imo, radeons give better image quality, mainly because ATI makes cards for todays games while nVidia tries to make cards of tomorrow when tomorrow you would like an upgrade instead

Radeons handle high quality AA/high rez while not losing a lot in performance, though 5900U is good, i would definitely say Radeon, gotta love their Smoothvision technology :D

even if the radeon will cost me $900 and the geforce will cost me $800?

well right now the 9800pro and 5900U are about the same price range, unless your getting the Sapphire RADEON 9800 Pro Atlantis Ultimate 256mb pic here

basically as long as the price is not more than buying the fastest CPU out

both nVidia and ATI are good at what they do, but its really the consumer that has to decide on themselves which has better quality for its value

personally i like ATI from a while back when they had 8500s, its just peoples decision, you can go for any of them, both the top lines currently out are really good, me and a bunch of friends have nVidia cards for a long time now, my bro and his friend both have ATI and from experience i like the quality and performance of ATI's cards, but thats from my experience, other people have had problems with em

if you take my word i would say ATI, anyone can say otherwise :wink:

cheers man. Think i might go ATI never had a ATI card be running my G4MX way to long

A very interesting question. At the moment I'm evaluating 17" flat-panel displays with 4 different video cards. The ATI 9800 Pro gives the best image quality in both analog and DVI-I modes, a three-year old Radeon 64MB VIVO also looks great for analog with the 3.5 Cat's. a Visiontek Nvidia ti-4600 has a slightly dingy appearance on whites in both modes with the 44.67 drivers, the image just isn't as defined or vivid as the ATI cards. Just because I had two laying around I also used a 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. It was truly not in the same league with the other cards but still had better whites than the Nvidia. All tests were done on varied operating systems: Windows 2003 Server, XP Pro and Home and 2K Pro. A 21" Sony GDM-F500R was used to compare a CRT with the flat panels using both HD-15 and BNC inputs. The best flat-panel to my eyes seems to be the NEC LCD1760NX at this point in time...

Going from a GF2Ti 64mb to a Radeon 9000, the graphics (even 2d) seem much cleaner on the ATi card. Nvidia seems to need digital vibrance to get the colours looking clear, but the ATi card seems to do a great job without a driver "hack" job.

Hehe, yeah. I'm an ATI convert. Ive been Nvidia since my old GeForce 2 (I guess you could say since my Voodoo 2 since Nvidia bought them, hehe). But the lovely people at MSI made me change my mind. After sending me 2 Fubar'ed Geforce 4 cards I decided screw it, and went to ATI. got my 9800 Pro and that baby performs like a dream. I personally think it out performas the GeForce 4. Havent seen an FX in action so dont know on that. But my 9800 Pro and I are a happy pair I must say :)

My Dad bought a 5900 ultra 128. I have an ATI 9700 pro. My Dad is a nVidia guy, and I am an ATI guy. We have the exact same Motherboard, Ram, CPU, Bios settings everything, and I can tell you that when we stress them, the 5900 starts Atrifacting, and the Visual Quality just isnt what the 9700 pro's is. The 9700 pro is SOO much better. I mean, when you turn on the AA, and AF, its like they are in different classes. This is in comparison to the 9700 pro, when my 9800 pro gets here, I can only imagine how much better it will be. But this is my experiences......Oh yeah, you dont have to worry about supplying an extra slot, or melting your other components with the 9800 pro either. With the 5900 you do.

as proved
Realisticly,
the differences between the cards in image quality, are very minute
sometimes 9800 winning, and some times 5900 winning

I also thaink that ATI Radeons image looks a bit more better than nVIDIA graphic cards' images. But I think now GeForce FX 5900 ULTRA is better than all of the ATI Radeon graphic cards. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Rar dont ask for corrections the ATi folks will come down and swarm in to prove you wrong. I, for one :)

i have best of both worlds...an FX5900 Ultra (BFG Tech Asylum) and an ATI 9800Pro XT. I bought the 5900 first and it did well...very well. easy to OC also. I posted an awesome 50K+ in AquaMark3 with that card. but when enabling FSAA and AF in some games...the picture looked ok...(text was real hard to read in game though) so i thought screw it, ill try an ATI. well after installing the ATI and jacking up the quallity to 6x FSAA and 16x AF, my games looked awesome! even the text was readable, clear and crisp. My 5900 Benches better than my ati in 3dmark 03, but the tables are reversed in 3dmark 01. my nvidia benches more in aquamark3 than my ati. now keep in mind that the diff in bench scores with the 3dmark tests is withing the 100s (ie 6700 vs 6400 in 03 and 18000 vs 17600 in 01) sept for Aquamark3..the 5900 was 50,000+ and the ati pat was 45,000+...5000 pts. I love them both, and if i had to loose one...id be hard pressed to choose.

I'm also ATI converted. Had Nvidia based cards since Geforce 256 :D