It was right about the time that all of this was taking place in the background that I decided it was time to upgrade my aging ATI Radeon 9000 for something better. I wanted the best card I could get for my money. With all this marketing nonesense out there, making that decision was not easy.

With all this going on, it seemed that anyone's best option, when looking for a directX9 videocard, was ATI. Their GPU's naturally supported DX9, and the ATi's 9600 was the card DX9 was developed on... But then there's that driver...just how much difference does that make?
If I were to just on what fans had seen of all this, it's quite possible to assume that the driver was the only difference between the cards....
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, there's more to it than that.

Each of the two GPU's processesses data in a different order, adding a level of detail, or a shader at a different time, and buffers between the shader units come at different places and in different sizes.

This means that the driver must break the code for the game up into different parts, and relay it in different orders to the card. The difference lays in how the actual 3D image gets rendered...from the closest object to the furthest object, and vice versa. ATI likes to draw the closest bit first, and then fill in the depth and detail. This way you aren't wasting time drawing the backside of objects that won't be seen.

Nvidia likes the depth first and then the closest object, followed by culling out the unseen.When comparing Radeons and the Nvidia "FX" line, the obvious differnce of computational depth is there, and explains how Radeons, with lower frequencies, perform better in certain situations.

But with the newest generations, the differences have almost flipped...Nvidia now has the slower clock speed but greater depth...and PS3.0 compatibility. ATI have responded with 3Dc, which they claim gives the same precision as PS3.0, but does not require the same depth. Sounds awfully like Nvidia in the past, with DX9, does it not?