NVIDIA betadriver 71.84
 

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_do..._2k_71.84.html

Seems to offer no change in performance along the highend card line, friends with Ti4600 and lower said Anti Aliasing ran a little smoother, however the shadows appeared to flicker.

Recommended for ATI Users

Recommended for ATI Users? huh? How would nVidia drivers work on an ATI card?

click the banana

I like the 75.90's on guru3d.com they work great with EQ2 with SLI.

for some reason I can quote, but gotcha Taleisin

And without bringing on my long array of defensive convo's for ATI, I'll pass it up, as at least ATI users get to click the dancing banana :)

Not exactly germane but....
 

I built my current computer from an excellent set of parts and am currently running on a respectable but not ridiculous ATI card. For those of you in the know, what would be the best card be for me to upgrade to in the $300-400 price range?

Isn't the x800 in the $300-400 range? I paid $200 for a PCI Express (blech) x700 and am loving it.

Quib

yes the x800 is in that range. the 6800 and 6800 GT are also in that price range if you want nVidia. a good place to shop may be http://www.newegg.com/ they always have good prices and the shipping is fast (and sometimes free with small stuff like video cards)and almost all thier products have lots of user reviews so you know if there is something wrong/not good with the product.

Does ATI vs nVidia really matter?
 

Any personal biases or perference btwn the two companies?

I'm a little wary of installing new nvidia drivers. After installing the 66.93 drivers, EQ2 would always blue-screen my computer whenever I tried to enter the game so I had to downgrade the driver to the previous version.

This is old info, not not sure if it holds true from the ATI x#00 cards or the newest GeForce line.

I own a GF3 ti200, GF4 ti4200, Radeon 9600, 9800 and x700.

From my experience the ATI cards render crisper textures and harder lines while the GeForce cards give a "softer" overall render. The ATIs are really clean renderers; NVidia loses some texture quality but provides superior anti-aliasing.

To be fair, Half-Life 2 at 6x AA looks really amazing on the x700 (well, all other settings at max as well) but I prefer the look of every one of my other games as it renders on the GF4 ti4200.

As for framerate performance, the ATI cards I own are a generation ahead of the NVidia cards, so they get way better framerates, so I can't give you good info as how the newest generation of each company compare. The GF4 gets a framerate of 30 in PlanetSide and 5-10 in EQ2 while the x700 gets 150+ in PlanetSide and a comfortable 30 with little variation with nearly max settings in EQ2 (only shadows and reflections are off or at low settings, 5 HQ models allowed at once, all others settings max as far as I recall). RAM speed has as much an impact on these numbers as my videocards do however (133 MHz SDRAM in the GF4 comp, 533 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 in the x700 comp).

If I feel so inclined, I'll try and get a screenshot with max settings (in EQ2) from the best of each company card I have to try and show the differences.

Quib

Wow, thanks.
 

Great info. Thanks for the in-depth perspective. Screenshots would be great.

Personally, from people I know who play in EQ2, I can tell you that most of them who had video problems were using nVidia. I can't give you statistics on overall. I've used 2 different ATI cards with EQ2 so far, and have had zero problems what so ever. Acctually, tell ya thruth, I've never had a problem with my ATI cards, except when I was on a Dell, without an ATI card.

Im loving my ATI x700. I play on 1600x1200 on High Quality (Shadows Off) and it runs very very nice!

If you look at the release notes...
 

EQ2 is specifically mentioned and will have a fix for the stuttering problem go live in the next release.

You will need Adobe Reader to view them, but I will link it and paraphrase for the downloading-impaired or folks who have download restrictions in the office:

Link to PDF is here.

71.84 Open Issues: GeForce 6 Series: Stuttering appears in different portions of the game EverQuest2. This issue will be fixed in the next driver release.

Regardless of which driver or video card you're using, I wish you luck and hope you all can continue to enjoy the game as much as I do!