Which should I get: nVidia Geforce 3 Ti500 or ATI Radeon 8500??

[x86]

I am going to be building a workstation that is going to do occasional gaming. I have enough money for both of them, but if I go with the 8500 I can get RDRAM instead of DDR for my NW 2.2. Please give me advice on which GPU to get.

 

[Tates]

Looks like you answered your own question.....RDRAM and Hydravision (dual display)......AND the Radeon 8500 costs less

 

[cmaMath13]

I would go with the GeForce Ti500, personally.

BUT, I don't think either card is a bad decision.

 

[Rand]

Both are damn nice cards.

If you want pure gaming performance then I'd lean towards the GF3 Ti500 as it is slightly faster in most cases, and nVidia's driver support is better... that said ATi has been making considerable strides in improving their drivers.
The R8500 has a better feature, and better DVD, and better FSAA in most cases, also you've got a guarantee of excellent 2D image quality which tends to be a weak point of many GF3's. You also get HydraVision and TV-Out with the R8500.

Either way your getting an excellent card, but if your only going to be doing "occasional gaming" as you state then I'd prefer the R8500 as it's a more well rounded card.
Having the extra money to spend on RDRAM if you go the route of the R8500 is always nice too.

 

[Sunner]

What kind of workstation are you thinking about?

If it's stuff like 3D Studio, or CAD, I'd get the GF3, if it's audio/video work, heck I'd have a hard time deciding

 

[Soccerman]

no-one appears to have benchmarked the Radeon 8500 with the latest unified drivers (9008/6011/6011 for win9x/2K/XP).

they certainly helped my old normal Radeon out a bit! my T&L scores jumped almost by 2x in 3DMark2K1. also, I got about a 250 point increase with these..

 

[BFG10K]

I'd definitely get the Ti500. nVidia's 3D image quality is better and more accurate than ATi's plus their drivers are much better.

 

[Chuck]

Im thinking of making a simalor decision. I probubly have the money for both but i'd obviously like to get the one with the better bang for buck (which ATM seems like the 8500). The things that concern me though is how 'correct' ATI's OpenGL drivers are (I do a bit of OpenGL programing so the last thing i need is buggy drivers). What do people think about the newer cards that are comming out. Would it be worth just to wait for them to come out and then get the current lot at a cheaper price? Or will there not be that much of a drop?

Thanks.

 

[BD231]

You would be happy either way, the 8500 has better 2D quality, Ti500 is a tid bit faster than the 8500. But honestly, why would you need anything faster than an 8500???

 

[Rand]

<< The things that concern me though is how 'correct' ATI's OpenGL drivers are (I do a bit of OpenGL programing so the last thing i need is buggy drivers). >>



With ATi having acquired FireGL's driver team, and the recent strides they've made in improving their driver support for the Radeon series I doubt you have too much to worry about.
FireGL's driver team will be handling OpenGL code for the FireGL 8700/8800, so it's likely at least some of that will make it's way over the the Radeon 8500 as it's based on the same GPU.