Image Quality Showdown: ATI vs NVIDIA August '06
 

Evaluating today’s latest graphics cards can be a difficult, time-consuming process. There’s a lot that goes into a graphics card, no one metric can be used to determine the performance of a given product: the number of pixel/vertex shaders, clock speeds, memory subsystem, etc all share a symbiotic relationship. In other words, all the components within the GPU rely on each other greatly, no one component alone can be used to judge or even guesstimate the final performance of the product.
Performance isn’t the only aspect that’s used for measuring the success of a graphics card though. Equally important is the image quality of the graphics card. It’s here where things can get tricky very quickly, as judging image quality can be very subjective. What looks terrible to one person, may not be noticed by a second person; what looks “great!” or “excellent!” to one may only look “good” to another. Often times, there isn’t a very fine line separating the two, it’s more like a very subtle marker with no defined boundaries.