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GeForce 7900 Vs. Radeon X1900
Gamespot has an article comparing the shiny you get when using a Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX SLI and an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX Crossfire. From the article: "All told, the barrier to entry is enormous; but once you're there and running your games at 1920x1080 with 4x antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering, any regrets you might have had about spending a small fortune will be thrown out the window. We're sure that one of these setups offers a better experience, however. The two could differ in terms of raw performance or the subtleties of image quality depending on the game. Either way, if you're going to lay down the smack for the best performance, we're going to make sure you get it."
Well keep in mind you need two of those for the suggested setup, and they're like 500 bucks each, plus the SLI compatible motherboard, power supply needed to power those two beasts, etc, and you've got yourself around 1,500 just to get the gaming parts for this monster PC. That is a lot of money for gaming equipment. I honestly don't know what could possibly drive a person to buy these cards, except wasting money, when you can just step back a generation and pick one up for 200 bucks which will do just as fine with the games out right now. Give them a couple of months and your monster $500 card will be down to the ~$200 range. What will your extra 300 give you? an extra 20 fps with FSAA on (which at high enough resolutions I can barely tell the difference anyway) for a couple of months longer than everyone else?
Oh yeah, and the "Oh but I've got to get ready for the new awesome wave of games coming out!" excuse doesn't cut it. By the time those new and awesome games come out a new card will be out and your money splurging inner self will go out and buy another card, and that'll be a couple hundred dollars down the toilet.
BTW, I'm still on my Radeon 9700, which I picked up when they dropped below 200, and it still does fine on everything I want to play. Granted I have 2GB of RAM, and a 3500+ Athlon 64, but then again those also have alternate uses, and aren't limited to a "gaming" investment.
Personally, I agree, however people value things differently. To some people, having the latest, greatest gaming box at the LAN party means a lot to them, and they'd get much more enjoyment the new top of the line video card than from say new rims on their car. I'm glad there's gamers out there that are willing to pay top dollar for the latest & greatest, because it motivates nVidia and ATI to be competitive and in the long run drives the prices down for consumers like you and me.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Articles like this are not for you. Your stuff plays fine for you. It does not play fine for the target audience of setups like are discussed above. A Ford gets you down the road well enough for most people, but not for a car enthusiast. This is no different.
We're all proud of your frugalness, and are glad you're having a good experience with the games you play. But others like to compare and discuss the bleeding edge of graphics technology, and comments of the formula above don't really add to that.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
I'd recommend nVidia over ATi to peopel, even for Windows. For Linux, no contest. I'm not Linux savvy, but I've actually gotten nVidia cards to work accelerated in Linux all the times I've tried. I still have yet to successfully make an ATi card work completely. However even in Windows the nVidia drivers seem a little more polished. For example in World of Warcraft there are certian areas that will cause an ATi 9600 and 9800 (and probably more) to have a GPU reset, meaning in essence that the graphics card crashed and the driver had to reset it. ATi allegedly fixed it a few driver releases ago, but it persists. nVidia card have had no such problems.
I generally believe these are the more important factors to look at. The good news is that new cards are fast to the point that no matter what you get, you'll be happy. Any 7800 or 7900 card is enough to rip apart any game out there. You won't find yourself saying "damn, if only I'd bought an ATi this would run better" or vice versa. Because of that I really think the thing to look at is overall system and app stability.
Also, though it might be fun to have a mitching high end setup, I recommend against it unless you've simply tons of money to spend often, and nothing to spend it on. Some people might be tempted to get something like that with the idea that you don't need to upgrade for quite some time. Fair enough, after all that performance is such that it's way ahead of current titles' requirements. The problem is that video cards come out with new features at an amazing pace. The upgrade the abilities of their shaders and rendering engines to do new, more realistic graphics. So it becomes not a question of raw pixel pushing power, but what they can do with it.
Once could get a professional visualization system built in 1999 that far exceeds the raw pixel stats of new boards, using a large array of Voodoo chips (Quantum3D makes such products), driving amazingly large displays with super high fidelity anti-aliasing. Yet, you'd find they were incapable of running a game like Quake 4. Why? Well for all their power, they lack the new features that are used now to create visual effects like visual distortions due to flame. Those capabilities weren't introduced to cards until receantly.
Thus your best bet is to find a price point that you think you can afford around once a year and look at buying there. Rather than trying to spend $600 once every three years, look at spending $200 every year, and so on. In general, you get a better experience for it. This holds true at basically any price point I've ever looked at.
If you can afford to buy around the upper end of the mid range cards, which is generally $150-200, you tend to find that nearly all games out there will run well, which a reasonable amount of eye candy. Developers aren't stupid, they know that most people don't have the latest $600+ card, and they need to sell to everyone they can. However even if you get a more low range $100 card, you still should find game run fine, just with details turned down.
What if you don't need another car, and like to play games?
c e+6800&pid=2223881873561302977&oid=299528262137621 7068&btnG=Search+Froogle&scoring=mrd
... the performance you get compared to the 6800 is nearly linear with the price increase.
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And that would be more like 1/10th (or less) the price for a previous generation card (here's a froogle for a 6800 at $170, compared to roughly $1000 for a 7900 SLI).
http://froogle.google.com/froogle_cluster?q=gefor
But it wouldn't be nearly as good, unless you consider 8x slower nearly as good. In fact, given the prices
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=271
(note that the 7900 sli is consistently more than 4x as fast as the 6800 sli, and that we're considering how it would compare to just one 6800 in the pricing above).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
On the flip side nVidia still blows ATI away in terms of Linux support. Although neither companies are near perfect, nVidia has been way ahead of ATI in Linux for years. For example, the recent Xgl live CD, Kororaa, locks hard after short usage on the two ATI cards I've tried it with (9600XT, X300 Mobile) but runs perfectly on the nVidia cards I've used (5200, 5700). ATI has certainly gotten better over the last two years, but I constantly have issues with their fglrx drivers (eg. my X300 locked X unless I limited the kernel to 732MB of RAM, this wasn't fixed until 8.16). Personally, if anyone asked who to go with when building a system that will run Linux, I'd suggest nVidia every time.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.