BumbRushfaulse, i personaly have sold/installed MANY 2600xt's in htpc's at the custmers dirrect request, and no i didnt "sell" them on the 2600, this was just them coming in and saying "i want a 2600 in the system because its better for videos", also some got the 2600xt for vivo fetures that nvidia cards do not offer.

i get my "fawed ideas" from the fact that im an 8800gt owner and have owned pretty much ever seirse of cards nvidias ever made even their old nv1(utter pos) and that since the FX line they havent fixed long term known issues due to their quest for king of the hill in whatever the days top epeen game/bench is.


this i can personaly call bullshit on, the 70% boost was not due to drivers at all, they made a totaly redesigned gpu that was used in the 5700, it performed better their older cards/chips still sucked utterly and fully for anything above dx8(ok they where good in older OpenGL games to)
as to no quility loss, just do some googling, the FX cards where CRIPPLED with driver updates that RUINED quility, I personaly can destify to this because I HAD A 5800ultra as well as a 5900xt, they sucked, you couldnt even hack the drivers to give back full IQ because nvidia hard coded alot of the "tweaks" into the fx line core files in order to get extra perf in benches, in all honisty its what drove me away from nvidia, i was as big an nvidiot as btarunr,newtekie1 and you till those days when i was given a low end 9600 by a buddy who had just gotten ahold of an unlockable 9500(9700 after unlock) i didnt want to use it because i remmberd how baddly ati drivers sucked for the rage128 under any NT based os, but i tryed it because i was so frustrated with the dx9 perf and image quility of my over priced nvidia cards, and i was shocked, in ALL newer games a 9600 that was 1/4 the price was FASTER this wasnt enought reasion for me to move fully to ati, at least at first, but after some gaming i compared screenshots of the 9600 vs the 5800 and 5900, the IQ diffrance was clear, explosions and partical effects looked totaly diffrent, no dithering under ati, no blury textures....it just looked nice, as my gf4ti 4400 had looked.

yes i know in gaming perf it ties, BUT it has better video decoding and hdmi support, check around, the perf went way up in video playback, just as the decoding on the g92 went up vs the g80 lines, also the 38*0 cards do have other small tweaks other then just a die shrink, and my point unlike some other peoples points was.
let me split this up a bit for easyer understanding.

ati never used the new core as a 2900 seiries card, it was renamed to diffr it from the 2900 and its bad rep/press, also makes it easyer for buyers to be sure they are getting a new core not an OLD core, this makes sence.

nvidia put the g92 into 8800gt/gs/gts cards THEN put the same chip into the 9600 and 9800, this is where i call bullshit, if they wanted to call them the 9 seirse then they should have callled them the 9 seirse, not use the same chip with less dissabled shaders/pipes/wtfe and called it 8800 vs 9800, honestly its bullshit and most ppl can see what i mean.

as to nvidiot, btarunr admited hes one, check the link in my sig, (found it from somebody elses sig and copyed it)

im not a fanboi,tho you seem to think i am, i just have a diffrent prespective from you, i see that game perf isnt the only reasion to buy a card, and that sometimes other things matter more to the buyer/client, till you have worked in computers as long as i have (13 years doing this for $) you wont have the proper prespective as to what matters to diffrent markets, its not all about epeen mark scores or crysis bench scores, to be honest at times i wish it was, at least it would make it easyer to say "this is the best card for X price", as things are you have to know more about how the cards acctualy work in diffrent situations and uses, video playback, hdmi/hdcp/video decosing/video in/out, the list goes on and on, some fetures ati cards offer that nvidia just dont, like ViVo(video in video out) if somebody wants these fetures they got to go ati or buy another card, and in the case of many MATX systems adding another card isnt a viable option because the systems got only 1-2 useable expantion slots.


see above, i will say it again, fps dosnt matter if your primary use isnt gaming, if you buy the card to use in a media pc/htpc where all that matters is video quility and playback game fps dont come into the picture, If you want ViVo fetures nvidia is not an option because THEY DONT OFFER THEM you would need to buy another card, and as i said above, many of the small pc's people choose for media systems(be it media pc or htpc) dont have enought expantion slots, take a look at those dell mini desktops, if you stick videocard in you have 1-2 slots useable at best, and many people using it for a pure media playback device would have a 3rd party soundcard because those dell boxes onboard sound is still utterly crap(worse then any home built's onboard sound i have seen in the last 4-5 years)

no but what if u cant game because you cant even get the system stable due to a driver bugg nvidia has known about since 2003? namely the bugg that causes x64 windows and server 2003(what x64 pro is based on) to crash as soon as you try and access even the nvidia control panil? this is a known issue in nvidias bug database, they just dont bother to fix i, their advice, "reinstall till it works" and "try slipstreaming a driver into your windows disk" NOBODY SHOULD HAVE TO DO THAT, most people wouldnt even know what slipstreaming was let alone how to do it...........

both companys have their faults, nvidia and its nvidios fault is that they only care about game bench perf and nothing else, not stability on certen windows versions, no image quility not video playback perf/quility/buggs, just epeenmark and crysis scores..., ati's is that they took a bad path with the 2900/3800 cores that eather dosnt have optimum driver support or game support, or it just needs redesigned, oh and they need to fix scaling on old games for wide screen monotors.....


i fully know that the top 2 at the moment each have their share of problems, but for my $ as a tech i would rather deal with ati cards/drivers then nvidia's in most situations sure they dont get the same uber high max fps but at least i dont have to deal with them crashing on x64pro or video rendering buggs thatplaugethe 8800drivers (well it acctualy effects many cards using the same driver revisions as the 8800 as well)

im on an 8800gt, its nice, but its got its buggs, and it can frustrate the hell out of me.

hey lets all just agree on this, at least we arent stuck with via/S3 and the like :)

quite frankly if i want ViVo Ill use my HD Haupage TV Tuner card it does the trick a hell of a lot better. My PC double for Media playback, but guess what i use an HD TV decoder card designed for MPEG4 and 2 Decoding. This is how i watch Media on my computer. AS for DVD playback i also do not use my DVD-Drive, i use a DVD Player a 10 disk DVD-Changer to be excat. My computer lets me watch cable and plays my movies, heck i have a VCR hooked up to it, because VHS looks better

On the VIVO issue, nVidia did offer it. Up until the 8000 series actually. The 7 series had VIVO. Now nVidia doesn't, and the reason is simple. It s much better to buy a cheap TV tuner card and get better results than buying a video card with VIVO. VIVO on video cards is dead, ATi just missed the memo. It never worked acceptably, it was a pain in the ass to use, and there were far better solutions out there.

You can litterally get a TV tuner for under $20, and it will work better than any VIVO video card. Even ATi has realized this and stopped including VIVO, the only two cards that still actually have it are the 2900XT and 3870, and only very specific models made by Diamond.

I've also asked him to tell me what these "long term bugs" were and he failed to do so. So one can only assume he is full of it when he talks about them. Just add the fanboy to your ignore list and move on. Saying something as a point in an argument is one thing, but then failing to back it up even after being asked, usually means you point is BS.

So the question I have is..

Should I buy the 8800gt 1gig?

From that list on the first page, it seems at the highest setting on the biggest games, it has a significant difference in some places.. but overall it seems the be behind the 512 by a couple fps. do I take this as a sign that the 1 gig could have a much longer life then the 512 cause it can support the games over the next few years that will be much beefier then most of those games? Or is it a smarter buy to do one of the GTX or GTS'?

Gotta buy something today :)

-Chris

you get the enefit of 1 gb when you overclock the card.

i assume newekie is still ranting about me, to bad for him i have him on my iggy list since hes such an nvidiot.

as to vivo, i have had alot of clients who NEED vivo on their videocard, because using a HTPC/MPC that only has 1-2 useable expantion slots means they gotta have eather a nic(wireless most times) or they can have a videocard(needed for most media pc's weather some ppl belive it or not) the best solution ofcorse would be a way to avoid addin cards all togather but that day hasnt quite came yet, newer onboard video is just about there tho, only problem is that most people use old work boxes(eg recycled computers) to build their media pc's and these units are very limmited in what you can add to them, u can eather add a videocard and wireless or videocard and tunter card now you can use a USB tuner,but those dont have all the inputs some people need, like my last client who needed a VIVO videocard really wanted an all in wonder because he NEEDS svideo and rca(compsit) inputs for some of the devices he uses, we couldnt find an AIW card so i managed to find him a 2600 card with vivo card that had the 2 main things he needed, then got a tuner card and a very pricy coax imput adapeter to go with a tuner card he alwase had bought, it works, but an AIW would be better, he couldnt bring his old AIW into the new systemb because the system had ZERO pci slots(its was a pci rage wonder card) the dell box we setup as his media edting/capture box wasnt able to take most cards due to lack of slots or inablility to fund 1/2 high cards that would work,(i hate those dell's..........HATE) he got the system from his office stuck a pentium-d in it and it works fine for what he wants to do, but only 2expantion slots pci-e 16x and 1x thats it, horrible design but thats what alot of ppl endup with when they recycle computers(the systems about 9 months old and his company s replaced all dell's with another companys products due to a dispute over on site support)