i have 7 computers in the house, 4 i will not even state there only for apps. the other 3 computer though are good. one is my main gaming computer. till just resently when PCI-Ex came out i was just a Nvidia fan, but when they hit the market all you could get for some time was ATI and doom was coming out, al i had was a Gforce 4 Ti 4200 and when i tryed it i was getting only 10-15 FPS before i even saw an enemy. i figered i would go for ATI cuase theres no way i was going to spend 800 some bucks on a card that was the last of the AGP gen there going out of date. all i can say is i wil not goback to a Nvidia card. the smoothness and grafix comaresin to a simular Nvidia car is much better.
gaming computer P4 2.8 prescot 775 socet.
2 gig's of OCZ ram
ATI x600 128mb
2 37.7 gig Rapter drives sata 10,000 RPM in raid 0 mode giving me 300mb/sec
with onboard 7.1 sound
second best comp. P4 3.4A
1 gig ram
Gforce FX 5700 128mb
80 gig 7500 RPM
onboard sound 5.1
now in looking at these rig's they run kinda equill some one, the gameing one being faster on the loading end but the grafix should be better on the second one since the X600 is acualy only a ported over 9600.
every thing run at 1280x1024
playing Planetside with the first one i was getting much better grafix and getting 200 FPS even with in a huge battle going on there being about 1000 people running aorund on the screen and who knows how mand vehicals i only got slight client side lag. where as the other comp i had to turn on anti-analisis dropoing FPS to 60 and still laged out in a little lesser battle, even traded over some ram to make sure. settings maxed out
In doom 3 though the Gforce card got little better FPS but the grafix were 3x better with the ATI x600 then the GFX5700 and the Nvidia card had some grafix tering so had to turn on the anti-analisis again, but FPS was already below 60 so didnt see a change there still better then ATI. settings Maxed out.
now in EQ2 i can have every thing turned up to high lvls with some turned to vary high on the ATI x600. water i can max out partical effects i can max out but thats it. I do not get any Client side lag, the vary vary odd time i get lag but its totaly server side, only reason i know is cuase im on Teamspeak with 6 other friends and we all get it at same time, although they get alot of PC lag and there running high end AMD 64 with high end AGP cards. Now as for the GFX 5700 most stull i need to set low the other half i can set to normal and a few odd things i can set high. like one being the Enviroment shading can turn that on when im in the open not in town. i dont do that one for the ATI since the shader is using a diff format, other shadows though ATI can handle just not Enviroment. now if i set both computers to low or even med, the ATI card looks a ton better then the GFX one. i even went over to me friends place and cheaked out his new 6600 and my lowly ATI x600 still looks better then his lol. hes pised at me hehe, 3x time hes got for better equipent then me he though and got worse grafix resalts. although he would kick my but on a FPShooter game.
in all though i will never go back to an Nvida card again. specialy since ATI cards are the best around if you want a Media center and want to run stuff on your TV and play movies Nvidia will never come close to that.
as for the next generation of cards who knows whats next. cuase all the cards out right now are just port overs from there AGP counter parts with a bit better pipline and can use there Softwear they way its meant to be. the PCI-Ex is only at the bottom of its potential and both companies could go either way, as of right now we are only getting 4gigs of pip line and the origenal tests made 3 years ago by the compainy that made PCI-Ex tested them at 16gig piplines. like back when that comany made AGP ports there estamets were for 2x and we got up to 8x
In all though you cant realy go wrong with either way. but if your looking for a card that has better over all grafix specialy for most games , and for other uses then just gaming your best bet is an ATI card.