The Firing Squad have thrown up their image quality comparison Showdown between NVIDIA and ATI high end graphics cards! Here's a snip.
Once upon a time, evaluating graphics hardware was a simple, straightforward process. You could get away with a couple of benchmarks, a bit about the card itself and a conclusion that compared the product in question to its competitors. Or maybe it just seemed that way, since there were far fewer features on which to focus. Nowadays, you have to consider 2D quality, video capabilities, and 3D performance. And of course, within each category there is a subset of brand new enhancements to be covered. Then, there?s the need to filter marketing terminology, much of which is useless blather anyway. In fact, next to sound cards, graphics products are perhaps the most difficult to judge. There are a number of variables to consider and admittedly, many of them are difficult to critique without intimate architectural knowledge. For example, who?s to say that a given card?s effective bandwidth specifications are accurate? How efficient is HyperZ? What about NVIDIA?s Lightspeed Memory Architecture? You get the idea?
Image Quality Showdown: ATI vs. NVIDIA
Once upon a time, evaluating graphics hardware was a simple, straightforward process. You could get away with a couple of benchmarks, a bit about the card itself and a conclusion that compared the product in question to its competitors. Or maybe it just seemed that way, since there were far fewer features on which to focus. Nowadays, you have to consider 2D quality, video capabilities, and 3D performance. And of course, within each category there is a subset of brand new enhancements to be covered. Then, there?s the need to filter marketing terminology, much of which is useless blather anyway. In fact, next to sound cards, graphics products are perhaps the most difficult to judge. There are a number of variables to consider and admittedly, many of them are difficult to critique without intimate architectural knowledge. For example, who?s to say that a given card?s effective bandwidth specifications are accurate? How efficient is HyperZ? What about NVIDIA?s Lightspeed Memory Architecture? You get the idea?
Image Quality Showdown: ATI vs. NVIDIA