Vulpes, I have a pretty deep-seated hatred of Nvidia, so I basically don't buy them anymore unless they absolutely
plaster AMD. This company effectively waged war on DirectX10, and tried to on DX11 (with much less traction, and much less effort, since they got DX11 parts out fairly quickly).
Any tech company who competes by trying to hold back technology for everyone, rather than simply making their technology
better, is a counterproductive company that hurts the market.
Nvidia is also very scummy about how they did it. They'd do things like use their clout with Ubisoft to remove DX10.1 from Assassin's Creed, because only AMD cards supported 10.1, and since its
way faster than DX10 in how it handles textures, AMD cards were outrunning Nvidia cards in the game. DX10.1 is really just DX10, sans the neutering MS did as a quiet bailout for Nvidia, because their cards couldn't support full DX10, so MS knocked those features out, and then renamed the full-featured DX10 as DX10.1, which is vastly superior in performance. Not being one to allow that kind of advantage, Nvidia pulled every possible dirty move to keep DX10.1 off the market for quite awhile.
They did something similar with the various publishers of Batman, Arkum Asylum, which literally has a "no-ATI" code in it that disables anti-aliasing on all AMD cards.
Then there's the intentional Nvidia naming confusion. You know the GTX 460? Of course not, because that's not a card. It's FOUR cards. Nvidia took a wildly successful GPU, and named far lesser cards after it to confuse customers. The 768mb and 1GB versions are entirely different GPUs, as different as the Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 (probably more different, actually). The GTX 460 SE is at least named a little differently to warn customers... Nvidia wasn't so charitable on the OEM version. The OEM GTX 460 is nothing like the other 460s, and is a much slower card, but customers buy it as an option, because PC-selling companies can advertise it as a "GTX 460!", and customers think they're getting a good video card, when they're really getting crap that just happens to be named after a good video card.
Intel... well I won't go on another anti-Nvidia style rant, but sufficing to say I don't like them a whole lot more than Nvidia.
So like you, I'll spend money on AMD preferentially... however, I think it should be said that neither of us should seek to spend
other people's money on those convictions. Make people aware that Nvidia's a scumbag company, and that Intel is dubious, sure, but it's also important to make them aware of the best computer they can get for the money.
Edited by Catamount, 03 February 2012 - 08:18 AM.