High-end Graphics Card Overview

High-end Graphics Card Overview 
You have deep pockets, yearn for the best experience in the game and still confused as to which graphics card to buy? Had it been a Monopoly in the graphics card business, then there wouldn't be so many problems. But, two graphic cards companies namely ATI and NVIDIA are continuously churning out new cards just to outdo each other in terms of performance. Before, we discuss about the current situation of high-end cards, let's just travel back in time and see the fight between these two companies, as it will help you get a better idea of which is a better company.
Initially 3DFX was the king in the graphics accelerator business. But, the NVIDIA Riva TNT graphics card simply bashed the best offering from 3DFX then. And NVIDIA kept on churning out newer generations of graphics cards every six months and 3DFX was unable to keep pace with NVIDIA and finally just shut down and sold its business to NVIDIA. This was the time when NVIDIA's monopoly began. The NVIDIA dominance continued with the GeForce 256 and GeForce 2 GTS. That was the time most graphics card companies started shutting down. All but one, ATI. The only reason why ATI was still operational was because their workstation graphics cards were selling well and NVIDIA didn't have a workstation graphics card yet. When NVIDIA released GeForce 2 GTS, ATI unleashed the first Radeon card codenamed R100 and was eventually called the Radeon 7500. But, in terms of performance, it was a step behind NVIDIA's offering. Though ATI never had major success with the Radeon 7500, their R200 a.k.a. Radeon 8500 did started making a dent in NVIDIA's sales figures.
During that time, NVIDIA released the GeForce 3 series, which boasted of DirectX 8.0 support and had never before seen features. ATI Radeon 8500 was one step ahead of the GeForce 3 in terms of features like the support for DirectX 8.1 and Trueform, but lacked in performance. But the performance difference was marginal and people started accepting the Radeon 8500 for getting the extra features and more importantly the superior image quality, which was ATI's forte. But, during that time Quake 3 was considered the benchmark for the graphics card. The company, which scored the most in Quake 3 was considered the ultimate winner. ATI were not known for good performance in OpenGL-based games. And since Quake 3 was an OpenGL-based game, ATI had to do something or else they would have lost the battle. Obviously making a new graphics card at that time was not possible. Here's when a new era dawned, which is known as Driver Optimization. The graphics card drivers were specially optimized for a particular game, which made the game run faster, but at the same sacrificed on some features such as image quality.
ATI suddenly took the performance crown from NVIDIA and upon investigation; it was found that ATI was cheating with its drivers. There was huge outcry and ATI had to pull back the drivers. So, the performance king was still NVIDIA. Then NVIDIA released the next generation graphic card GeForce 4 Ti, which was basically a small upgrade to GeForce 3 series. This widened the performance gap a little more in favor of NVIDIA, but their success was short lived. ATI released a graphics card codenamed R300 four months after the GeForce 4 Ti. This graphics card is none other than the Radeon 9700, and in terms of performance, it was giving double the scores of the GeForce 4 Ti in certain benchmarks. NVIDIA for the first time lost the performance crown officially.