ATI Card and PC games

The Game Room
1

Hi all,

I just pulled the trigger and bought a new PC. I play a lot of games and my 5 year old PC went from being boarderline to being under a lot of minimum specs so here we are. Only issue is I have always used Nvidia video cards but with this PC I could only get an ATI card, specifically the ATI Radeon HD 5870. I did some research and it seems that ATI has issues with some games, EA games and City of Heroes in particular as far as games that I play are concerned.

Did I make a mistake or is what I see on the internet just overblown nerd rage? Any one with ATI cards have problems playing the games they want to play?

2

What sort of issues are you talking about?

I have a 5850 and no problems running anything. Never tried city of heroes, but plenty of EA games.

3

I’ve got a 5870 myself, also no issues, and it’s a top performer. I don’t play anything on less than the highest video settings @ 1920x1200.

4

There aren’t any huge difference between the brands in general (not talking about specific cards!). There are some issues though, particularly when a software company plays favorites. GTA4 supported ATI’s Crossfire, but not Nvidia’s SLI, although I think both have support since the expansion was released.

If you buy something other than ATI or NVIDIA (mostly older cards) though, then you wasted your money.

5

Not really sure. I was just going by some stuff I saw when I Googled ATI problems. Thanks for the input all, looks like I was worried about nothing.

6

City of Heroes has had in the past a tendency to have driver issues occasionally with ATI cards, and I don’t know why–I used to play it on a 3870.

Practically speaking, those “issues” boiled down to changing a few graphics settings a notch lower and waiting for the next driver release.

–Z (currently an all-ATI household, with his 4870 and his wife’s 4850, having no issues whatsoever with any of their gaming)

7

If I’m not mistaken City of X uses PhysX which is Nvidia(or so I’d assume since Nvidia owns it but maybe not?) only but it’s far from an essential part of the game. It just makes the particle systems and some other graphical garnishes look a touch better.

8

That’s true, you miss out on the extra features of PhysX currently, but last I heard Nvidia is allowing ATI to develop their own PhysX implementation in the hopes get the feature more widespread support.

9

Also, if you have an extra pciex16 slot and a nvidia card that supports physx, you can use it in conjunction with your ATI card to run physx: just use a monitor if you are not comfortable with the resistors. This has worked quite well with my 4850 and 5850.

10

You don’t need to use either a monitor or resistors. If you have windows 7 you can force windows to use the Nvidia card as though it had a monitor. It works for me.

11

Hey thanks, this worked great.