Graphic/Sound card suggestions?

[Ancient Oldie]

Well one question comes to mind when you say that the Radeon is better (I've also heard this), do all games support the radeon card ?

What do you mean? All games support all cards. This isn't the 90-ies. There are only two existing API's - OpenGL and Direct3D. Radeon and GeForce have fine support for both.
My advice to you is to get Radeon 9800 Pro. However, if you have more money than you can spend and want to be able to say "Hey, I could've spent 500$ but I spent 700$ instead!", then you should go ahead with GF 5900.

Actually, nVidia has made agreements with some game companies like EA so that they make games that will work much better or only with their videocards. In response, ATI has begun to do the same. I personally won't buy games from EA or video cards from nVidia from now on because this will just create a division among PC's similar to consoles; those with Radeons and those with GeForce's. Who wants to deal with a shittier graphic card so that they can play a game that they like? Plus, it's not like graphic cards are so cheap that I can afford to buy both. Truly sucks in my opinion.

 

[KillaKilla]

In my experience, ATI cards, dollar-for-dollar, ATI beats NVidia hands-down. Especially seeing as even NVidia's prize card, the Geforce FX-5900 pro, gets beaten in HL2 FPS by ATI's3rd generation card, the Radeon 9600. See here:

and FX comparasons:

This was taken from Valve, not influenced by Nvidia or ATI, and is based off of HL2.
Bottom line: ATI>Nvidia.

 

[Briosafreak]

This was taken from Valve, not influenced by Nvidia or ATI, and is based off of HL2.

Actually this numbers showed up on an ATI sponsored meeting, by Gabe Newell, head of Valve, that has a deal to sell millions of OEM copies of a cut version of Half-Life2 with ATI, game that has been specifically designed to take the best out of ATI shaders...


But anyway i agree, in DirectX Nvidia is much worse, if anyone has any doubts just try 3dMark2003.

 

[JJ86]

Checking my back issues, Maximum PC magazine reviewed the ATI 9800 Pro head-to-head with the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and gave better reviews to the ATI Radeon:

http://www.maximumpc.com/reviews/videocards/index.html

 

[Ratty Sr.]

Ignore all those stupid "benchmarks" sponsored by who knows who. The ONLY applications that give objective comparisons of various video cards are following:

- 3D Mark 2003 (but only with 330 patch, because ATI "optimizes" its cards for original 3D Mark 2003, and only for DX 9.0 cards)

- Unreal Tournament 2003 (good for testing antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, otherwise useless)

- Fraps (a nice little application, but there is a considerable deviation in the results it gives)

- Morrowind (mostly because none of the manufacturers bothered to tweak their cards to accomplish higher results in this game)

All other applications, including 3D Mark 2001, HL2, original 3D Mark 2003 and others, are useless, because they are used and abused by both nVidia and ATI to display higher score for their products than they normally should. For example, nVidia's cards use the always-same camera path in 3D Mark 2001 to decrease number of rendered polygons, thus increasing the framerate. ATI made similar adjustments to their drivers to score higher in 3D Mark 2003.

EDIT: Here are some real Geforce FX 5900 Ultra vs. Radeon 9800 Pro comparisons:

As you can see, results "slightly" differ from those in Half Life 2. Also note that 5900 has 256 MB RAM, which will give it additional advantage in the future (when textures grow bigger... ). But Radeon 9800 Pro is 100 dollars cheaper. Conclusion: they're both great cards and you can't go wrong with either of them. [/img]

 

[Briosafreak]

Yo Ratty:
http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware/video_cards/ati_vs_nvidia/dx9_rel50/001.htm

 

[Odin]

http://www.connect3d.com/products/products_radeon_9600pro.htm
http://www.hightech.com.hk/html/9600pro.htm
http://www.sapphiretech.com/vga/9600.asp
http://www.cptech.com.tw/page2/productlist.asp?page=2&prodid=12&id=1&sn=12&temp1=2

128/256MB ?

opinions about these cards ? quite cheap..

Of course I'd like to buy 9800 PRO, but that's more than twice the price of these ones..

 

[Ratty Sr.]

This whole pixel shader deal is insane. ATI and nVidia seem to introduce a new pixel shader every three months. How am I supposed to keep up? I bought a GF4 for Morrowind, now I should buy a Radeon 9800 Pro for Half Life 2, next I'll have to buy a GF 6 for Doom 3... And most of these games might not even be worth half of this investment! Bah, where are the good old days when all you had to do to make your games run swiftly was open config.sys and change "DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS" into "DEVICE=EMM386.EXE RAM 4096".

 

[Briosafreak]

This whole pixel shader deal is insane. ATI and nVidia seem to introduce a new pixel shader every three months. How am I supposed to keep up? I bought a GF4 for Morrowind, now I should buy a Radeon 9800 Pro for Half Life 2, next I'll have to buy a GF 6 for Doom 3... And most of these games might not even be worth half of this investment! Bah, where are the good old days when all you had to do to make your games run swiftly was open config.sys and change "DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS" into "DEVICE=EMM386.EXE RAM 4096".

I feel your pain...