nvidia or ati ?

[John Bray]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 12:47 +0800, Claus Reheis wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 11:09 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 16:29:39 +0200,
> >   Rakotomandimby Mihamina <mihamina.rakotomandimby at etu.univ-orleans.fr> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > I am going ti buy a brand new computer, and would like to know if it is
> > > better either to have a nVidia or an ATI graphic card.
> > 
> > If you were think of getting a less expensive card, the ATI 9200 will work
> > with free drivers. There is a project to have free drivers for later ATI
> > cards, but you should go looking for the current status of that project
> > to make sure it is far enough along for you before committing to using a
> > ATI model.
> 
> If you want it easy going and you want 3D Support I would suggest you a
> NVIDIA model!
> I also had a good experience with cads from Intel...

one of the considerations that i hadn't thought about until recently is
that all the recent nvidia cards have mpeg2 decoders built into them.  i
believe -- dont' know for sure -- ati cards don't have them.  this means
that if you get into atsc hdtv or movies, it can reduce the load on your
system.

john