Hi,

I'm trying to determine which is the better of these two video cards: 128MB Nvidia GeForce 8600GT card while the other has a 512MB ATI Radeon X1650 card.

Both cards are the upper-level mid-range versions of their respective series. On the one hand, the ATI has substantially more VRAM, but the Nvidia supports D3D 10 and SM4.0 as opposed to D3D 9.0c/SM3.0 that the ATI supports. Also, I have always heard better things about Nvidia cards compared to ATI cards.

I'm trying to find some advice on which one is better, but I can't find any actual comparisons or anything for these specific cards (the comparisons I can find are only similar ones like the X1650 Pro or 8600GT PCI-E), so I figure that what I need to know is whether the extra VRAM is that important. Looking at the ATI table and the Nvidia table seems to indicate that the Nvidia is better, but then again, the Nvidia table also says that the GeForce 8600GT is a PCI-E card with at least 256MB even though the card in question is an AGP with 128MB. (:-?)

(It looks like the ATI card is not supported in Windows 7 while the Nvidia card is, which I suppose is also a factor, though not quite as immediately relevant as performance.)

Any ideas?
Thanks a lot.