The funny thing is, ATI is the company that gets caught "optimizing" their
drivers in this article. Give it a close read.
Here's what John Carmack said,
"On the other hand, the Nvidia drivers have been tuned for Doom's
primary light/surface interaction fragment program, and innocuous code
changes can "fall off the fast path" and cause significant performance
impacts, especially on NV30 class cards."
It may be that the 'fast path' is the way shaders are compiled to get
around the NV3x series restrictions.
Both cards have optimizations. The valid ones are good for everybody.
I'd be worried if ATI and nVidia had given up on them and were just
relying on brute force to solve all the issues.
It's funny how different people can interpret the same data differently.
I've had an ATI card in my box for quite some time but I feel that NVidia
has the better product this round. If you feel the need to "punish" NVidia
for the FX series this go around I guess you can do that but I think it's
your loss.
Good thing about this generation is that both series of cards are
equally capable and you can't have a wrong choice.
X800 is still ahead in shader heavy DX9 games. The new FarCry
benchmarks (using SM2.0b on X800) show X800PE to be 15-20% ahead of
6800Ultra (which is using SM3.0). This should be good news for X800
owners who are waiting for STALKER or Half Life 2. 6800 is clearly
ahead in DOOM3 and it's likely that the lead will be carried over to
other DOOM3 engine games. However, to me the more important thing is
that nVidia in DX9 and ATI in openGl are competitive enough that most
people would not regret purchasing either of the 6800 or X800 cards.
It comes down to price then. It's hard to beat 6800GT if you can get
it for 300-340$ and X800XT-PE is great at 400-450$ range..........
(says the person, who doesn't buy graphic cards over 200$
)