OK first off to the Mods: There will be no pissing matches in this thread!
To all else: There will be no pissing matches in this thread. Got it!?!

The deal:
I may be receiving as a gift the ability to purchase a new machine. I have read that most folks think an i7 is a but much, and by the time the coding folks catch up the software with the hardware, the hardware will be old!

The machine will be general use (generally used for POSER! :) ) but other things as well and I have no idea when I'll be able to get a new machine. Ol' Besty (my current machine AMD 64 2800+ 1.8GHz 1.5Gb RAM) is fine, but I need more juice. I'm narrowing parts down and have come to the video card portion of the program.

So ATI or NVIDIA??

Please some good suggestions and reasonable reasons please.
(Also If you really think an i7 IS TOO MUCH then please suggest away. This new machine may be it for the foreseable future. If you have some suggestions then please SITEMAIL me to keep the Mods happy and this OT message ON topic.).

Thank you my fellow Poserites! (Posers? Poserians?)

Having used both ATI and nVidia cards in my machines over the years, I can truthfully say I've found the nVidia cards to more user friendly.  In fact, I just dropped a new nVidia PCI graphics card in my computer.  I found the nVidia cards to be more stable and the driver update notices I get from nVidia are great.

As for the cpu, if you can get the i7 for a decent price, go for it!  This is the chip I'm dying to have but can't afford it until I get a job.

Honestly, half a dozen of one, 6 of the other.. check tom's hardware guide for the best bang for the buck in your pricerange.

My current systems all have ati, but I've had both... ati was just the best buy at the time of these coincedentally.

My roommate has an ATI in her machine but it's a stock HP that's about 7 years old.  We want to upgrade it but, again, no go until we both have jobs.

I can never spot a significant difference between the two brands (when comparing similarly powered cards). I had both over last 5 years, and never had major issues with either.

 I have one machine with nVidia and the other with ATI Radeon.

Both seem all right for daily poser and daz studio, except the ATI card appears to hve more instability than the nVidia one.

Also, Vue will nag if my ATI card drivers are out of date, and refuse to launch.

I could not get an ATI card to install in my old pc so I went with nvidia and it went with no problems.  I have heard that ati and intel work well together while nvidia and amd  are a good fit. I dont know if any of that is true. I am using a nvidia 6200 card at the moment and it runs all my graphics stuff nicely.  Check the opengl support and decide if you are a game player because that will be more important than Poser at this time .

Sadly your old machine is better specs than mine :(

I have an Intel Core 2 Duo and  the nVidia GeForce 9400 GT graphics card and they work hand in hand with no problems.  I had problems with my old ATI when I went to the Dual Core which is why I changed.

My son's pc used to have an ATI card (I forget which one) & it was nothing but trouble, even with driver updates most graphic intensive programs refused to play nicely so I switched it for an nVidia card & the problems went away.

Now I'm not saying the nVidia cards are all better than ATI cards because I've only experienced one ATI & some of the driver updates for the nVidia cards have caused problems in the past, but I personally would go for nVidia every time, partly due to that one experience & partly due to nVidia fixing the problem drivers in pretty short time.

I've been using ATI for years and no problems at all. No instabilities or things like that. Cards I've used so far are the Radeon 9600 Pro, X1650 Pro and HD3400.

We've just got a new laptop that has a ATI HD3400 with 512MB and that thing sure rocks. My old ATI X1650 had a few minor problems with displaying large Poser scenes (over 12 figures in it, not counting the props and such) correctly. It would leave out some of the textures, guess it can't handle everything in view. That problem doesn't occur with normal scenes, only large ones.

The HD3400 works great though, even with larger scenes. Displays everything fine and the opengl preview is much closer to the final render, that's a huge + !

The intel dual core works well with this ATI.

Nidvia.

It supports hardware physics - PhyX.

My old PC gave up the goast

Went from XP 32 bit to Vista 64 bit

Some of my old software did not adapt

I curently have no spell checker

New PC's are a pain

I Always run NVIDIA Machiens,Thay work, Don't fix it if it ant broke.

Physx is just for a very small handful of games, and the horsepower needed to run it is off the scale.

I remember a physx map on UT3 that even with the dedicated pysx card still dropped down to a unplayable 10 fps.

IMHO, it's just a gimmick thing.

Garee, if you note, imagination304 is recommending a Nidvia card.  This is apparently a new manufacturer who may have radically different physics processing.

Klebnor

Had an ATI card, didn't like it.  Too hard to set up and never seemed to work right.
Have had Nvidea cards ever since and have liked every one of them.
Just my two cents.

Nvidia is incorporting the physx tech into thier own cards.. read the gaming forums.. just like the stand alone physx cards, you need a monster machine for them to be useful at all.

4 years from now, they will probably be worthwhile, but currently pretty much everyone thinks they are a waste of money.

There are hundereds of maps out for unreal tournament 3 now.. and the only physx maps are the three provided by the company itself, a year ago.

I have been a die hard ATI user from day one... a lot of years with these cards... but hey... I'm Canadian so I suported the home town team.

ATI driver updates are the most confusing load of any driver software I have ever dealt with. Recently I changed over to Nvidia to run my Home Theatre (HTPC) and noticed a sharper picture, minor, but noticable. I don't do that any more, I'm using a PS3 for the theatre.

The driver updates for Nvidia... a breeze. With ATI you had to unload it all and build it back up, the instruction were cryptic and a real pain,  I would never go back to ATI.

ps
The video card offers nothing to render spead so go for a hassel free card...Nvidia

Ati driver updates are a two click deal.. you just click to launch, and then click again for the typical installation. Sometimes you need a reboot, sometimes not.

But there is no need at all to uninstall and reinstall them again.

I update every single month, so I should know.

I have used both, I have a good machine and prefer Nvidia.

I used to deal with ATI when I had my Dell Dimension 4400 and never had problems for the 5 years I had it -- as stated, the updates can be a real pain and shame on me if it's too old.  I got a Core 2 Duo with NVidia with no problems - on Vista.

JB

Core 2 Duo here too that came with Vista, even though I said I'd never use Vista, it died on me a couple of weeks ago, the good old Blue Screen of Death it managed to take both hard drives with it somehow. I'm now using Ubuntu in it's place & Poser 6/7/pro work perfectly & render faster than on Vista.

Nvidia does work better with OpenGL.

Quote - Nvidia does work better with OpenGL.

That seems to be the case. They also work better with Linux.

Thank you my fellow POSER users.

NVIDIA for the win!

Thank you again. I work on the rest of the machine.

I regret the time with the matrox millenium  :crying:

I dunno. I loved my Matrox Card. I think I still have it.

Anyway I settled on a 9800 GTX+. New Betsy is arriving soon!

All theses card are for gamers ...

Hey i'm the better, i've the most fps ... serious, only childrens thinks that !

Have the card who you have who is the most usualy for you, dont look other !

Same for peoples who search the most cpu ... only your use can point what you want !

Quote -   I have heard that ati and intel work well together while nvidia and amd  are a good fit. I dont know if any of that is true.

leave it to the comp manufactures to come up with that one especially when ati is owned by amd  lol.

Any how my 2 cents, I just got;  the new Gateway 6000fx with the i7 and an ATI 4850 hd. which could be a sweet system if you can get past all of Gateways never ending failures. 
With this card my render speeds are great I've rendered 1000 hq renders in Daz using render throttle and it took about 3 hours. seems to run depending on the scene anywhere from 1- 20 seconds for the render. poser of course takes a bit longer.

I myself prefer the ATI video card. for this type of application. I seem to have multiple problems with nVidia while using Daz, it's seems nVidia does not handle openGL as well as ATI
either way poser still crashs and burns less than 200 frames into an animation set on preview, with the new service pack that is supposed to prevent that.

I do tell you though this is the first comp I've seen that can handle running Daz, poser, photoshop, flash , windows media player and 20 open internet pages and applications all at the same time without lag.  :o)

The card does NOT affect your rendering speeds. It does have a bearing on the quality / speed of the general Poser app when you're setting up a scene.

I got an ATI Radeon 4870 and frankly, I'm not sure it was the best choice. I find that programs with slightly clunky OpenGL implementations - that's Poser and, depressingly, Photoshop CS4 Enhanced - occasionally make the card throw a tantrum and freeze up the system and / or cause a BSOD. Other programs (Vue 7 Inf, C4D) do no such thing, no matter how much I throw at them.

Quote - I dunno. I loved my Matrox Card. I think I still have it.

Anyway I settled on a 9800 GTX+. New Betsy is arriving soon!

Good luck with the 9800 GTX+. I recently upgraded to one of those from Gigabyte and had some issues with Poser and the drivers. It was resolved with a Video Card BIOS update followed by a driver update. Check this link for a discussion and resolution if you have purchased the GV-N98XPZL-1GH:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=84478

Otherwise the card has worked well and I have no problems since then.

I used to use Matrox cards all the time when I was building my own equipment. The main reason I built my own computers was 'cause it was a lot cheaper to do so, way back when. About the time Dell and Gateway were getting big, it became possible to get something ready made that met my needs without all the hassle, so I started buying whole machines.

Long about then, I started to notice that I had a lot of software that used OpenGL, and some research at the time led me to the conclusion that nVidia support was way ahead of ATI in that area. I don't know how much of that has changed, but I've used nVidia cards ever since, and I haven't had any trouble with them. Also, I keep thinking I'm going to play around with Gelato someday, so I feel like I'm keeping my hand in.

I don't know about Poser, present or future, in this regard, but I've seen a lot of Carrara users who've reported excellent results with an i7 CPU, getting 8 rendering threads that tool along at a very pleasant speed.

Some  Ati    cards that work well with 3D apps including Poser[

http://ati.amd.com/products/firepro/specs3700.html](http://ati.amd.com/products/firepro/specs3700.html)

Ati is very cost effective imo.