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ATI vs. Nvidia in a Video Shootout
ThinSkin writes "ATI and Nvidia are well known for hailing their products as leaders in 3D apps and games, but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well. ExtremeTech is featuring an article that tests cards from ATI and Nvidia to determine who takes the cake in video quality and performance. Using CPU utilization scores and visual quality comparisons during video and DVD clips, the author concludes that ATI's latest generation of GPUs have an edge over Nvidia, particularly in DVD playback and with video acceleration."
Oh, right, TFA.
... remember Moore's Law.
Surprisingly, the prices of these two cards are very close: ATI's X1800 XT & Nvidia's 7800 GTX.
I'm guessing that they used an X1800 XT with 512MB of GDDR3 while most 7800 GTXs only have 256MB GDDR3. They come to be about the same price but I attribute their release dates
Newegg has a great datasheet regarding all mainstream cards.
My work here is dung.
I thought that Nvidia had the edge because they are using the new fast subdivision algorithms of Jean Gallier at Penn CS dept.
anyone care to post the bottom line, i.e. for someone building an SLI system, ATI or nVidia? Isn't that what it's all about in the end? Bottom line?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well
Well, they do make VIDEO cards, don't they?
Back in the day you could judge the quality of a video card by how fast it displayed the "stars" screensaver on windows 3.1 .. And the truly awesome rigs wouldn't skip every few seconds.
http://cubemonkey.net/quotes -- fortune-mod quote generator
What I want to know is if ATI still wins under Linux. It is really cool to say that ATI has the best video playback, but if you are building a MythTV box, a test under Windows does not really tell you much.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
At first I thought big deal but then it accured to me that of all the people I know ( your typical family pc) the most common use is to download and edit pictures, and video. I am amazed how quickly a pc newbie user can become a proficient video editor with just a few tools. I'm sure it wont be long before they double or tripple the pc gaming market share. will be nice one day to see the prices of DV cards come down with the main streaming of things like firewaire and digital video for the common home user.
Thanks for the link!
/.'ing are we?)
(Preventing a
Clearly, ATI offers better video support in their latest graphics cards than Nvidia does...In really tough video scenarios, like those with odd cadence patterns or noisy DVDs, ATI delivers better quality.
If you want your video to look its best and run as fast as it can, you have to enable all sorts of settings in the advanced properties of your player (or players, plural), and those settings can be different between ATI and Nvidia cards. In short, Microsoft needs to seriously clean up this mess. Video codecs need to hook into a common framework, one that the graphics cards manufacturers can target for acceleration without needing to work with every individual codec maker on the planet.
Codecs are getting out of control, just look at this codec list to see most of them. There has got to be a better way than this Codec conundrum.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...and the winner is...
Ninnle Linux!
Many PVRS support linux and the number increases every year. Since this article deals with DVD/DIVX movies and not gaming, I would like to see some reviews with Linux drivers. Anyone have any experience?
http://religiousfreaks.com/Will it be possible to afford DvD's after buying one of these cards?
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
In 6 months we will get an article virtually identical to this one. Wake me up when something special happens. The video card industry is a never-ending pissing match. While all these suckers spend $500+ on brand-new cards, I get a one-generation-old card for $150 that plays the latest games quite well. I got a GeForce 6600 a few months ago for right around $175 and haven't run into a game I couldn't play. Granted I can't run 4xAA at full resolution like the latest SLI setup can, but it is more than adequate.
Does either card dual boot XP and OSX?
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a =170327,00.asp
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
...brought to you by ATI
I thought driver support for linux from nvidia was far ahead of that coming from ATI?
Russian web-site www.ixbt.com has monthly 3d video report featuring the newest NVidia and ATI cards as well as the newest drivers. See here. Although the text is in Russian you can still read the diagrams (like this) which they provide. They compare quality in games (provide screenshots showing bugs), performance and price.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Nothing to see here. Move along. :D
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
In other news, Duracell is competing with Energizer for the battery market.
What is the state of video on Linux?
I would love to see a comparison of performance and video quality of these same cards on Linux. Do the drivers even support any of this functionality? Is CPU usage similar?
Sure they could solve the problem. They could mandidate you use only Microsoft codecs. Problem solved. However if you want things open, such that you can choose what you like to use, well that means that people are free to make as many codecs and variants as they like. It sucks, but what are you going to do?
My work here is dung.
ATI used to have the suckiest drivers (i.e. fragile, crashprone, hard to install) as well on Linux, at least it used to be so when I gave up two years ago. ATI used to be more open source friendly with regards to hardware spec for old hardware, but to use high-end you need an unfree driver anyway to take full advantage of the card.
My latest system is dualhead dual-dvi pci-express 7800GT system running on Ubuntu. I was expecting the video configuration to be a major pain the ass, but everything worked well.
Until ATI has the same level of Linux support, I will not take their products under consideration.
..but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well.
And both are going to fail prity miserably while they fail to provide serious technical information on their video capabilities. I've a need for H.264 *encoding* accelleration and video capture atm but trying to get information on the exact capabilities of cards (especially AVIVO) was a PITA. Sometimes the marketing droids would e far better beingg replaced by a technician.
Anyways, pity the article doesnt look at anyhing apart from DVD playback - to be honest, how high CPU utilisation is while playing back a DVD is a long way down my list of priorities when Im looking at buying upto 8 £400+ cards. How about capture quality, driver stability etc etc?
ATI having better quality video has been the case for the last 10 years. Even when they sucked at drivers when it came to games, their video was unmatched, both quality-wise and performance-wise (HW acceleration since 1997 with Rage Pro).
For non-gamer video enthousiasts there was never any doubt as to what card to get.
Now X.org might be able to benefit from improved 2D drivers, which would make drawing windows sooo much faster. It might go from 5uS down to 3uS. But these drivers would not likely result in improved 2D image quality.
Now, for improved drivers to do anything to video quality, you have to let the drivers do some of the video decoding. I am not entirely certain if there is a standard place where nVidia or ATI could even stick their drivers for this. I believe that XMMS, VLC, and the like all do things in their own sofware, and just just the display as a place to dump the final result. If this is the case, then there is really nothing that video card manufacturers could even do, short of integrating their code into the various player applications. But, like I said, I could be wrong here.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Read a DVD -> Reading a file -> Decrypting -> Decompressing -> Motion compensation -> YUV2RGB -> Deinterlacing -> Scaling -> Displaying on video device -> ATI X1800
There can be a separate component registered for each step. Or many. And DirectVideo can determine which one is the most appropriate for the given input, output, and hardware configuration. So if you video card supports hardware YUV2RGB scaling, then it will do it. If not, the software can.
The problem is partially that crappy companies get in the way. I downloaded a codec so I could view DV files, and it registered such that all video types were DV. This is a common scenario that requires a purely brain-dead programmer:
boolean IsThisTheProperCodecForThisVideoType?(string videoType)
// TODO: Look at type code and see if it is a DV file
{
return true;
}
ATi radeon 7000 through 9200 have excellent 2D and almost excellent 3D support from the open source DRI drivers. Any of the newer cards from ATi are lacking 3D accelleration under these drivers but have good 2D, although the driver that will enable 3D in these newer cards in under development and making rapid progress. nVidia cards have excellent 2D support from the opensource nv driver, but are completely lacking 3D support unless nVidia's ( not open source ) drivers are installed. When the nvidia drivers are installed, 3D accelleration will work perfectly. IMHO, ATi's drivers are not nearly as stable or powerful as nVidia's. nVidia has definitly got it won if you don't mind using non-free drivers, but if non-free drivers are a problem for you, you should probably go with an older ATi card.
I got tired of waiting for their stupid proprietary drivers to be released for FreeBSD/amd64. When I got their bullshit excuse for not being able to do so I offered to do it if they provided me with register specs. I'm not interested in their OpenGL driver (which isn't DRI compatible btw) implementation, just the damned specs. But no dice. Anyone who has spent a couple of hours reading the objdump output of their proprietary .o kernel part can tell there's nothing magic there. NVidia? Never again.
Does not matter. ATI Software suck's so NVidia wins!!
Buying a windows machine for video encoding and DVD authoring is like buying a Mac for games.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
For those of you wondering about linux drivers - ATI's fglrx linux driver works fairly well (I use it to play HD .ts files on a Radeon 9800 pro). The only problems are lack of support for xvmc, and some problems with dual head (confusing config, xinerama issues). I don't have any performance issues with full bandwidth 1080i content and 5.1 sound running on a 720p display (video de-interlaced with mplayer's halfpack filter).
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
I run Linux.
ATI has gotten better on Linux, but Nvidia vastly outperforms ATI on Linux.
I would not recommend anyone purchase an ATI card for Linux usage, and I wouldn't commit to maintaining anyone's system if they have an ATI card.
For 2D, or Video, they are okay, but they are severly lacking for OpenGL usage.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
When I last needed to buy a video card update, I basically got the card that had the highest performance/price ratio, which ended up being an ATI x700 card.
Next time, it could be nVidia, or ATI again.
Granted I am not as interested in the $800 video card solutions, but then, no game on earth actually leverages the performance of these cards. My x700 plays HL2 and Doom3 without a glitch, as well as actual graphics intensive games like Dungeon Seige 2 which actually grind my FPS to under 30fps. Since my monitor doesn't support more then 1280 x 1024 resolution, I don't care about video cards that can power 2 1900x1600 screens.
So basically ATI and nVidia are in a competition for bragging rights. But that has little impact in the real world. Except for those people that demand the latest and greatest and have disposible income (probably only 5% of the PC market), the rest of us only care about which cards perform well for the $200 or so we allow ourselves to spend on video cards. If it happens to be an ATI card, we buy ATI, vice versa with nVidia.
Maybe I am just getting mature in life, but I could care less about ATI vs Intel, ATI vs nVidia, or Apple vs Microsoft, etc, etc, etc. I want good value for my money and I think I am not alone in this market.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I downloaded VLC to play HDTV video clips that I downloaded from my cable box via firewire and I was not able to get it to play the clips without dropping a signficiant amount of frames; however, Elecard MPEG Player was able to play the clips without dropping frames. So it seems as though VLCs codecs are not as efficient as others. The details are 720P/60FPS video on a Athlon64 3200, 512 MB RAM (Single Channel), with an AGP-8x PNY GeForce6600 (256 MB). I may not have had something configured right on VLC, but I fumbled around for hours trying to get it working.
I don't get it... a DVD will play on my 2000 powerbook with an 8meg card. That's like comparing different manufacturers of floppy drives for read access.
I've found that I can get absolutely insane performance with MPlayer on Linux.
Athlon XP 2000+ 1.66GHz
NVidia GeForce4 440 MX
(NVidia driver, 2.4 kernel)
MPlayer CVS snapshot (post 1.0pre7)
With OpenGL direct rending, display of standard-def material averages less than 1% of the CPU time, and a very big speed-up on HDTV material as well. I could hardly believe it myself when I first noticed. Try it for yourself:
mplayer -nocache -dr -vf scale,format=bgr16 -vo gl -nortc -framedrop -lavdopts fast
It's quite funny that it's actually a lot faster than hardware acceleration (XVMC), as well as working with any codecs, and of course making it possible to use mplayer's interlacing and telecine filters (add filmdint before 'scale').
Kinda makes this benchmark seem pretty pointless, doesn't it? If they would work on reducing overhead (where much CPU time is wasted) hardware acceleration really wouldn't be important.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Has ATI released Crossfire yet? I haven't heard much about it if they have. That said, I have always been an nVidia person my self.
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
Who cares about DVD playback? I'm not going to buy a $400 video card to watch movies on my PC. ATI can't come close to Nvidia when it comes to games!!
For dual card systems ATI uses thier own crossfire Technology. http://www.ati.com/technology/crossfire/howitworks .html
IMO the open-source ATI drivers are excellent. As long as you don't need to play doom3 or UT2004 ATI is a fine choice.
If you do want to play such GL games, NVIDIA is the _only_ choice - the closed source Linux drivers are pretty much as good as the Windows drivers. The equivalent closed source ATI drivers are horrible - slow and buggy.
Windows does video encoding and DVD authoring better than a Mac, look into the benchmarks instead of listening to Mac fanboys repeating some stereotype from 10 years ago.
I'm looking at benchmarks for Final Cut Pro on Windows nad having trouble finding them...
The PC was better for a short time, but the pendulum has swung back again to Macs once more being the superiour video and DVD authoring solution. You didn't get the memo?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While Nvidia's closed-source drivers are clearly better than ATI's, the opposite is true of the open-source drivers. If you are looking to build a system without binary drivers, or are using non-x86 and so cannot use the provided drivers, then you're better off going with ATI.
I imagine this is no coincidence, how many people can be bothered working on the nv driver when the nvidia driver works so well... But it does worry me how easily we have come to accept binary drivers now that they work so reliably for 90% of the users.
The line between news and advertising is getting very thin.
1. DVD playback requiring hardware acceleration died with the PIII.
:)
2. Extreme Tech focuses on DVD performance under 3D section with constant and vague references to video performance. What's video? If the focus is solely DVD (and newer codecs), then say as such. *sniff* *sniff* Can you smell it? That site smells ripe with ATI fan boiz...
4. There is no 3, there is no codec a P4 can't handle, and there is no spoon.
5. [ This item thrown in for literary effect ]
6. [ GOTO line 1 ]
Have a nice day!
Its a shoot out. Picture the scene. It is has just turned noon in a dusty run down old town and ATI and standing at opposite ends of the main street. 3....2....1....DRAW!!!
I see
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
Currently I'm running a Leadtek 6800GT on two Dell 2001FP monitors. I noticed that one of the monitors ends up going black for a moment with some screens, and refreshing afterwards.
I did a little bit of looking into it, and believe that the problem is with DVI compliance on one of the video outputs. Tom's had a good article on it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/29/the_tft_con nection/
So my question ultimately becomes: are there any problems running any of these cards on two monitors, at 1600x1200? Are they fully DVI compliant without reduced blanking?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
As the owner of twin overclocked 7800GTX's I dont care if ATI ever has the better video card, because I enjoy not having the stress in the middle of a game as to when my cards are going to blue-screen my gaming rig. I owned ATI for years, then went to Matrox before finally investing in my NVidia boards. I will never go back. ATI has lost innumerable customers because they would not go out and hire kids who could write decent graphics drivers. They should have poached programmers from Matrox or something, but it is too late now. NVidia just works.
With nearly every video card integrating VIVO feature, I have yet to see any site do an review of just how well VIVO function works on modern video cards.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Ouch. That's why the Pentium is now inside a Mac. Did you get the memo?
:-)
That was on the memo - right after the part about how now you can use the best software with even faster processors. The Mac has always led in speed and now is no exception as they move the lower end computers to faster processors and await Intel chips that can finally match the more powerful G5 desktops.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No matter which card I buy, the better one will always be the OTHER one. :(
nVidia is short for the latin word invidia, which amounts to the act of jealousy.
Looks like they may have fallen back into their name after all?
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
I am amazed how quickly a pc newbie user can become a proficient video editor with just a few tools.
We're just a few years from the point that people can make distribution-quality movies [with distribution-quality soundtracks] from the comfort of their own garages.
Then we can forget once and for all about Hollyweird & the over-arching agenda they try to shove down our throats [Heath Fudger eating pudding, Filthy Seymour Hoffman eating Andy Warhol, etc etc etc].
A video card can easily help out by providing a few services that are usefull to most video codecs out there, most important are:
- hardware scaling
- colorspace translation
There is a standard for this on X, the xv extension.
The x.org drivers for ati and nvidia cards support it, and so do the proprietary drivers from ati and nvidia.
Most modern video players on Linux and other systems that use X support it as well.
In my experience the proprietary drivers do it a bit better and faster, but the x.org drivers are definitely usable for most situations.
The author of the article concludes with this ridiculous statement:
In short, Microsoft needs to seriously clean up this mess. Video codecs need to hook into a common framework, one that the graphics cards manufacturers can target for acceleration without needing to work with every individual codec maker on the planet.
A few observations, as someone who has done extensive programmatic work for digital video in windows:
By no means is Microsoft saintly or innocent (far from it), but it seems to me that they just can't win no matter how they play the game. The statement above is just looking for a quick target rather than addressing the real problem: people who are too dumb to make codecs that leverage a standards based playback architecture (it doesn't even have to be DirectShow--there are other architectures out there). DirectShow is a very developed, very extensive framework for processing audio and video, and it is solely the fault of people proliferating the market with excessive, buggy, redundant code that there are conflicting third-party applications.
Were MSFT to do anything to "fix" this problem, they'd have to further restrict restrict codecs in DirectShow, in which case the above author would proceed to whine about how MSFT doesn't allow third parties enough integration. Having your cake and eating it too? I think so.
How is the parent off-topic?
Looks like he pretty much nailed the ATI / nVidia driver status under Linux, which incidentally mirrors fairly well the situation under Windows.
Which part is off-topic? Mentioning drivers, which are vital to the performance of video on any card, or the fact that the parent runs Linux?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
>> In short, Microsoft needs to seriously clean up this mess.
Oh god please no. This needs a to be a well-designed OS-independent standard. Unfortunately Microsoft aren't capable of either concept.
I always WANT to like ATI because they provide much needed competition for Nvidia. However, I had a 9600XT when HL2 came out and had nothing but trouble with the drivers. I know that some people don't, but for me, I'm sticking with Nvidia because I've had such a bad drivers experience.
(Crashing, kludgy drivers, settings not staying during games, etc.)
"We're just a few years from the point that people can make distribution-quality movies [with distribution-quality soundtracks] from the comfort of their own garages."
This is the mistake geeks make on a regular basis. Uber technology does not an artist make.
"Then we can forget once and for all about Hollyweird & the over-arching agenda they try to shove down our throats [Heath Fudger eating pudding, Filthy Seymour Hoffman eating Andy Warhol, etc etc etc]. "
People have ALWAYS had the opportunity to "just say no" to whatever Hollywood produces. You can't blame them if people decide to say "yes".
I just upgraded my living room PC from ATI to NVidia, knowing that I was probably trading some video quality (TV, DVD) for better NVidia software and better overall performance. But I didn't realize just how bad it was with current NVidia video (7800GT) -- it's like going back from 32 bit color to 16. My HTDV Wonder practically crumbled to dust (probably ATI's fault for incompatibility) and my brand new video hardware decoder almost approaches my original quality, though the filtering still sucks.
Now it seems that I might get closer to my original ATI video quality with NVidia's PureVideo -- but they charge $20 to $50 bucks depending on what audio I want? That's outrageous. ATI's quality video is included in the base price, but NVidia wants to charge extra for not even the same level of performance? What are they becoming, a car dealership? Oh, the windshield wipers are extra?
NVidia needs to bundle PureVideo pure and simple. If it was a "nice to have" feature or they were ahead of ATI on video quality, I might not mind. But they've burned any loyalty I had.
2D quality on Matrox cards is outstanding. How come we couldn't get a comparison with on of their cards. I have a Parhelia laying around here somewhere but unfortunately it's not quite working anymore (the screen is a nice shade of pink).
Time makes more converts than reason
Ne-ver buy A-T-I.
Sorry guys, your pathetic excuse for a driver has bitten me too often. When I had an old Geforce 3, I had zero problems getting good quality video in anything I tried to run. Getting a Radeon 9800... well... it does have nicer colour, when it works. But between texture flickering in one game, crashes to desktop in others, and driver versions that aren't backwards compatible with their own older drivers (by that, I mean if I upgrade to a new driver to support a new game, suddenly my older games get artifacts and texture problems that they didn't have with the older drivers)... no thanks.
Ne-ver buy A-T-I.
There's a word for that: Propaganda. It seems you believe those bullshit TV commericals that Apple is running.
So you don't think the new Intel chips are fairly fast? Make up your mind man!
You have of course used one in person to see that they are slow. Right? Right? Or are you just commenting based on, dare I say it, propaganda? How ironic!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, the new chips give a great speed boost in laptops where Apple could not get multiple (or any) G5's. There is a good reason to switch - performance moving forward.
Apple has always had (and still has) quite powerful desktops, but the laptops have absolutely been suffering over the last few years, which Apple has thankfully corrected.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I had a 9600XT when HL2 came out and had nothing but trouble with the drivers [...] (Crashing, kludgy drivers, settings not staying during games, etc.)
ATi has always had less polish on their drivers than nVidia, but after the release of their first Radeon cards, the rewritten drivers were fine. I've owned an 9800 Pro since they were released, installing newer drivers almost as often as they were released, all with zero driver issues. The key is to FOLLOW DIRECTIONS, i.e. uninstall the old drivers, reboot if prompted, install new drivers. Anything else is likely due to 1. not following directions and 2. messing with things you don't understand. Could also be a craptastic PC, too. =)
Just can't stand to let folks keep trashing ATi for FUDdish reasons. Bash them for their crappy Linux drivers or something, as long as it truly is their fault.
I had a lot of conversation and disputs with iXBT video-guru Mr. Andrey Vorobieff about testing methods on 2D quality.
e id=401558
Since then they have a little caption: "On our equipment (noone seen yet) everything looks fine!"
Compare to German review dated 2003: http://www.tecchannel.de/tecdaten/show.php?articl
All the test methods are logged and described. Every topic is pedanticly researched and verified.
I'm still interested in good reports about 2D signal quality (from the videocard to the monitor), then about video quality playback, and THEN 3d quality and performance.
So I still rely on my own eyes: Matrox still in the game. ATI is next. Nvidia out of my yard.
Don't you saw an artifacts on LCD monitor (analog way, don't speak BNC-style on CRT, pleeease) after changes in refresh rate? 60 hz is "native" to LCD, and changes to 75Hz may result terrible effects like text jagginess and contrast corruption like in worst times.
Long vive CRT!
Lost about 3 hours yesterday trying to make my TV card work with ATI Radeon X700. The ATI's lame Win XP drivers simply disable overlay surfaces when you rotate display... so if you want to watch TV on an LCD in portrait mode, buy nVidia.
This finally proves conclusively my theory, to wit:
If you're looking for the best video card to buy at any given moment, all you have to do is ask me whether I have ATI or Nvidia, and then buy the highest-end model from the other manufacturer.
well after a certain point everything reaches a base low level that companies just don't supply beyond. The video cards I buy today cost the same as the video cards I bought 7 years ago. I spend the same dolalr amount on a harddrive today as I did 7 years ago. You do get more for the money but the price doesn't seem to fall in the eyes of the enduser.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
I've definitely seen artifacts in ATI's OpenGL implementation, though I can't guarantee that the problem isn't code related since I didn't write the code. It's worse with the ATI mac driver (ATI's driver, since I have a 9200 mac edition card) like from this projected texture http://www.lostgumball.com/lightfeather/strange2.p ng (note the pic is rather large - also ignore the font problem - freetype handles the font being used poorly on mac and Linux -others work fine). The lightfeather team (http://lf.mmdevel.de/ has also seen artifacts on Windows and Linux running with ATI cards, so it appears to be an ATI driver or card problem. nVidia drivers/cards projected correctly, so the feature developer thought it was working.
Note that the projected texture shouldn't even be visible on this side of the wall (pictures noise.png - noise4.png should show it from the inside, but I see these as black on my PC monitor - grr... gamma).
nVidia seems a lot more cross-platform friendly in general, at least for OpenGL support in Linux and Windows. I don't have an nVidia card for mac, so I can't attest for that platform, but installing the ATI driver on linux for a 9600SE card was certainly non-trivial (separate download and a bit of a pain to install and configure) compared to my old GeForce4 card (which was new when I installed linux on that box).
People have ALWAYS had the opportunity to "just say no" to whatever Hollywood produces. You can't blame them if people decide to say "yes".
But that's what's so bizarre about it; people most emphatically say "no," and yet Hollyweird keeps pursuing the same damned agenda with a dogged determination that can only be described as religious [or, more accurately, as pagan]:
Why is it that every graphics card posts has to have at least ten of these posts? Not everyone is like you.
Your 6600 performs massively slower then a 7800gtx or even a 6800gtx(or ultra or whatever the high end of that generation was called). You might be fine with it but there are those with more money that care a bit more about graphics quality.
Then there are those like me who don't need even a 6600, i run my games fine with an old radeon 9500. That doesn't mean i can't imagine those that may want to run higher res with 8xaf 4xaa or whatever the hell else they like to run.
It's their money...
Hmmm... Pie...
My HTPC (Shuttle SK41G) had an ATI 9000 Pro, which ATI played as a DirectX9 card with the model number, but was actually DirectX 8. The PC would periodically crash. I replaced with an old MX440, and everything worked fine, but it wasn't DirectX 9, which I needed for HDTV. So, I came across an ATI 9600SE for a dirt cheap price. Certainly a newer card would be more solid than my old 9000. Nope. The PC periodically crashes, usually around 1.5 hours of TV watching mark. Not just my TV viewing software, but watching with PowerDVD causes a BSOD. ATI, no way! Fix your crappy drivers!