Nvidias Features
3D Vision enables users to fully view content in 3D. This is a major step up as it's no longer 2D and gives users full control of gaming, viewing photos plus more in true 3D. There are two types of 3D visions the basic home edition or the pro. Home edition is for normal users it works for Games, Movies, Photos, Blu rays, and I think even websites. The more advanced Pro version is used for Cad, 3D video editing and anything else the 3D vision is capable of. However it runs around $200 dollars which might be a problem for some people. Considering that a regular monitor wont do it, you will have to shell out a few more bucks for a 120hz screen.
Physx is a new type of engine used in games and movies. Its called a physics engine SDK and its used to enhance the gameplay and to simulate real time experience. This engine is mostly used to improve the 3D environment of games as well as graphical performance. This means all those explosions, bullet holes, flames,blood, buildings collapsing and more are all processed by the Nvidias Physx Engine. Whats new is that before most of the load was on the CPU but what the Physics Engine does is it transfers all of it to the GPU allowing the CPU to process other tasks.
Cuda, what is it? Well im not entirely sure. From what I read is instead of normal GPUs that just process graphics, Cuda enables GPUs to act some what similar to a CPU. How this helps is instead of just rendering graphics the Gpu can be now used to process other stuff as well. Whats different about it is Users can use C codes in Cuda allowing users to program tasks. Not only that but Cuda increases the performance of graphical use, and helps out in video editing and other programs as well.
Purevideo HD Technology delivers great picture quality. The way it works is it has a separate video processing core on the GPU. Once again this allows to do multiple things as the load is off the Cpu and the power consumption is lower. Like mentioned it provides great video without no distortions and free of stutters. One of the biggest reasons for it is the support and acceleration it provides for blu ray and HD DVD movies. This completely transform the experience of HD movies on the pc.
SLI is Nvidias way of connecting and scaling graphical performance by running 2 or more Gpus. Running with 2 cards boosts up the performance to twice as much while when on 3 cards the performance is at 2.8x so almost 3 times as good. How Sli works is one card processes the horizontal frames while the other card processes the vertical frames resulting an increase in performance.
Alright, now its time to get into the Ati Features and see how they compare to Nvidia.
Ati Features
HD3D is Ati feature that transforms 2d into 3d. Just like Nvidias 3d vision a 120hz monitor is required as well as glasses in order to view the 3d image. HD3D is only available on the 5000 series cards and up. Same as with Nvidia this feature allows users to play games, movies, and view photos all in 3d.
Eyefinity definitely makes a big difference in all around use. What Eyefinity does is allows users to hook up multiple monitors to the gpu. Currently I believe you can have 3 monitors hooked up to one Gpu which is awesome. This is a great feature for heavy multi taskers as it allows plenty of space on the desktop to run multiple programs on different screens. For instance on one screen you can run photoshop on the middle screen you can have a website opened and on the third screen have a movie running how fantastic is that. One more cool thing is when gaming the game displays across all three screens and usually your fov (field of view) will be bigger.
Eyespeed and Avivo HD kinda go together with each other as they both accelerate and increase the quality and smoothness in videos/other tasks. One major thing that Ati includes is the (UVD) which is unified video decoder and what it does is it offloads your cpu so that it can process other stuff while still having that eye candy in movies and games. Avivo hd plays a big part in watching Blu ray and HD DVD movies as it increases the performance resulting in no lag.
Crossfire x is Ati's way of running multiple Gpus, the way it works is a little bit different then nvidia. Ati gpus instead of processing horizontal and vertical lines they process tiles. The screen is divided into tiles and then each gpu processes a separate tile. This does not mean that its faster or better but it does increase the performance. To get a better visual think of a checkerboard.
Which Ones Better?
In my opinion they both have their pros and cons. Nvidia and Ati are pretty much right on each other as they both offer the same features but in different ways.
Sli vs Crossfire, supposedly Sli is better as the performance it offers is slightly greater than crossfire and sli has better drivers support as well.
As for all the other features it's a tug of war between the two and no ones really sure which way it will go. Both Nvidia and Ati offer great amount of features to be explored and I would say you cant go wrong with either one.
source: http://EzineArticles.com/6273952
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