nVidia vs. ATI : A casual gamer’s perspective spread over a decade

Let me clear this up front: I am a BIG nVidia fan boy. However I have nothing against ATI and I believe they currently have the edge in the graphics card wars.

nVidia’s Fermi based GeForce 480GTX is the fastest single GPU card out there today but it has to look up to ATI Radeon 5970 which is the fastest dual GPU setup in the market. If I had $600 to spend I would be certainly going for the 5970 in my rig. It is the fastest graphics card in the world now and seems a better return of investment than the $500 480GTX. The 5970 beats the sh!t out of all other cards out there and tops every gaming benchmark with a huge margin.

At the moment ATI is basking in all the glory it could ever imagine. nVidia’s Fermi architecture seems to be a very good move by the company however it still is in its nascent stage and it should only get better down the line.

My first ever discrete graphics card was a nVidia Riva TNT2 32MB (still remember that?) on my Pentium 3 that I purchased in year 2000. Quake 3, Unreal, GTA 3 used to be the primary games on my PC and the card handled all these pretty well. Aahhh! It was heaven until Spiderman for PC and No One Lives Forever 2 came out. These games required Hardware Transform & Lighting support on the graphics card and my poor Riva TNT2 had none of it. I then upgraded to “THE” nVidia GeForce 2 GT 64MB. I was back in heaven again and sailed through all the games out there including the leaked demo of Doom 3 in 2002.

In 2003 Need for Speed underground came out with some awesome graphics for the day. It needed pixel and vertex shader support on the graphics card for this awesomeness. Time to upgrade again: This time I bought my 3rd nVidia card in the form of the abysmal GeForce 5200 128 MB (I was in college and on a budget). Theoretically it was a fully fledged DirectX 9 chip but practically it was a pathetic excuse of a card and I had to persist with it for another year. Doom 3, Half Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2003/4 , NFS U2 were all butter smooth at medium settings.

F.E.A.R. came out in 2005 and my rig couldn’t handle it anymore and lost its battle for survival. All this time ATI was steadily chipping away nVidia’s market share and an ATI Radeon 9700 was THE card to have. Doom 3 had a solid backing from nVidia while Half Life 2 was supported by ATI. At this time ATI held the graphics card crown for the first time ever. I purchased a ATI Radeon 9700 128MB from an OEM for an awesome deal. This card was GOD. I could now play anything: F.E.A.R (the Crysis of 2005) was heavenly at the highest settings. My first ATI had made me very happy.

In 2007 nVidia trumped ATI and came out with the first DirectX 10 card. The GeForce 8800 was the beast that nobody could have even thought of. It had around 3 times the processing power of the nearest competing ATI product. The days of ATI were numbered and nVidia enjoyed this supremacy for a couple of years. Their performance level card , the GeForce8600 GT, was the most popular and it has been in my gaming laptop for nearly 3 years now. It’s played every game I have thrown at it at high settings (Yes, Crysis included). nVidia had me there.

Last week I installed Metro 2033 on my laptop and for the first sign my 8600 was showing some signs of aging. Looks like it was trying to tell me that it can no longer hold its sway against the current big boys and it’s time to move on. I am going to get a new rig and this time I am going to join the ATI bandwagon again while still being an nVidia fan boy. Does all this sound like a Lakers fan rooting for LeBron James?