Oh dear, oh deary me.
Cyber-Mav: Posting benchmarks from
October 2005 with ancient drivers, and only selecting the benchmarks the 7800GTX won in, then calling everyone suggesting an X1800XT a fanboy makes baby Jesus cry.
It's pure hypocrisy, and you just owned yourself.
Now then, these ones are from
March 2006 and are taken from a 7900GTX/GT performance preview, and they show a very different story with much more mature drivers on both sides of the fence. Let's stop with the dishonesty shall we, and let the man get the best card for his money?
In many situations the X1800XT (both 256MB and 512MB versions)* spank the 7800GTX 256MB, and almost never lose to it at their worst, because these cards are almost on-par with the 7900GTX 512MB in some situations. It used to be that Nvidia graphics cards utterly dominated the OpenGL arena, but between the time that Cyber-Mav's benchmarks were recorded and the present day, ATI have really improved the quality of their drivers.
What we see today is that ATI and Nvidia cards are generally on-par in both Direct3D and OpenGL, with ATI cards usually being cheaper and pulling ahead in higher resolutions with anisotropic filtering and antialiasing enabled. However, Nvidia cards still dominate the flight simulator genre and this probably will not change for some time.
Take into account that you will also be getting an X1800XT new and with full warranty, whereas second-hand with no cover is pretty much the only way to get a 7800 Series graphics card these days, and you have a winner.
*The reason that there is a huge performance difference between the 7900GTX 256MB and 7900GTX 512MB is because the 512MB model did not only have increased VRAM, but it was also gifted with nicely ramped clockspeeds. The 256MB and 512MB versions of the X1800XT, however, have always performed practically identically.
