Video Card Compatibility Help

[Rich46yo]

Well I went the easy way and just bought a pre-built system with enough card to keep me happy for the service life of the gamer.

Ive played the upgrade componants game. Many times Ive played it in both my gamers and my NLE/DV puters. Buying a pre-configured gamer is the easiest out there is cause I have 3 years of no worrys on the warranty.

Skuzzy doesnt have much good to say about NVidia drivers either for vista. I'll admit when its running right the NVidia performs well.

[Skuzzy]

Overall, NVidia has had a lot of problems getting thier drivers stable for Vista.  This has been well known in the industry for some time now.  Even NVidia has admitted it.  ATI has been ahead on that curve.  NVidia just got a driver release that finally allows Windows Media player to be stable on Vista when using an 8800GTX (or better), under Vista.  Before, if you played certain WMP files under Explorer, it would crash the player and IE at the same time.

They are getting better.  And to be fair, both companies had to start from scratch with thier drivers.  ATI got the edge due to a good working relationship with Microsoft.  NVidia and Microsoft have had a strained relationship since the XBox video chip debacle.

Neither companies drivers are that great, but ATI still maintains a slight edge in thier DirectX support under Vista.  Again, it is due to the working relationship with Microsoft.

Under XP it is quite the opposite, although NVidia has had some really bad driver releases lately for XP as well.  A bit of a roller coaster.  Probably due to trying to build a branch driver set for both XP and Vista.

[drdeathx]

Rich,

Skuzzy gave some nice info (I was unaware). My response was in frustration of ATI but I was fair to both companies! Maybe its a crapshoot! Its amazing that some have great luck with some comapnies but the wars keep technology going and hopefully prices down for us normal guys. 

[Rich46yo]

Rich,

Skuzzy gave some nice info (I was unaware). My response was in frustration of ATI but I was fair to both companies! Maybe its a crapshoot! Its amazing that some have great luck with some comapnies but the wars keep technology going and hopefully prices down for us normal guys. 

Oh one thing we are sure of is its a crap shoot. I find Vista loaded puters to be intimidating where'as I was always comfortable with XP. Ive had some Godawful problems configuring NLE systems with XP but always found a way to fix things. I just never really worried about XP issues cropping up that I couldn't deal with, or, at least be talked thru on the phone with a techie.

But this Vista thing? Often I wonder who in heck MS was creating it for. A big part of their market share is content creators and gamers and they sure didn't develop it for us. I'm considering a new NLE system but I'm hesitant to run Vista on it. My current NLE has 3 different video cards/realtime video accelerators loaded on it, both 1394a and 1394b with 5 external HDs on the firewire chain, 3 internal cheetahs on a SCSI chain, an external SCSI to finish the SCSI chain, 4 monitors, 2 DVD DL burners, and external DVD copier,4 gigs of RAM, 4 USB printers, an external 1394 audio mixer, 3 sets of speakers including a big MAudio 7-1 setup. I use 3 different NLEs, numerous programs like Adobe After Effects/Photoshop, an entire Sony editing/audio/DVD creation suite, and uncountable software programs accumulated over 15 years in DV.

And they all run in perfect harmony in Windows XP Pro. Meanwhile the very thought of trying to make deadlines in a new system running Vista just frightens me.

[drdeathx]

LOL   STAY WITH XP!!!!!!             

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I'm fairly confident I will never get Vista, not even for free. Windows 7 seems to fix many things that are wrong in Vista but it's just a polished Vista.

And you know what they say - you can't polish a turd.

I'm heavily thinking to start moving to Apple and get consoles for the kids to play with. What am I going to do with the leftover 3 gaming boxes now? Grr..

[BaldEagl]

lol... 2 of my 3 machines are still running Win98.

[drdeathx]

Baldeagle I bet you still have your original apple(Punch cards) LOL       

[Skuzzy]

Rich46yo, I also do a fair amount of NLE work at home as a hobby, and have invested a considerable amount into that hobby.  One thing you need to know about Vista.

The sound system in Vista will alter your audio and you cannot stop it.  It drops cycles so syncing audio is almost impossible to do, even with external reference clocks.  ASIO drivers do not work in Vista, due to the DRM implementation.  Although if you check around the Internet, you will find folks who have hacked Vista up pretty good in order to make ASIO work again, if that is your cup of tea.

If you do NLE work for a living, a Mac or Linux system would be a better choice now, than a Vista based computer.  I guess Microsoft figured the NLE market was not big enough for them to be worried about as most of the large production houses have switched to Linux for their render farms already.

[Rich46yo]

I think they messed up. While the pro-NLE market may not be large the consumer DV market is. And MS had a large share of it. With XP Pro they had finally come close to the reliability we PC DV guys used to dream about. And not just with the operating system but also their 3rd market DV customers. Quality DV drivers were the norm with XP and DV products and as far as the Pro-sumer market share, and consumer market share, they were burying Apple.

But now there is no question I'd buy a Mac. I started with DV when the original Pinnacle DC-10 came out. Remember that? I still have my Seagate Cheetah 2 gig externals that were the cats arse at the time. Now I have so many terabytes storage isn't even a concern.

But I do remember the early days of DV and of being forced to learn computers just to keep a system up and able to output 20 mins of DV.

And just when MS approaches the promised land they come out with this Vista monstrosity. Ive used up to 20 audio streams for my work. Can you imagine doing that in Vista while outputting surround?

[TilDeath]

I would check the Overclocking sites.  There you can find reviews with benchmarks for both videocards and power supplies.  Find the best rated within your 200.00 budget.

Overclockers Club http://www.overclockersclub.com/
Extreme Overclocking http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/
Overclock.net http://www.overclock.net/
Benchmark Reviews http://benchmarkreviews.com
  Hope this helps