Video Cards
Speed. It's all about the speed.
Every gamer crosses the video card battlefield at least once in their gaming life. Usually more than once. There are really only two players anymore. NVIDIA and ATI. For a very long time NVIDIA has been the leader. Not only in benchmark speeds but in driver stability. That seems to be changing.
The drivers are the codes that allow the video card to talk to the rest of the machine. ATI suffered for quite some time with a reputation of having drivers that were somewhat unstable. This problem was one of the main reasons I have shyed away from these cards for a long time. The last thing I want is to be playing a game and have a lock-up or blue screen of death pop up in the middle of an intense battle. But ATI has been not only raising the video card bar but also stabilizing its drivers. Meanwhile NVIDIA has endured its own driver scandals.
Over the summer, NVIDIA's drivers were shown to contain special coding that effectively cheated the standard benchmark tests into thinking NVIDIA cards were faster than they really were. NVIDIA had cheated, using a speed hack to put it into gamers' terms. To NVIDIA's credit, they removed the special code and announced a policy that stated they would not create drivers that had "application awareness". Both ATI and NVIDIA include optimizations in their drivers but at least they are not specific to an application (especially not a benchmarking application).
Enough of the drivers, let's get back to the cards. ATI has been doing a terrific job raising the bar over the last year. So much so that NVIDIA has now found themselves reacting to ATI's cards rather than leading the market which they had done for so long. The top ATI card is still outperforming the latest NVIDIA cards. ATI is also offering a trade-up program that lets the consumer order the latest ATI card, try it, then send back their old card for a $50 (USD) rebate. Given that many gamers are tech-hungry, I think this is a brilliant idea. I may be switching to ATI cards.
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