ATI or nVidia?

Well most environments are hardware independant so from a programming perspective it doesn''t matter. Peformance is another matter.

Unless you want to go and develop programms that run on that one specific card only, I wouldn''t really worry about that.
You''re programming either OpenGL or DirectX, not card of BrandX or BrandY.

Both cards should be pretty fast, and support most common extension, except for a few specialities. (A few more texturing units here, 128bit color depths there etc...)

What I''d really worry about when getting a new card is: Money I want to spend. Driver support. ''Do I get what they promise''.

if you don''t want to mess with vendor specific features or quite some useless parts in hw when only using standard features, don''t get an nvidia card. they never fit too well into standards, big parts of them remain unused if coding real stuff. so you have to code twice actually, if you want good performance on normal cards and on nv cards:D

the radeon9700 (or another one of the new ones, 9500 or so) is worthing its price, partially just because every feature of the card is available in dx9, and every feature of dx9 is available on the card (and so will be more or less gl1.5, when released)..

devsupport is great, devpage has nice to read, simple and small to download example codes, not that bloaty, and most of all: working, understandable code.

ati works very near to the opengl ARB, nvidia only complains about it and tries to get them to use their own proprietary standards. ati worked hard on being the first card fully supporting dx9

the gfFX is not worthing its price (more than 100$ more for a card with not _that_ much more features? and the speed, well.. they use bruteforce to get more than the radeon.. a bruteforce optimized radeon with the same cooler would beat the gfFX possibly even.. does not look _that_ well for the "advanced" technology used by nvidia..)

of course, i''m a bit biased, after years working with nvidia hw and that only for perpixellighting (wich they said is possible since gf2 announcement). the first real card wich provided it is the radeon9700. it is as well the first card that works stable here, too.. nvidia cards didn''t.

"take a look around" - limp bizkit
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