Not many people know that ATI Technologies is an almost ten years older company than NVIDIA. While some fifteen years ago the collegial competition between these two companies was superfluous at best, being that there were other companies with graphic cards of comparable quality, there is an outright war between the Canadian based ATI and American, or more accurately, Californian based NVIDIA. ATI with their Radeon line and NVIDIA with their GeForce compete for the gamers market and there are no holds barred.It is seemingly all in your allies that keeps the game going, one of NVIDIA’s founders quit AMD to start the company, AMD acquired ATI some six years ago. Microsoft and Nintendo hired ATI to create the graphics core for their game consoles, Intel licenses the NVIDIA technology, Sony Playstation 3 has NVIDIA chips in there and in one interesting turn of events, now the Xbox, Microsoft’s game console features NVIDIA processors as well. NVIDIA provides N-Force chipsets for motherboards, which feature AMD processors, but feature onboard ATI graphics.
Who produces the best graphic card nowadays, ATI or NVIDIA?
That would largely depend on whom you ask. Many benchmark tests have either the one or the other company’s flagship best in this or that test, but the numbers speak for themselves. Namely, NVIDIA has an overall market share with PC gaming population that surpasses the magical 50% mark, while ATI manages to grab a third of the worldwide share. The fact of the matter is that you can play any and all games with either top grade card.
ATI proudly announces that the current flagship, the AMD Radeon HD™ 6990 is supposed to be the fastest gaming graphic card in the world. It is written in small letters, though, that the excellence is valid only for the 3DMark test performed in February. While the current NVIDIA flagship, the GeForce GTX 590 does not claim similar excellence, the entered specs seemingly outperform the ones listed by ATI’s card.
Are you really getting the best?
It is all moot, though, because the manufacturer-produced cards are not the best versions available to the public. The modified versions, manufactured by Gainward and the likes, which can be overclocked and are modified to perform faster, these cards put all the numbers on either site to shame. At such high levels of tweaking, every single item that you have in your gaming computer is a factor that has a vital impact on your final performance.
It all comes down to IF
If your main processor is not top of the line, if your computer bus is not the fastest, if your RAM is not the fastest, if your connections to the monitor are not the fastest, if your just recently downloaded driver is not the fastest, if your operating system is not tweaked to insanity, and there are perhaps a thousand more ifs, then the computer aficionado next door might just outperform you with his machine. Not to say that in a week or two, a completely new set of cards is being released and who knows what happens then.
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