I'm not an NVIDIA GeForce fan for their graphics card, nor a fan of its counterpart the ATI Radeon. But looking on their benchmarks and performance the GeForce 8800 Ultra speaks for itself. Here are the specifications/performance for
GeForce 8800 Ultra and the
ATI Radeon™ HD 2900.
NVIDIA® Unified Architecture - Unified shader architecture
- GigaThread™ technology
- Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10
- Geometry shaders
- Geometry instancing
- Streamed output
- Shader Model 4.0
- Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline
NVIDIA Lumenex™ Engine - 16x full screen anti-aliasing
- Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
- 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering
- 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing
- 32-bit per component floating point texture filtering and blending
- Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data
- Support for normal map compression
- Z-cull
- Early-Z
NVIDIA Quantum Effects™ Technology - Advanced shader processors architected for physics computation
- Simulate and render physics effects on the graphics processor
NVIDIA SLI™ Technology1 - Patented hardware and software technology allows two GeForce-based graphics cards to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today's top titles.
NVIDIA PureVideo™ HD Technology2 - Dedicated on-chip video processor
- High-definition H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
- Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
- HDCP capable3
- Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing
- Noise Reduction
- Edge Enhancement
- Bad Edit Correction
- Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
- High-quality scaling
- Video color correction
- Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support
Advanced Display Functionality - Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x1600
- Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
- Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
- NVIDIA nView® multi-display technology capability
- 10-bit display processing
Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™ - Full DirectX 10 support
- Dedicated graphics processor powers the new Windows Vista Aero 3D user interface
- VMR-based video architecture
High Speed Interfaces - Designed for PCI Express® x16
- Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
Operating Systems - Windows Vista /Windows Vista 64
- Windows XP/Windows XP 64
- Linux
API Support - Complete DirectX support, including Microsoft DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0
- Full OpenGL® support, including OpenGL 2.0
As for Radeon HD 2900 Series
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 (CrossFire™ 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
- CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology
- Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
- Integrated compositing engine
- High performance dual channel interconnect
- ATI Avivo™ 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 Xilleon™ 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-ray™ 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
I will now leave the judging from you on which graphics card you would choose for each of us have different tastes and standards. Happy Gaming!
