Originally posted by: Wreckage
You can get a 9600GT that will be faster than a 3870 for $149.
A bit of a budget stretch but it will be faster than your 1900 no problem.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814134038
Another nVidia biased comment from nWreckage, and without links, backup or evidence.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3235&p=4
From a performance standpoint, the Radeon HD 3870 comes out slightly ahead by outperforming the 9600 GT in one more game (and two benchmarks). The 9600 GT, although winning fewer benchmarks, manages a higher margin of victory in those games that it does win in. Performance issues in Quake Wars and Call of Duty 4 give the nod to NVIDIA, especially when you take into account a lower average selling price for the 9600 GT.
http://www.tomshardware.com/20...ce_9600_gt/page17.html
As can be seen clearly, STALKER and Age of Empires III are the exceptions: the only games for which the GeForce 9600 GT managed to edge the HD 3870. In all the other cases, the HD 3870 was fairly clearly ahead of its rival, with spreads of 13 to 15% with Call of Duty 4 and World In Conflict, and smaller ones with Unreal Tournament 3 and Supreme Commander.
The situation was reversed once the filters were enabled, even though the spreads weren't as wide. In four games, the HD 3870 kept the advantage or was only slightly behind the 9600 GT. Two games gave the card an especially strong advantage in filter mode, with a difference of more than 20%: Oblivion and Supreme Commander.
http://www.techspot.com/articl...eon-hd3870/page10.html
As you can see, based on the seven games we tested using a number of various quality settings, the performance difference between the Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 9600 GT worked out to be very small. Each product had its ups and downs and on average the 9600 GT turned out to be less than 1% slower than the Radeon HD 3870. Those wanting to use AA/AF exclusively should note that the 9600 GT appeared to be slightly better when using these quality settings.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14168/11
The pattern in our performance testing was unmistakable: the GeForce 9600 GT is just a little bit slower than a GeForce 8800 GT and a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870. Of course, that statement needs some qualification, since we tested the 8800 GT and HD 3870 at bone-stock clocks, while the 9600 GT and HD 3850 we tested were both overclocked considerably. But the basic trends we spotted were consistent, even when we reduced the 9600 GT card to Nvidia's base clock speeds. The 9600 GT also impressed us with the lowest power draw under load of any card we tested and very low noise levels?despite its amped-up clock speeds.
I'm struggling to figure out what's not to like here. One could argue that the practical performance difference between the Radeon HD 3850 512MB and the GeForce 9600 GT in our testing was largely nil. Both cards ran most games well at common resolutions like 1680x1050, even with quality levels cranked up. Image quality between the two was comparable?and uniformly good. When there was a performance difference between them, it was usually fairly minor.
This is true enough, but the performance differences were large enough in Call of Duty 4 and Half-Life 2: Epsiode Two to distinguish the 9600 GT as the better choice.
One could also argue that the 9600 GT's strong performance today may give way to relatively weaker performance down the road. If game developers shift their attention to using more and more complex shaders, the 9600 GT could end up running tomorrow's games slower than the Radeon HD 3850, which clearly has more shader processing power.
Is not personal, just correcting your misinformation that you are giving to others. nVidia has the current high end crown, ATi is beating slighly nVidia in the midrange market, and low end market (Enjoys higher availability and better pricing), ATi has the crown in feature set overall while nVidia has the crown in the performance overall. Being biased on a company without even getting paid from them is just something that is out of context in my book. /end