[warriorscot]

Well egypt is close enough to have alot of stuff shipped from Europe pretty cheaply if you were wanting to, but you shop around you can find most things pretty much anywhere. The x700 is the same price as a 6600GT but is a better card. Any x800 is in a different class than the 6600GT.

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WARRIORSCOT, you are more ATI biased than any one I know, Im 4 the best bang for the buck ATI or nVidia. The 6600 GT is a better card than the X700. The X700 does better at HalfLife2 and the Sims (duh, the games were built around ATI cards), but all the other games the 6600 GT does better AND Battlefield 2 was built around nVidia (not to the extent of ATI and HL2 though)

[anoobrew]

WARRIORSCOT, you are more ATI biased than any one I know, Im 4 the best bang for the buck ATI or nVidia. The 6600 GT is a better card than the X700. The X700 does better at HalfLife2 and the Sims (duh, the games were built around ATI cards), but all the other games the 6600 GT does better AND Battlefield 2 was built around nVidia (not to the extent of ATI and HL2 though)

[warriorscot]

Im not ATI biased i read the reviews and look at the prices and therefore determine ATI are better at the moment, i used to like nvidia back in the day, you never know the 8 series might be great and they will have a reasonable price so ill like them, and read the latest benchmarks youll find you are wrong and your completely obssesed with how games are made to favour one or the other, thats not strictly true and its only handful of games where that is true and thats usually remedied by the next patch from the game maker and the card maker.

Its games based on open gl that lack performance with ATI cards not because they were made for nvidia its the same with games that dont use open gl they work better on ATI, its just which road the makers went down to build the game and the way the cards have been made to concentrate on a certain method of rendering over another not because they have been desingned for that card the rest is just what the manufacturers do instead of manufacturing, just because intel puts runs great on intel on most games doesnt mean its true and we know it isnt, although the way intel chips are heading i may be digging out the old intel fanboy hat later this year, but thats a seperate point.

A good example is games like CoD2 its a game desinged for both it has SLI features but its been optimised to run ATI because of its 360 brethern game so its both but by your logic it would be a made for nvidia because they were the ones who have the startup advert, although this also changes on your region of the world.

[anoobrew]

I dont know where you get your tests from but tomshardware.com is highly professional. Their data is dependable and inbiased and their benchmark clealy indicate that the 6600 GT is a better card. ATI does better at AA but its not a better card.

I understand that just becuase a game advertises a certain manufacturer doesnt mean it runs best on it, but ignoring the fact that ATI card do better at certain games and nVidia cards others is foolish. Y does the 7800 GT do better than the X1800 XL at Fable, Quake 4 and FEAR. In those games the nVidia cards do better than ATI. The games inner-works just happen to work better w/ those cards.............conincidence? I think not, marketing goes far beyond advertisement, its called alliances among companies.

Sure I may be no game designer but just common sense helps to make these simple observations.

Heck what a better way to blow ur competition out of the water, pay off all game makers to build games that are best ran on their video card and horribly on their competitions (HL2) and then everyone will buy ur cards becuase they do better at the games

Its not conspiracy. . . .its part of the dog-eat-dog business world

[warriorscot]

No its because those games you listed are open GL based, ATI cards have never been good with openGL, although they have fixed the opengl problems with the latest patches to thew x1800xl with open GL performance increasing by 35%.

I Usually read a few review sites i dont stick with one i just go about them when im in the mood, Hexus i usually head back to but it depends i prefer to look around as when the big ones review things they do it when its just out thats great iof you are buying then but driver support is pretty poor when they are new alot of the time and you can see as much as 50% improvement on some cards after only a month of driver updates from the new release.

I also judge cards slightly differently, many review based on how high fps is at the lowest settings, i generally read into the settings where games are actually run at, so its 1024x 768 and 1280x1024 which is the most common and i look at What settings are enabled specifically things like AA and if its in DX9 mode.

And HL2 didnt exactly play crappy on nvidia hardware, it still ran fine, it just didnt have any advantage, the advantages are due to the hardwares ability to render the different kind of rendering technologies, it depends on where the companies have developed the cards abilities. But it will all change as the way the cards work are about change, and we will probably see one card brand being better at one thing than the other, its one company trying to outdo the other the game developers and publishers arent particualrly invloved in the process, the only times where they are is where the card manufactrers pass them information on the way they develop the cards and then its up to the developer wether they use this information to utilise the features they dont always, the only cases where this happens quite often is in console development where software has to be heavily optimised for identical hardware.

If you look into you see its not the fact that they are specifically setting out to make games work better one way or the other when they design the game its the card makers making the cards so they run better at that type of game. Games that are non open gl see better performance on non nvidia cards as nvidia have heavily developed the cards to run opengl to the detriment of non open gl and ATI is the exact opposite.

The longer the cards are out though the smaller these differences get as the manufacturers release drivers to correct the bias either way so by the time it been out 6 months and the new cards are out they are both running at the full capacity and show only small bias towards either side of the equation.

And most of the reviews i have read set the 6600GT and x700 essentially equal in performance, however the x700 is alot cheaper than the 6600GT so in my view much more worth the money than a 6600GT. I really used to dislike 6600GTs when they were sold at the same price as x800s a much much better cards yet one which was in the same price bracket when the cards were first released.