Geforce 6800 vs. Radeon 9800 Pro

[beach2nd]

Wow! I certainly didn't expect to come home from work and find this many replies! A lot of good discussion, but I think I am going to go with a 6800 over the 9800 Pro. The main reason is that I only upgrade every few years and it seems like it will last me longer (plus the fact that the 6800 GT is too rich for my blood). I also plan on playing Doom 3 a lot and the nvidia cards seem to be where its at for that title. It also doesn't hurt that the 6800 comes with Far Cry, so that is $40-$50 I would have ended up spending anyway. Thanks everyone for all the help!

P.S. Please keep arguing, its very good reading.

 

[Oreo]

Matthias99, I might reply tomorrow, I'm too tired now. But it is a valid statement to say for example that PC2100 DDR memory is twice as fast as regular PC133 memory, cause it is, just that you won't see double the performance in any (real life) situation. You can see it in for example Sisoft Sandra benchmark but in a game for example it might give a 15% boost.

In a hypothetical situation a card that is twice as fast as another card is potentially always twice as fast but it won't often give twice the performance since there are other bottlenecks in the system. But if you had 10 benchmarks where at high resolution you always saw that the faster card was around twice as fast then it would be a true statement to say that the card is twice as fast. That does not mean however that you will always get twice the performance in all situations. I'm too tired for this, hope you understand what I'm saying.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: beach2nd1
Wow! I certainly didn't expect to come home from work and find this many replies! A lot of good discussion, but I think I am going to go with a 6800 over the 9800 Pro.

Good decision. Wait if you can to see if prices fall in the first week of August.

P.S. Please keep arguing, its very good reading.

We've been over this discussion many times before.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: beach2nd1
Wow! I certainly didn't expect to come home from work and find this many replies! A lot of good discussion, but I think I am going to go with a 6800 over the 9800 Pro. The main reason is that I only upgrade every few years and it seems like it will last me longer (plus the fact that the 6800 GT is too rich for my blood). I also plan on playing Doom 3 a lot and the nvidia cards seem to be where its at for that title. It also doesn't hurt that the 6800 comes with Far Cry, so that is $40-$50 I would have ended up spending anyway. Thanks everyone for all the help!

P.S. Please keep arguing, its very good reading.

The 6800 is not a bad choice. For a few bucks more you DO get a definite performance advantage over the 9800p (and XT).

You might consider eVGA's UPgrade program . . . i know it works with the GT to Ultra . .. basically you buy the GT and in a few months - when the Ultra is available, you mail in the "old" card, pay the difference and get the Upgrade.

Anyway, check Hot Deals - often . . . might find "something"

 

[chuwawa]

I'm in a similar situation as you and I've decided to go with the 9800pro. The reason is that 9800pro will play doom3 at an adequate level. Sure the 6800 will most likely play it better but in about a year both of these cards will struggle with the new games that are based of the new Doom3/HL2 engine.

So, you can keep the 9800pro now and play the current games quite well and then upgrade in a year's time to be able to play the next generation games.

That's my thinking anyway. If you're looking for your card to last you, neither of those choices will so just get the cheaper of the two.

 

[RaiderJ]

I just read this entire thread :Q

I personally think it's great that there is FINALLY some great competition among video cards at EVERY price point. I personally think the 9x00 cards provide a bit better price/performance margin over the regular 6800, and the 6800GT provides a better price/performance margin over the x800 and 6800U cards.

Would it just be great for arguments sake if Half-Life 2 came out and all of a sudden the Radeon cards were recommended?

 

[apoppin]

IF THIS IS TRUE- if you play Diii - do NOT get a 6800

Doom 3 "High" quality only available on 256mb cards?

Image fidelity is dependent on what quality level we load the textures at.

In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically.

High quality uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss. This is the quality that for instance the PC Gamer review was played in.

Medium quality uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This level gets us comfortably onto 128MB video cards.

Low quality does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well. This fits us onto a 64MB video card.

if you wanna play Doom iii on HiQ - IF this is TRUE - FORGET the 6800.

:roll:

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: RaiderJ
I just read this entire thread :Q

I personally think it's great that there is FINALLY some great competition among video cards at EVERY price point. I personally think the 9x00 cards provide a bit better price/performance margin over the regular 6800, and the 6800GT provides a better price/performance margin over the x800 and 6800U cards.

Would it just be great for arguments sake if Half-Life 2 came out and all of a sudden the Radeon cards were recommended?

Well actually now the Geforce 6 series leads the ATI card in HL2 as well.

Also 128mb is reaching the end of its days. 256 meg is becoming the standard and 512 the entusiast. I think things should run fine on a 128mb card and a 256meg card. AGP Aperture picks up more slack than you think. Yes its definately slow than going straight to GDDR 3 memory but still its there to help with the textrue memory overflow. The 6800 is a better choice if you have the money or the time or both.

-Kevin

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

Originally posted by: RaiderJ
I just read this entire thread :Q

I personally think it's great that there is FINALLY some great competition among video cards at EVERY price point. I personally think the 9x00 cards provide a bit better price/performance margin over the regular 6800, and the 6800GT provides a better price/performance margin over the x800 and 6800U cards.

Would it just be great for arguments sake if Half-Life 2 came out and all of a sudden the Radeon cards were recommended?

Well actually now the Geforce 6 series leads the ATI card in HL2 as well.

Also 128mb is reaching the end of its days. 256 meg is becoming the standard and 512 the entusiast. I think things should run fine on a 128mb card and a 256meg card. AGP Aperture picks up more slack than you think. Yes its definately slow than going straight to GDDR 3 memory but still its there to help with the textrue memory overflow. The 6800 is a better choice if you have the money or the time or both.

-Kevin

You missed the post above - the 6800 will SUCK at Doom iii Unless you think Medium Quality is "fine" for a 300 dollar card. What a waste (for Doom iii)

:roll:

AGP Aperture isn't gonna make up for 128MB of "missing" ram.

 

[Gamingphreek]

The 6800 will not suck at Doom It will probably perform better than previous gen card, rmember yeah only 128mb of RAm but still it has 12 pipes and a lot of architectural advantages.

AGP Aperturn wil pick up a lot of slack it just wont be as fast as "real" 256meg of RAM.

-Kevin

 

[JBT]

Yes I know appopin that there are deals for GT's everyonce in awhile I got my GT for 301 from COMPUSA... But MANY and MOST people are getting them for 399 from eVGA and other places. these few spuradic deals are not reliable and many of them end up not working anyways. There are VERY few people who actually get on them so its not a realistic comparrison if you are going to use some freak hot deals as your price reference.

I would agree if you are willing to spend the extra couple of bucks it is worth it I LOVE my GT is performs AMAZINGLY at every game I play. But most people don't have time to spend on forums and hot deals sites to sniff out these deals. So in other words if you can spare the money go GT if you can't go vanilla and if you don't mind playing at a touch lower settings and want a great deal that you can get on a 9800 pro now then get that.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: apoppin
IF THIS IS TRUE- if you play Diii - do NOT get a 6800

Doom 3 "High" quality only available on 256mb cards?

Image fidelity is dependent on what quality level we load the textures at.

In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically.

High quality uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss. This is the quality that for instance the PC Gamer review was played in.

Medium quality uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This level gets us comfortably onto 128MB video cards.

Low quality does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well. This fits us onto a 64MB video card.

if you wanna play Doom iii on HiQ - IF this is TRUE - FORGET the 6800.

:roll:

Then forget the 9800 Pro too, which, let me remind you once again, is the topic of this thread. D3 will run better on the 6800 than the 9800 Pro...disagree?

Dude, you seem to think any thread discussing video cards is a direct attack on your 9800XT.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Oreo
Matthias99, I might reply tomorrow, I'm too tired now. But it is a valid statement to say for example that PC2100 DDR memory is twice as fast as regular PC133 memory, cause it is, just that you won't see double the performance in any (real life) situation. You can see it in for example Sisoft Sandra benchmark but in a game for example it might give a 15% boost.

In a hypothetical situation a card that is twice as fast as another card is potentially always twice as fast but it won't often give twice the performance since there are other bottlenecks in the system. But if you had 10 benchmarks where at high resolution you always saw that the faster card was around twice as fast then it would be a true statement to say that the card is twice as fast. That does not mean however that you will always get twice the performance in all situations. I'm too tired for this, hope you understand what I'm saying.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't think you can draw this conclusion from the benchmarks.

As for RAM, the reason that doubling your RAM speed doesn't double game performance is not that your new RAM isn't twice as fast -- it's that the RAM is not the bottleneck. If the 6800 is "really" 50% faster than the 9800Pro (or, say, 40% faster than the 9800XT), you would think that at the most arduous video settings (1600x1200 w/ AA and AF, where you are almost always going to be video-card limited), it would be 50% faster than it all the time. But it's not.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

Originally posted by: apoppin
IF THIS IS TRUE- if you play Diii - do NOT get a 6800

Doom 3 "High" quality only available on 256mb cards?

Image fidelity is dependent on what quality level we load the textures at.

In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically.

High quality uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss. This is the quality that for instance the PC Gamer review was played in.

Medium quality uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This level gets us comfortably onto 128MB video cards.

Low quality does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well. This fits us onto a 64MB video card.

if you wanna play Doom iii on HiQ - IF this is TRUE - FORGET the 6800.

:roll:

Then forget the 9800 Pro too, which, let me remind you once again, is the topic of this thread. D3 will run better on the 6800 than the 9800 Pro...disagree?

Dude, you seem to think any thread discussing video cards is a direct attack on your 9800XT.

Dude, you forget that the original poster asked about the value of the 6800.

Should we not mention it does NOT run Doom III at HQ settings.
If he wants to play Doom III, the GT would be "logical" or if he can't afford it, to wait and/or use the eVGA "upgrade" program.

You seem to post just for the fun of attacking . . . other than a bump, your post is totally worthless.

:roll:

 

[jacktesterson]

Originally posted by: AMDHardcoreFan
well just to pee off all you folks Im an ATI Fanatic (for Video Cards) and will stick to my 9800 Pro

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: apoppin
Dude, you forget that the original poster asked about the value of the 6800.

What's the subject line of this topic?

"Geforce 6800 vs. Radeon 9800 Pro"

"I'm trying to decide between these two cards."

Where do you read, value of 6800? :roll:

As I said, you're commenting on questions nobody's asked. Just be happy with your card. The guy's made a good decision. He's paying 40% more for a card that will generate an average of 30% better performance--which will almost certainly increase over time--and can take advantage of new game programming technologies and is getting a free game.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

Originally posted by: apoppin
Dude, you forget that the original poster asked about the value of the 6800.

What's the subject line of this topic?

"Geforce 6800 vs. Radeon 9800 Pro"

"I'm trying to decide between these two cards."

Where do you read, value of 6800? :roll:

As I said, you're commenting on questions nobody's asked. Just be happy with your card. The guy's made a good decision. He's paying 40% more for a card that will generate an average of 30% better performance--which will almost certainly increase over time--and can take advantage of new game programming technologies and is getting a free game.

letsee you're telling me to 'keep my opinions to myself'.

i'm telling you yours are worthless.

:roll:

You are riught about 1 thing - this DOES deserve its own topic in GH

thanks

:roll:

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

Originally posted by: apoppin
Dude, you forget that the original poster asked about the value of the 6800.

What's the subject line of this topic?

"Geforce 6800 vs. Radeon 9800 Pro"

"I'm trying to decide between these two cards."

Where do you read, value of 6800? :roll:

As I said, you're commenting on questions nobody's asked. Just be happy with your card. The guy's made a good decision. He's paying 40% more for a card that will generate an average of 30% better performance--which will almost certainly increase over time--and can take advantage of new game programming technologies and is getting a free game.

letsee you're telling me to 'keep my opinions to myself'.

No, I'm telling you to stay on topic.

i'm telling you yours are worthless.

Baseless flame appreciated.

 

[Oreo]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Oreo
Matthias99, I might reply tomorrow, I'm too tired now. But it is a valid statement to say for example that PC2100 DDR memory is twice as fast as regular PC133 memory, cause it is, just that you won't see double the performance in any (real life) situation. You can see it in for example Sisoft Sandra benchmark but in a game for example it might give a 15% boost.

In a hypothetical situation a card that is twice as fast as another card is potentially always twice as fast but it won't often give twice the performance since there are other bottlenecks in the system. But if you had 10 benchmarks where at high resolution you always saw that the faster card was around twice as fast then it would be a true statement to say that the card is twice as fast. That does not mean however that you will always get twice the performance in all situations. I'm too tired for this, hope you understand what I'm saying.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't think you can draw this conclusion from the benchmarks.

As for RAM, the reason that doubling your RAM speed doesn't double game performance is not that your new RAM isn't twice as fast -- it's that the RAM is not the bottleneck. If the 6800 is "really" 50% faster than the 9800Pro (or, say, 40% faster than the 9800XT), you would think that at the most arduous video settings (1600x1200 w/ AA and AF, where you are almost always going to be video-card limited), it would be 50% faster than it all the time. But it's not.

Ok, good I think we are speaking the same language now atleast. You seem to understand the way bottlenecks work which has been one of my main points in this entire thread. But I also think that the 6800 actually almost always does get a score that is 50% higher than the 9800 Pro where the bottleneck is the graphicscard. In settings like 1600*1200 it shows a 50% advantage alot of the times BUT the thing that messes that trend up is when you enable AA at resolutions 1280< (not in ALL games though, some play fine with 4x AA all the way to 1600*1200 without the massive drop in performance). Then you hit a wall with 128MB cards, all of them, and the results drop down alot and it seems that the 50% delta grows smaller. This is of course because the memory on the card isn't big enough so you have to use ram from the system (AGP-aparture). What do you think about this theory?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Oreo

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Oreo
Matthias99, I might reply tomorrow, I'm too tired now. But it is a valid statement to say for example that PC2100 DDR memory is twice as fast as regular PC133 memory, cause it is, just that you won't see double the performance in any (real life) situation. You can see it in for example Sisoft Sandra benchmark but in a game for example it might give a 15% boost.

In a hypothetical situation a card that is twice as fast as another card is potentially always twice as fast but it won't often give twice the performance since there are other bottlenecks in the system. But if you had 10 benchmarks where at high resolution you always saw that the faster card was around twice as fast then it would be a true statement to say that the card is twice as fast. That does not mean however that you will always get twice the performance in all situations. I'm too tired for this, hope you understand what I'm saying.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't think you can draw this conclusion from the benchmarks.

As for RAM, the reason that doubling your RAM speed doesn't double game performance is not that your new RAM isn't twice as fast -- it's that the RAM is not the bottleneck. If the 6800 is "really" 50% faster than the 9800Pro (or, say, 40% faster than the 9800XT), you would think that at the most arduous video settings (1600x1200 w/ AA and AF, where you are almost always going to be video-card limited), it would be 50% faster than it all the time. But it's not.

Ok, good I think we are speaking the same language now atleast. You seem to understand the way bottlenecks work which has been one of my main points in this entire thread. But I also think that the 6800 actually almost always does get a score that is 50% higher than the 9800 Pro where the bottleneck is the graphicscard. In settings like 1600*1200 it shows a 50% advantage alot of the times BUT the thing that messes that trend up is when you enable AA at resolutions 1280< (not in ALL games though, some play fine with 4x AA all the way to 1600*1200 without the massive drop in performance). Then you hit a wall with 128MB cards, all of them, and the results drop down alot and it seems that the 50% delta grows smaller. This is of course because the memory on the card isn't big enough so you have to use ram from the system (AGP-aparture). What do you think about this theory?

I haven't seen any evidence that 128MB of video card RAM is a big enough bottleneck to drop performance *that* much at 1600x1200 with 4xAA (MSAA, AFAIK, does not use *that* much extra memory). What is needed to determine this is a benchmark of two cards that are identical save for their memory (for instance, a 128MB 9800Pro and a 256MB 9800Pro at the same clocks in the same system) run against each other at these settings in a number of games. If the 128MB card drops drastically in performance relative to the 256MB one, then you'd have something to talk about. I don't have a 256MB 9800Pro, so I can't test this, but I'll look for tests on the web that might show this comparison.

Edit: here is one such test: test

In this particular test (RTCW), the 128MB card loses only a fractional amount of performance compared to the 256MB one at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 4xAF. This would suggest that the amount of memory, at least, is not a restriction (or at least not in this game).

same review, next page

The same results in WC3 -- only a slight performance hit at 1600x1200 w/ AA and AF enabled.

driverheaven review

Okay, this seems pretty conclusive. The *biggest* performance drop they saw (which was only in a single app, the CodeCreatures benchmark) was 25%. In all their other tests, it was under a 5% difference between the 256MB and 128MB cards, even at 1600x1200 with AA and AF enabled. If you want to argue this point, you're going to have to find some benchmarks directly comparing 128MB and 256MB cards that show performance drops in the same apps that Anandtech used.


You *may*, however, be getting bottlenecked by memory bandwidth on both cards at those settings (since both AA and AF eat up extra memory bandwidth, and both cards have a similar amount of bandwidth). This becomes very difficult to determine, though, since the bandwidth usage for both is dependent on the details of the algorithm involved. This could be tested by taking a card and seeing if performance at these settings scales linearly with memory speed. I will try to test this later with my 9800Pro 128MB.

 

[Oreo]

I've put together a list of benchmarks from the Anandtech review comparing the two cards at the highest settings when neither of them seem to be hitting a "128MB wall" because of AA. One way to test if there is a wall at a certain point is to for example compare the 9700Pro and the 9800XT from the A-tech review. The 9800XT should be around 25% faster when they are totally graphicscard limited but if it gets alot higher result than those 25% the 128MB card is hitting a wall because of its limited memory.

6800 vs 9800Pro (highest settings before hitting 128MB wall on either card)

F1 Challenge 1600*1200 4xAA/8xAF
ATi 9800 Pro - 29,1 fps
nVidia 6800 - 37,1 fps
6800 - 27% faster

Far Cry, 1600*1200 no AA/AF
ATi 9800 Pro - 37,5 fps
nVidia 6800 - 59,3 fps
6800 - 58% faster

Halo, 1600*1200 no AA/AF
ATi 9800 Pro - 22,9 fps
nVidia 6800 - 35,1 fps
6800 - 53% faster

Home World 2, 1280*960 4xAA/8xAF
ATi 9800 Pro - 48,3 fps
nVidia 6800 - 67,6 fps
6800 - 40% faster

Jedi Knight, 1600*1200 no AA/AF
ATi 9800 Pro - 48,9 fps
nVidia 6800 - 77,7 fps
6800 - 59% faster

Never Winter Nights, 1600*1200 4xAA/8xAF
ATi 9800 Pro - 24,7 fps
nVidia 6800 - 45,2 fps
6800 - 83% faster (driver issue?)*

UT2004, 1600*1200 no AA/AF
ATi 9800 Pro - 39,2 fps
nVidia 6800 - 47,5 fps
6800 - 21% faster

Wolfenstein, 1600*1200 4xAA/8xAF
ATi 9800 Pro - 33,5 fps
nVidia 6800 - 52,6 fps
6800 - 57% faster

X2, 1280*1024, 4xAA/8xAF
ATi 9800 Pro - 31,1 fps
nVidia 6800 - 48,1 fps
6800 - 55% faster

6800, on average 50,3% faster (*46,2% not counting this benchmark)

So from this review alone my claims that the 6800 is 50% faster doesn't seem too far off IMO.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
Okay, this seems pretty conclusive. The *biggest* performance drop they saw (which was only in a single app, the CodeCreatures benchmark) was 25%. In all their other tests, it was under a 5% difference between the 256MB and 128MB cards, even at 1600x1200 with AA and AF enabled. If you want to argue this point, you're going to have to find some benchmarks directly comparing 128MB and 256MB cards that show performance drops in the same apps that Anandtech used.

So why do you think the 6800 would drop so much, in percentage comparison to other cards, when AA and AF are enabled? You've established that it's not the 128MB of memory. Does this not look like a driver problem?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

Originally posted by: Matthias99
Okay, this seems pretty conclusive. The *biggest* performance drop they saw (which was only in a single app, the CodeCreatures benchmark) was 25%. In all their other tests, it was under a 5% difference between the 256MB and 128MB cards, even at 1600x1200 with AA and AF enabled. If you want to argue this point, you're going to have to find some benchmarks directly comparing 128MB and 256MB cards that show performance drops in the same apps that Anandtech used.

So why do you think the 6800 would drop so much, in percentage comparison to other cards, when AA and AF are enabled? You've established that it's not the 128MB of memory. Does this not look like a driver problem?

Guesses:

1) Lack of memory bandwidth compared to pixel fillrate. It may be reaching a point where it's constrained solely by memory bandwidth (it has about the same amount as the 9800Pro, and less than the 9800XT), and is then just wasting a lot of its fillrate waiting on the memory. I'm going to try to investigate this later today on my own system.

2) AF on the 6800 cards eats up cycles on the ALU, decreasing overall performance more than on ATI hardware.

3) Less efficient AA implementation. NVIDIA has long taken a bigger performance hit with AA than ATI, which would suggest architectural or algorithmic limitations.

4) Game-specific issues. Certain applications may cause it to take a bigger AA/AF performance hit (especially since MSAA and NVIDIA's new AF are adaptive; they could take much bigger hits in some applications than others).

 

[Gamingphreek]

As far as i remember AA on Nvidia HW was more effective. It is AF that really screws them over.

-Kevin

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
As far as i remember AA on Nvidia HW was more effective. It is AF that really screws them over.

-Kevin

Depends. At least in the past, NVIDIA's AA at the "same" level (ie, 2x, 4x, etc.) was noticeably lower in quality than ATI's, but took a comparable performance hit. I haven't seen anything really recent (other than some things looking at the X800, but those were focused on AF) on AA quality and performance, so maybe things have changed on the 6800 cards.