Quote Originally Posted by 3Z3VH View Post
I guess it all comes down to what you want in a card... good benchmarks, or good gameplay

Personally, of the five ATI cards I have owned, all five had texture clipping issues, and improperly drawn shadows. Of the seven GeForce cards I have had, only one had issues and it was due to faulty memory on the card. You are correct, the ATI cards all outperformed their Nvidia counterpart at the time in synthetic benchmarks (which is why I bought them instead of the Nvidia at the time) but when it comes to gameplay, ATI still needs driver work. I have simply been burned with less than stellar video anomalies by too many ATI cards to trust them anymore.
Personally, of the five nVidia cards I've owned, three have died on me, with accompanying image quality issues and glitches, the other had a cooler that was louder than my desktop fan (no prizes for guessing the series), and the last is still going strong. Of the three ATi cards I've owned, all have OC'd extremely well and none have shown any problems, except for a few isolated specific driver package issues which were fixed in the next release.

Be that as it may, I was recommending nVidia cards when the 4-series, 6-series and 8-series were king, briefly the 260 216 when the price/performance was excellent, but now wouldn't dream of recommending nVidia cards, and the Rage, 6-series, 9-series, 1900-series, and now the 4-series. All anecdotes like yours and mine are going to do is confuse an issue with arbitrary units of data.