ATI VS. Nvidia

[ganhosi]

Ok, Before you all flame me, I have searched over 200 posts and I have not found anything on the driver compatibility of FFXI in regards to ATI or Nvidia cards.

The video card that I can get for my Birthday is a Nvidia FX 5600 or an ATI Radeon 9500 Pro. I remember in the past ATI's Driver department was a bit poor and I have heard rumors that FFXI was designed towards Nvidia driver compatibility. I wanted to get some input regarding people who have either 1 of these cards and the in-game results. Please feel free to include opinions on graphics, lags, driver crashes, etc. Thanks for the input.

[bunta]

If you get the older model of radeon 9500, the bios on those thing can be flashed to 9700.

[aerobahn]

as for the 9500 soft mod very few 9500's that are out NOW will do this due to revisions by Ati.


Ati's drivers a solid now adays, they update them every month sometimes earlier.

as for being opimized for nvidia? naw,

last but not least of all the GforceFX the only one that showed great value compared to the radeon was the 5900, well not true price value but you get what i mean.

the 5600 is a good choice.
9500 and 9600 are all good with comparable proformence.

an even better choice is to wait for "rainbow".
the value r360 comming out soon.
ATI's next value card

[Doppelganger]

unless you have an 8x AGP, i suggest you get the ti4600 or the radeon 9700. you will save some money and not loose much quality. the ti4200 is also a good choice, as long as you don't get the 4.0.3 driver. i lost about 200 points on the benchmark by getting it.

[aerobahn]

8x agp does nothing. It's all theoretical badwidth that does nothing. From 4x to 8x most people people will only see a 1 to 10 frame advantage. Buy a card thats 8x agp and have a 4x agp slot means nothing really you'll be fine..... untill "pci express" comes out

[Doppelganger]

like i said before, you say that the difference between 4x and 8x agp is minimal. therefore, save some money with one of the two cards and get some extra ram for the comp, making it better overall.

[James Ruglia]

ATI. Why? Because when I signed up for their beta, I didn't get in because a sent in an email before reading "Must be at least 18" on the send-in page. But when I went to NVidia, it didn't say any such thing, so I sent in mail. Then checked "Terms of agreement and copyright etc." and in the middle of a bunch of legal crap it said it there. But this has nothing to do with their video cards, just my personal querrels with the two.