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Thread ID: 43999	2004-04-03 14:13:00	Life After nVidia??	chiefnz (545)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
226948	2004-04-03 14:13:00	Well it's been a long, hard and sometimes frustrating journey but finally the honeymoon with nVidia is finally over. Today I took the plunge and for the 1st time ever in my computing life I'm using a non nVidia GPU based graphics card. I know... the shock the horror.... how could I? Well I must admit the biggest influencing factor was price! I've been shopping around and having taken into consideration testing and the opinions of others, an ATi based GPU (or VPU as they call it) was inevitable. I've gotten myself a Gigabyte GV-R96128D graphics card, it's based on the ATi 9600 XT VPU. At first glance it looked a hell of a lot smaller than my old GeForece FX 5200 board. However as with all things in life.... looks can be deceiving. After uninstalling the old GeForce card I popped the Radeon 9600 XT in and without much fuss I installed the drivers and had it up and running. I was almost too scared to run a benchmark but I knew I had to and at the end of all the 3DMark SE tests I am pleased to say it scored a whopping 9000 3D marks... almost more than double my old GeForce card. Needless to say I was pleased. My appreciation for ATi's technology was further enhanced when I played Halo, it ran so smooth (800X600@32 using VSYNC) I thought it was a different game all together. I must admit the only snag I did have was trying to run Halo @ 1024X768 but it was no biggie, I am quite happy with its performance. So in the end the old saying that "change is inevitable" rings true, nVidia has been a reckoning force in the graphics industry but really I think they have serious catching up to do with ATi. ATi have the power, performance and affordability elements stacked in their favour and it will take something truely special if not revolutionary from nVidia to beat, if not just match them at this stage. Well that's my piece... I'm really impressed with ATi they certainly have my vote. cheers chiefnz PS: Incidently kindly post what kind of GPU or VPU you're using and for how long... just as an indication of where most F1'ers place their graphics vote :)	chiefnz (545)
226949	2004-04-04 02:06:00	RE: Halo It is well known that Halo has been optimised horribly (and rushed?) for PC and the frame rates are basically unacceptable for the majority of PC FPS gamers. I was looking forward to it but finding out the specs you needed for a decent game (at a decent resolution - 1024x768x32 @ 85/100Hz should be minimum) I passed - your new ATI card is just extremely fast so it has compensated for the sh*t conversion - remember this was the original XBOX game and any PC VPU should be able to handle this at any resolution. Basically I don't run anything at 800x600x32 (or if I do it's @ 120Hz) as it looks like sh*t on a big monitor - you should be able to run any game (except maybe cutting edge DX9 games - FarCry anyone?!) up to 1600x1200x32 with VSync on with any half decent video card and get playable frame rates.	HadO (796)
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