PR says 'any minute now', but almost secretly they announce another delay anyways. :p

[SBKT]

I prefer ATI, but they're really buggy now I hear, and supposedly the NVidia is better, but I'd personally say ATI.

I prefer ATI too and I've had about 5 different cards, 3 of which rather new (X850, X1300 and a X1600XT ) . Before you think I broken them all, no I just like to upgrade, I've never had problems with any of them. Not one crashed, no bugs, no lock-ups, no burners. Not sure why the current ATI cards would be buggy, but I haven't noticed anything about it.

As for the topicstarter's question. Are you planning to play DirectX 10 games? If yes, then I would advise to wait a little longer before you buy a new graphics card. The drivers of the Nvidia 8800 are not so good (none for DirectX 10 at the moment!) and ATI's equivalent supporting DirectX 10 isn't quite released yet. I love the way their PR says 'any minute now', but almost secretly they announce another delay anyways. :p

If you must know, it's got some sort of BLACKBOX problem with a lot of games. Usually, the ones with DirectX.
I thought DirectX was a sotfware kajigger, not a hardware kabooble.

[SteveK]

That's more than likely a driver issue.  Try upgrading your drivers (if you dare).  Don't forget to unisntall everything ATI before installing new drivers.  You should have a "ATI - Software Uninstall Utility" entry in your Add/Remove Programs.   I'm running Catalyst 6.8 on a X1900XT with no problems.

As for Land Whale's upgrade, it depends on what you want.  If you need the absolute best, get a GeForce 8800GTS/X.  If the previous generation if good enough, go for a X1900XT or X1950XT.  Keep in mind that you won't have DirectX 10 if you go the latter route.

[PHeMoX]

We haven't truly seen any DirectX 10 benchmark either of the GF8800 series in comparison with ATI, so i'm a bit cautious when it comes to claims about DirectX 10 just yet. I bet the GF8800 will work though, but you'll get my point ... ATI seems to skip the 'let the public beta test our cards-phase', but this is just an assumption on my side off course ..

[shinygerbil]

Having a similar dilemma, I've done some searching, and I've come up with the following:

I dual-boot linux, so ATi is out of the question; their drivers and Linux support is shockingly minimal, at best. SO I will go for nVidia.

A 7950 is really not future-proof.

An 8800 comes in two main varieties: GTS and GTX. The GTS is the lower-spec, being roughly

[PHeMoX]

I really doubt if a SLi mainboard is useful without putting two cards in there 'right from start', by the time you've got the money to buy a second card it may very well be outdated already.

Two ATI X1900XT in Crossfire half a year ago would have been a waste with DirectX 10 right around the corner coming, but perhaps two SLi Nvidia first generation DirectX 10 cards suffer from the same problem. Don't forget that development is going rapidly lately, just look at the huge jump in performance between Nvidia's 8800 series and their 7900 and then we haven't even seen ATI's latest and greatest yet ...