ATI X16000 or NVIDEA?

Does anyone know details on the strengths & weaknesses of these cards? It seems the NVIDEA cards are stronger, but I'd like to know if the Radeon has any advantages for certain types of processes.

Thanks,

Jeff

Both are excellent. Nvidia is reputed to make the better card, and Nvidia cards are definitely more broadly supported across various OS' (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.) than ATI's. However, I think either one would make a good choice. It seems clear to me that Apple must feel the Nvidia is the better card, since that is what shows up in its Mac Pro, vs. the ATI in the iMac series.

In the good old days, ATI were better at rendering. But things change

I have never owned an Nvidia card, but they always seemed to come out with the better cards first. I actually had to check and see what was in my MAC, its another ATI card.

This might be the end of ATI in Macs as the company was bought by AMD a few months ago.

When I go into "about this mac" it just says ATI, wonder which model...is there a way to tell without opening the computer and looking at the card?

In the System Profiler, under Graphics/Displays it says at the top. Mine says ATI x600 XT

Thanks, mine says ATI Radeon 9600

jeffk27 said:

Does anyone know details on the strengths & weaknesses of these cards? It seems the NVIDEA cards are stronger, but I'd like to know if the Radeon has any advantages for certain types of processes.

Thanks,

Jeff

Click to expand...

Too generic a question to really give a good answer. There are many models of Nvidea and Radeon cards, representing different generations of cards and various models within each major generation.

A good resource to compare the different cards is linked below. These are benchmarks on windows, but the overall capabilities of each card should be comparable on Mac :

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html


A good example here is probably the 20" and 24" iMac models. You can get a base X1600 in the 20", or in the 24" model a 7300GT or a 7600GT.

Many would assume the 7300GT is faster than the x1600, yet the charts say it isn't so. One example, the new game Prey, has nearly double the FPS on an Radeon x1600 than on an Nvidia 7300GT. Ditto for Oblivion.

Switch over to the Nvidia 7600 GT on the 24" iMac and the tables are turned. The 7600GT has roughly double the FPS as the x1600.

Within the various Mac linups, my impression is that the following would generally be true :

X1950XT > 7600GT > X1600 > 7300GT > integrated 950GMA

This is not considering SLI in the Mac Pro line.