Originally posted by: Cheex
What are your reasons?
Utility type things. Subjective type things. I'm looking to get myself a larger WS panel soon. I played around with one that was nice but didn't have good res scaling support in HW, and CCC was a complete letdown in picking up the slack. nV's drivers handle this better atm. I'd rather not have to rule out the purchase of a panel I otherwise really like just because it can't do its own scaling.
Aside from that, I've owned lots of cards both red and green through the years and my last 3 have all been from Camp Red. They were all very nice, but G80 was compelling and I wanted to experience for myself. I also wanted to try out a new sort of "ownership experience", if that makes any sense. Many card companies have come and gone over on the nV side since I last owned one; I wanted to see how these new companies were doing it.
I chose the eVGA GTX (some people love 'em, some people hate 'em) but so far, so good. Product presentation was top notch. Installation was smooth as glass. As for the IQ on this thing... 2D quality on nV cards used to be a crapshoot. This card looks better than my BBA X1900 on the desktop - my eyes are quick to pick up variances in desktop display since recently auditioning a good LCD and returning to CRT. This card has noticeably better sharpness and contrast than ATi's own X1900 offering.
On to 3D... People were saying G80 had better IQ in 3D than R580 did. I asked myself, "how the hell can you get much better IQ than R580".
Well... ATi sure got their work cut out for them. Let's hope they're up to the task. This GPU
wrecks R580. It ain't just the speed (even though that is better by a factor of ~60%(!) over R580 in what I've looked at). The IQ... it's sublime. Playing Oblivion, the best looking game I own, there's a whole new level of liveliness and detail to the world. The HDR lighting is more balanced. The colors are warmer. The textures are more defined.
Hell, I suppose this turned into a mini-review instead of a simple answer to a simple post... but I'm honestly blown away here. This is nV's R300 moment; they have answered their competition's offensive with a critical strike.
nV has pissed me off in the recent past with their corporate practices, and their product for the past few cycles hasn't been leaps and bounds over the other. But it's clear that they really put their nose to the grindstone on this one and got back to putting out killer graphics chips. I will give credit where it's due. I have no regrets owning this product; it's revolutionary IMO.
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