Switching to the other side

<note this is a geek heavy post>

Well today I finally did something I thought I’d never do. Yes I have gone to the other side… I have switched from Nvidia to ATI!

I’ve been using Nvidia graphics cards since it became clear that having a 3DFX card wasn’t the way forward (which was back in 1999 I believe). Nvidia have done me proud over the years but part of me was scared to try new things and ATI was ” the other side” of graphics cards.

For those who don’t know what Im talking about, ATI and Nvidia are the Coke and Pepsi of the graphics card world. Both big, both good but you tend to side with one or the other.

Anyway I found my 9600GT just wasn’t pulling its weight anymore and decided it was time for an upgrade. After a lot of research into the new GTX 200 series from Nvidia I was conscious that ATI always seemed to have more cards in the top 20 performing cards that Nvidia. This was confirmed when looking at specific application tests such as Far Cry 2 and the like. So I decided to see what ATI had to offer. I thought I would aim for a DirectX11 card as Dx10 is (in theory) on the way out, however ATIs HD 5700 and 5800 series didn’t seem to pull the same punch as their older 4800′s. IE for more money you can get a 5750 graphics card over an older 4870 and get WORSE performance all round. But it will do DX11. I figured I could live without that for now

So whats it like? Huge is one word. It fills two PCIe bays and sounds like a hairdryer when starting it up. Whats it like? Don’t know yet. Haven’t put it through its paces. BUT I will say this. ATIs drivers are about 50MB smaller in file size than Nvidias which is a bonus

Personal