Buying an XPS 15" laptop - NVidia v. ATI graphics card

I am starting to research 15/-16" laptops and looking at the XPS - for my wife who is a photographer. She currently has an Inspiron 1720 but it's not performing for her so she wants to upgrade. Plus she still has the PITA issue with Vista where her screen color calibrations are continually lost. I on the other hand have an Inspiron 1520 with an nVidia graphics card and once calibrated, my screen doesn't lose the settings.

So I wanted to get her a laptop with an nVidia card - but looking at the XPSs they all seem to have the ATI graphics card - only the old stock still has the nVidia cards. Is the ATI comparable or better than the nVidia? Will it retain the calibration settings like the nVidia does? Is dell no longer bundlingg nVidia cards because of the problems I have read about (never had any myself).

 

The problem your wife is having with the video card settings not saving is a GPU driver issue, try reinstalling new graphics drivers.
Secondly, it really comes down to the series of the card, typically with both nvidia and ati the last 3 digits of the card number determine the performance of it, so an nvidia 8800 would perform better than a 9300, the same applies for ATI. Hope this helps!

 

The problem my wife has right now is because she has no video card - she just has the integrated INtel video - and she constantly loses the settings - it's a known Vista issue. I on the other hand on the same version of Vista don't have the problem as I have a video card.