ATI Vs Nvidia

Not really true about the cards working better together. They are just CPUs and GPUs. For a while people said that because AMD did not allow SLI on their systems and Nvidia didnt allow Crossfire on their's. And since Nvidia mostly consisted of Intel CPU sockets as of late people just paired Nvidia with Intel and AMD with AMD/ATI. Nvidia however was such a failure at chipsets they dumped that whole portion of their business.

But from a non-technical standpoint no one pairs well with nvidia and everyone pairs well with ATI. Nvidia is a terrible company from a business perspective and everyone hates them. This is because Nvidia has talked trash to nearly all major corporations and screwed them over at some point.
One reason OEM's hate Nvidia is because of their dishonest business practices, such as selling known to be defective silicon. This caused huge failure among motherboard chipsets and lots of RMA's due to dead systems. Among this issue was also their whole 7000, 8000, and 9000 series having a much higher chance of early deaths.
I remember when Nvidia's CEO said that they were the greatest company in the world and Intel is a stupid company who cant perform well. That got a lot of laughs, but Intel didnt think it was funny. That was right about the time Nvidia's license was expiring for SLI support on Intel boards, that led to a whole year of Intel telling nvidia to go f*** themselves and did not allow support for SLI on Intel based motherboard. Nvidia finally bought themselves back into Intel's good graces and now allows SLI support once more.
Microsoft also doesnt like Nvidia and has had ATI graphics chips in both XBox's and also is having ATI in the next XBox. Apple has had many bad experiences with nvidia and keeps dumping them from their products because Nvidia is giving them so much trouble, yet after half a year or so of refusing to use Nvidia products Apple switches back because Nvidia offers them a large enough sum of money.


As for drivers, for quite a long time Nvidia has better drivers and ATI's team wasnt very good. This was YEARS ago though and ATI has gotten far better since being bought by AMD back at the launch of the HD2000 series. However, ATI still drops the ball when it comes to pre-launch support with crossfire. You usually have to wait a week or two before you have top performing drivers and crossfire profiles that work with the latest big game. Nvidia on the other hand makes sure they put out a near final driver and an SLI profile right before at at the time a game launches.
And actually last year Nvidia had a pretty bad time with their drivers. I havent heard anything recently but last year Nvidia had 3 or 4 driver releases that caused major issues on computers, such as a high number of bluescreens, some people needing to reinstall Windows to fix their driver install, graphics glitches, and even one that killed a huge number of GPUs.



As for performance, ATI has done very well the past few generations. the HD4000 series completely dominated Nvidia for a very long time. Nvidia's "Fermi" only came out on top right at the end of the generation when the 5k series was about to be launched. Then the 5000 series was much better than the Fermi cards until 3 or 4 months later when nvidia finally fixed their issues and put out a proper version that performed well, this beat the 5000 series. Nvidia then updated Fermi once again and brought the GTX500 series which is better than ATI 6000 series, however when comparing cards of the same cost both ATI and Nvidia are neck and neck and only the GTX580 performs significantly better than ATI but most people either cant afford to shell out $500+ for a graphics card or simply dont want to. Most people only buy $150-250 cards, and in the category both ATi and Nvidia are about the same with Nvidia only recently coming out with a bit of an advantage.

Prior to ATI's 4000 series, Nvidia had help the performance crown for 3 or 4 generations. Nvidia came oout with the 7800 which was really good, then followed with an even more amazing 8800 card, then just overclocked the 8800 for a bit and made the 9800, then renamed it and overclocked it a tiny bit more and came out with the GTX100 series. During the 7, 8, and 9 series from nvidia they were on top, with ATI pulling back ahead at the time of the GTX100 series. So that was 3 years straight that Nvidia was top dog and ATI was having really rough times in terms of hardware performance and software stability. It was the middle of that time period that ATI was bought by AMD.





You are right about the whole vram issue. Nvidia is in a bad spot right now because many of their cards only offer 1GB of memory, which is no longer enough in the latest games when playing on highest settings. Once you exceed a cards memory, performance takes a nose dive. You have to pay out an extra $100 or so to get the higher memory version and most people dont want to do that. ATI on the other hand anticipated games like this and released most of their upper mid/top end cards with 2GB of memory.
The 580 can only have 1.5GB or 3GB of memory due to the unorthodox way Nvidia chose to make its memory controller. Due to mismatched channels the card can only have an odd amount of vram. Thus you either have barely enough/not enough or way too much.

 

I used to be involved in the industry, I did some contracting work with different people. I have been out of that for a little while now and am currently in a more steady job where I am training to take over the company, but I still do the odd contract on the side. So I like to keep up with things still and do a lot of reading on the subject matter. You never know when the knowledge may come in handy.






As for a certain piece of hardware just "feeling" better, I completely understand and have felt that way with different things over the years. Others have felt that sort of thing too, even Anandtech mentioned that sort of things once in a review they did.