ATi 4850 vs nVidia 8800 Ultra Comparison

Miscellaneous Advantages

I prefer the Catalyst Control Center to nVidia’s control panel. The layout is better, more polished, plus it opens instantly for me.

The 4850 also has much lower physical, thermal and power consumption characteristics than the 8800 Ultra, requiring only a single PSU connector. While the idle temperature is quite high (around 75C), it seems to be localized to the card so it doesn’t impact ambient case temperatures very much. The 8800 Ultra had much lower temperatures and a dual-slot cooler which evicted a lot of heat out of the case but despite this, it still dramatically increased ambient temperatures.

The 4850’s cooler is also silent at idle and while it does spin up a bit under gaming it’s generally quieter than the 8800 Ultra’s cooler under load which is surprising considering single-slot fans have a tendency to "whine" when they spin up.

Anisotropic Filtering

Unfortunately it’s not all roses for ATi with this one. One of the things I immediately noticed is the 4850’s inferior AF quality compared to my 8800 Ultra. Newer titles are generally not much worse but many legacy titles have visible texture shimmering and line crawling where the 8800 Ultra was producing perfect image quality. The games that were quite bad were Undying, Serious Sam 1st Encounter, Star Trek Elite Force and Painkiller.

In addition to nVidia’s superior texture filtering they also offer full screen super-sampling modes which stack with AF and offer even better image quality on textures.

Profile/Game Management

ATi still haven’t implemented automatic profiles, nor have they allowed the end-user to change advanced compatibility flags to allow users to tweak the drivers without resorting to application renaming. nVidia is far ahead of ATi in this area, especially with regard to being able to force AA into unsupported games (e.g. I can force AA in Stalker with nVidia but I can’t with ATi).