Secondary PCI card just for this game

[Budwise]

Actually, if you compare similar graphics chip generations, it's pretty much a wash between NVidia and ATI hardware. Back in the day, I was a big fan of the original Voodoo and Voodoo-2 graphics cards - I still have a pair of Voodoo-2's that ran in SLI together. But NVidia's Riva TNT hardware wooed me with a bigger bang for the buck, and I became a dedicated NVidia user for years.

But when ATI introduced the Radeon 9700 series cards, it was pretty clear that my old GeForce 4 card was outmatched. And when NVidia's rebuttal (the first of the GeForce 5x00 series) bombed compared to the Radeon 9700, I tried my first ATI card - and was hooked!

But times changed, and now NVidia has bounced back - but image quality between the two is pretty much a non-issue. At any given price point, you can get a great card from either ATI or NVidia, and not really be able to tell the difference between them. Because of driver conflicts only (and that may someday be resolved), and only with this particular game (Medieval), I recommend ATI over NVidia.

Okay, let me explain. I ran to similar GFX cards that came out around the same time. An ATI Radeon 9600 and a Geforce 5500. Yes, I know the ATI ran a trillion times faster but when I put them in the same computer with the same configs - just swapping out the cards. THE NVIDIA HAD A WAY BETTER PICTURE!!!! I wish I had a screenshot but I swear upon my childs life the Nvidia card was a lot better on the eyecandy. The difference wasn't little either, the color was way better. The only thing the ATI card had was a little sharper picture. For pure realism much less immersion factor, stick with Nvidia - except for MTW.

[EatYerGreens]

Budwise,

I have ATI myself, only it's one of the cheaper ones - Radeon 9200 (I wanted twin monitor support and this fitted my budget at the time).

Anyway, the ATI control panel utility has a whole section where you can change the colour balance/depth to custom settings. I think you could have achieved equivalent richness of colour in this way and you were just disappointed by the default settings of one card versus the other. Evidently the NVidea team's idea of a good default setting is different from that at ATI.

In your shoes, I would have done exactly the same thing - gone for the one I liked best in its 'out of the box' form - but just wanted to make the point that you could have had the quality AND the colour to your liking.

[Budwise]

Thanks. Yeah I really didn't tweak with many settings but I remember tweaking with the color. But it wasn't just that, I can't even put my finger on it but if I had to live with the image from the card being my permenent eyes, I would 100% with NO regret go with nVidia. Like I said, I don't know what it was but it just looked better.