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Sideways take on ATI/NVidia battles
Komplett usually have a bit of 'humour' in their weekly emails...I thought this one was worth passing on:
Well, we’ve had them on the site for a short while – but it really looks like we’re gonna be getting these phat ladies in at any moment. Though we say so ourselves, if you wanna be the Big Man on your street and be the first to be sporting this sexy new hardware in your pimped-out Rig, Komplett may well turn out to be the shop you should be using.
What the hell am I talking about? The next generation of the increasingly petulant graphics card soap opera, that’s what. By most accounts, the last generation was a resounding victory for ATi – the 9x00 family of cards was a ripping success; their fundamentally more elegant design at a low level meant nVidia was always playing catch-up, especially in terms of the all-important image quality. This was all spiced up by some delightfully childish name-calling and accusations of benchmark-fiddling by both sides with every new driver release. Indeed, if you carefully read the changelog for the latest nVidia Forceware drivers, you’ll see “Improved normal mapping performance using Pixel Shader 2 refinements, because ATi cards smell and they make your wee turn green.†ATi responded by hastily releasing the 4.51 Catalyst drivers, which are exactly the same as the 4.50 versions, except that during the install process they flash up a screen saying “Due to the overly esoteric pixel pipeline arrangement in the GeForceFX cards, current nVidia hardware is known to give you cooties, and I saw him kissing Julie Lowmax from form 4B. Also, nVidia aren’t invited to my birthday party.â€
Well, both ATi and nVidia have now unveiled their next great leap, and it’s only really good news for the customer that the race is closer than ever – this bitter conflict makes for great prices! So we have the nVidia GeForce 6800 family going head to head with the ATi Radeon x800. nVidia have come over fully Wu-tang on our collective candy ass, and designed a card so high tech it has been accepted as a god by no less than 14 semi-autonomous Polynesian island states. ATi had less work to do, so they have simply opened up a can of medieval whoopass, by doing the hardware equivalent of injecting the 9800 with horse steroids and sending it out for a brutal training regime on an inhospitable asteroid in outer space, with a gruff but basically loving drill sergeant. It’s brains vs. brawn – and the current thinking seems to put the x800 just ahead. It’s a close match, though – and in truth, with either of these cards in your system, you’re looking at running Far Cry at resolutions so high that when you turn off your PC the real world looks pixellated. We’ll see how this bitter rivalry finally pans out when the various next-gen PC games come out over summer though.
So, either flash the cash and show off with the gaming equivalent of a gold-plated thoroughbred racehorse fed entirely on Beluga Caviar and weapons-grade plutonium – the water-cooled Gainward "CoolFX" GeForce 6800, or enjoy having the fastest graphics card in the world at a price we think will make you question whether or not that’s air you’re breathing – the Sapphire x800Pro.
What the hell am I talking about? The next generation of the increasingly petulant graphics card soap opera, that’s what. By most accounts, the last generation was a resounding victory for ATi – the 9x00 family of cards was a ripping success; their fundamentally more elegant design at a low level meant nVidia was always playing catch-up, especially in terms of the all-important image quality. This was all spiced up by some delightfully childish name-calling and accusations of benchmark-fiddling by both sides with every new driver release. Indeed, if you carefully read the changelog for the latest nVidia Forceware drivers, you’ll see “Improved normal mapping performance using Pixel Shader 2 refinements, because ATi cards smell and they make your wee turn green.†ATi responded by hastily releasing the 4.51 Catalyst drivers, which are exactly the same as the 4.50 versions, except that during the install process they flash up a screen saying “Due to the overly esoteric pixel pipeline arrangement in the GeForceFX cards, current nVidia hardware is known to give you cooties, and I saw him kissing Julie Lowmax from form 4B. Also, nVidia aren’t invited to my birthday party.â€
Well, both ATi and nVidia have now unveiled their next great leap, and it’s only really good news for the customer that the race is closer than ever – this bitter conflict makes for great prices! So we have the nVidia GeForce 6800 family going head to head with the ATi Radeon x800. nVidia have come over fully Wu-tang on our collective candy ass, and designed a card so high tech it has been accepted as a god by no less than 14 semi-autonomous Polynesian island states. ATi had less work to do, so they have simply opened up a can of medieval whoopass, by doing the hardware equivalent of injecting the 9800 with horse steroids and sending it out for a brutal training regime on an inhospitable asteroid in outer space, with a gruff but basically loving drill sergeant. It’s brains vs. brawn – and the current thinking seems to put the x800 just ahead. It’s a close match, though – and in truth, with either of these cards in your system, you’re looking at running Far Cry at resolutions so high that when you turn off your PC the real world looks pixellated. We’ll see how this bitter rivalry finally pans out when the various next-gen PC games come out over summer though.
So, either flash the cash and show off with the gaming equivalent of a gold-plated thoroughbred racehorse fed entirely on Beluga Caviar and weapons-grade plutonium – the water-cooled Gainward "CoolFX" GeForce 6800, or enjoy having the fastest graphics card in the world at a price we think will make you question whether or not that’s air you’re breathing – the Sapphire x800Pro.
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