What do you folks think of this?

[Lores]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8800gt.html

[Anach]

Well for stability, quality and driver support, I'm much happier with my ATI card than I have been with all the Nvidia cards I've owned.

Though still a good card if you've currently got a lesser one

[gelfling]

Well for stability, quality and driver support, I'm much happier with my ATI card than I have been with all the Nvidia cards I've owned.

Though still a good card if you've currently got a lesser one

Exactly.

My last Nvidia could almost have competed with Concorde's sonic boom it was so loud. It also expired in a melodramatic style and thus I feel disinclined to try them again. ATI are better for colour quality and are significantly quieter.

[Lores]

http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce_600i.html

My motherboard. Im currently runnign2 7600 gt's

[Anach]

I originally went with an SLI board (using it now), as I was going to go with two Nvidia cards, but afte running that for 12 months, I had had it up to here with nvidia and when I got my current ATI, it was a sigh of relief.

Even SWG looks better on ATI. Nvidia causes mustafar lava to look like patchwork. ATI has been known for a higher image quality than Nvidia for years. They are quieter. I couldnt live without ATI tray tools (System tray icon to manage everything graphic related), and best of all. Where my Nvidia would BSOD or crash the PC, my ATI card has a driver recovery feature which resets the display driver, allowing you to restart the game or reboot the PC manually if something goes wrong.

Still im not trying to convince you to go ATI, just describing my experiences. Ive got a stack of 8 or so Nvidia cards here, in comparison to the 3 ATI cards I've owned. So I've had plenty nvidia experience. Still the 8800 is a good card, and going to be a whole lot better than a 7600.

[Lores]

I cant crossfire on that board can I?

[Anach]

No you cant, but i'm not sure you'd want/need to. Like this time around, my next upgrade will be a dx10 card, not adding a card to this one, which most games dont support anyway.

[Lores]

Thanks for you input. Mayve I'll just buy my second raptor drive for now and delay gpu until next summer.

[A'Ton Sands]

Well for stability, quality and driver support, I'm much happier with my ATI card than I have been with all the Nvidia cards I've owned.

Though still a good card if you've currently got a lesser one

Agreed, I have never really got on with NVidia cards.

If you are looking for DX10 cards I'd wait till ATI bring out their next range, it should be soon.

[Parrot]

Overview GPU Specifications System Requirements

ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 2900 Series - GPU Specifications
ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Technology – GPU Specifications
700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process
512-bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
Fully distributed design with 1024-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Optimized for high performance HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering at high display resolutions
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
320 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0
Shader Model 4.0
Geometry Shaders
Stream Output
Integer and Bitwise Operations
Alpha to Coverage
Constant Buffers
State Objects
Texture Arrays
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Temporal anti-aliasing
Gamma correct
Super AA (CrossFireâ„¢ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
Bicubic filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
CrossFireâ„¢ Multi-GPU Technology
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel interconnect
ATI Avivoâ„¢ HD Video and Display Platform
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10801
Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
Integrated AMD Xilleonâ„¢ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
HD decode acceleration for H.264/AVC, VC-1, DivX and MPEG-2 video formats
Flawless DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-rayâ„¢ playback
Motion compensation and IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation)
HD video processing
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Edge enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
High fidelity gamma correction, color correction, color space conversion, and scaling
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
PCI Express x16 bus interface
OpenGL 2.0 support

[Lores]

I thought this was interesting:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13479

[asharin]

Not only that, ATI cards provide a much cleaner 3d image.
If you have both types of card you can see the difference.