which graphic card serie Workstation or Gaming?

Giovanni Azua wrote:

 > Hello Clarke,
 >
 > Many thanks for your exhaustive response!
 >
 > I have had second thoughts about buying a previous
 > cheaper version of NVidia or ATI e.g. NVidia ASUS N6600GT
 > 128MB, instead of upgrading to this one I would rather
 > stay with my current Fire V3100 4 pixel pipelines 128MB ...
 > if I want an upgrade I want an upgrade
 >
 > Actually checking more in details the NVidia vs ATI I found
 > that ATI has more appealing numbers i.e.
 >
 > "ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum" clock rate 520Mhz
 > "ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum" clock rate 540Mhz
 >
 > vs
 >
 > "NVidia 6800 Ultra" clock rate 400Mhz
 >
 > Which somehow contradicts with your judgement that NVidia
 > is usually faster than ATI ... funnily I loaded my 3DMark
 > project for their latest benchmarking (I got 1180 score)
 > and reviewing others saw the topmost 12K score being NVidia
 > 6800 Ultra, perhaps very few people have bought ATI latest
 > already ...

You missed the point. I was not making a judgment about the performance of
the hardware, I was commenting on the availability of drivers. Regardless
of any differences in the hardware, that 6800 Ultra on Linux using the
nvidia optimized drivers is going to outperform the ATI board using the
default SVGA drivers in X.

 > When the comparison comes to drivers availability I think this
 > changes continuosly ... I think is better getting the
 > most powerful card and wait for the drivers to upgrade than
 > getting great drivers support but then stay with the desire
 > of having the fastest card

That is true for Windows where both companies release updated drivers on a
regular basis. Linux is not Windows. Nvidia has consistently provided
solid drivers for Linux, ATI has been spotty and their drivers have
typically supported a subset of the features of their boards.

 > What do you think?

Bottom line--for Linux I'd go with nvidia. Every experience I have had with
ATI and Linux has been bad. And not because I don't like ATI--most of the
video hardware I own is ATI.

 > Best Regards,
 > Giovanni
 >
 > PS: Playing Counter-Strike with ATI V3100 (latest drivers XP) is
 > really frustrating ... the lagging is noticeably horrible.
 >
 > "J. Clarke" wrote
  >> This may end up the decision-making driver. Just about everything
  >> supports XP. ATI and nvidia take different approaches to Linux
  >> support--nvidia's is closed-source but pretty much fully supports
  >> the capabilities of their chips, ATI has a closed-source driver
  >> that's so-so and on an intermittent basis works with the developer
  >> community to allow open-source support for their chips, but it
  >> generally doesn't happen while the chip is current. So for Linux,
  >> if politics is more important to you than performance you'd
  >> want to go ATI, while if performance is more important than
  >> politics you'd be better off to go nvidia. Solaris you're likely
  >> on your own. As for Unix, don't encourage SCO.
  >>

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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Giovanni Azua wrote:

 > I had the NVidia GeForce 6600GT card yesterday in front
 > of me ... but what made me hesitate before buying it was
 > the fact that it only includes 128MB instead of 256MB.

Yes, that's right. Only some (much slower) GF6600s (non-GT) offer 256MB...

 > I know that more is not necessarily better but I wonder
 > if the lack of 128MB would impact my experience gaming?
 > at the end I can not know how much of this RAM is being
 > actually used? by e.g. Counter-Strike, Half Life 2 ...

Well, with 128MB the high-res textures of some games don't fit in the cards
memory. This leads to texture swapping which was a huge performance hog on
AGP systems. With PCIe, texture swapping isn't that much of a problem like
it was with AGP...

 > I have also searched all over internet and did not find
 > any GeForce 6600 featuring 256MB ...

Simply because there aren't any...

 > Price-wise the difference is very heavy specially here in
 > Switzerland:
 >
 > NVidia GeForce 6600GT : 300CHF
 > Nvidia GeForce 6800 xxx: +700CHF
 >
 > meaning +350USD difference ...
 >
 > Any ideas?
 >
 > I would also like to know if you have any brand opinion
 > I would say ASUS is the best one ... isn't it?

I have a MSI NX6600GT and a PNY Verto 6600GT here. The MSI is crap, the
heatsink is cheap and doesn't cover GPU and memory correctly. The PNY card
is fine, and it offers a very good picture quality (important of You use a
crt!)...

Benjamin<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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