ATI or Nvidia Graphics cards for older games?

Greetings all,

I have done a few searches but nothing definite has come up. If there is a thread I should be reading it would be appreciated if you could let me know of its existence, either by a link or title so I can search for that.

I am looking for a laptop to play older games as well as current games. The laptop will be running Windows XP. I have read in a few posts that the new Nvidia drivers break older games, and I have found this true on my desktop. Some of the older games like Thief 1 & 2 require older drivers with my Nvidia cards. Most of the older games I am looking at are from the 90's and early 2000's. Games are a mix of strategy and first person shooters.

I have not been able to find any reports of the reliability of ATI drivers for older games. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Specifically I am looking at the Asus M50sa-AK023C, as it has a ATI 3650 video card and a full size keyboard with almost standard number keypad. I also plan to remove Vista and install Windows XP.

Thank you for your time.

 

Fill in the FAQ and you`ll get tons of sugestions.
Currently,NVIDIA is leading the race.

 

tsk tsk...did you write that without reading his post?

I have a mix of Nvidia and ATI hardware and I'd agree that ATI seems to have an edge on compatibility. Then again, most of my compatibility issues had to do with the Nvidia 6 and 7 series cards, not their 8 or 9 cards. The only real issue I had was a bug in Beyond Good & Evil where water effects on a 6 or 7 series Nvidia card woul cause the game to slow to a crawl.

So yeah, my general vibe is that older games will be better supported by ATI, but I haven't seen their next generation of mobile GFX hardware yet, the 4 series, so I cannot comment on that. You could also make Nvidia hardware a bit more compatible by installing older drivers, but that is almost impossible on the very new chips.

Anyone else have some hands-on experience with GPU compatibility? My vote is ATI.

 

I have always had ATI and Nvidia cards for the last 10 years and the ATI ones always worked better for me than my Nvidia, which were less reliable and a couple even died on me. I was most impressed with my 3dfx voodoo 5500 though Nvidia bought them out and layed everyone off and didnt support the video cards anymore.

I'm crossing my fingers that the new HD3650s next month will have GDDR4 memory and blow all the competition away. It would be wise to release a new version with new Puma and Montevina platforms, like AMD did with the mobile HD3870.

Just do not get an HD2600, that hardware was built assuming a DX10 spec that changed, and they should have just kept the hardware the same as the old cards. The HD2600 is good for gaming, but it doesnt do Antialiasing (AA) very well and you may want to crank that up on older games.

 

Thank you for the replies, it is appreciated.

Eleron911: Yep I will fill out an FAQ once I get the drivers questions answered. I figured that the gaming forum would be the best spot for this specific of a question.

StormEffect: I will have to try my old software with a Nvidia 8xxx card and see if that makes a difference. I had a few problems a year back when I tried a Nvidia 8xxx card in comparison to my Nvidia 79xx card (forget the model number). Right now my two likely choices are the Nvidia 9500M or the ATI HD 3650. Simply due to likely compatibility issues I am tending to the ATI card.

Tommyboy. I loved my old Voodoo cards. I had the old dual Voodoo II cards, 3000 and 3500 cards too (if I remember the model numbers correctly). They worked really well.

 

I've used both nVidia and ATI cards over the last 10 years as well.

For me, nVidia has always been better. The drivers were always better, games ran better, nVidia actually delivered what they said they would.

I never had any issues with hardware reliability.

For me it was always ATI's notoriously bad drivers that brought down some aspect of the overall experience. I remember my Radeon 9550. UT2k4 ran beautifully, but the GTA games didn't have streets! If I used updated drivers then the performance noticeably dropped all around but I had streets back in GTA games.

I don't think I'll ever touch an ATI card again unless I absolutely have to.

 

never had ati in my notebooks but i always buy a ATi card for my desktop simply because they have the best peformance price ratio but i gues that doesnt go up for notebooks. Since ati is ownd by AMD the drivers are good and they cant be compared with the older drivers!

 

An ATI 9550 sucks too, thats why you didnt like it, I had a 9500 and it was awesome. You were probably comparing like Nvidias performance card with ATIs value cards.