[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]If you're referring to the poor hardware acceleration in Photoshop and other Adobe Creative Suite products, I believe that problem was dealt with, or at least minimized, with one of the early Catalyst 10 driver releases almost a year ago. I remember being perplexed by the unusually poor performance I was getting out of the HD4200 in comparison to my 7800GT. I originally thought the discrepancy was due to the HD4200 being, well... an HD4200. Toms wrote a good article at the time which confronted this issue, and after a few driver updates my HD4200 performed noticeably better, still not great but CS4 is at least usable. What surprised me more then anything at the time was how little attention the problem received, and how long it took to solve, given the maturity of many of the affected GPU's. And as for your statement about gaming, there's probably a good deal of truth to this. There's no way anyone who had just bought a high end HD5000 series card wouldn't have noticed this problem if they actually used Photoshop or AfterEffects for serious productivity, it was very obvious. ATI/AMD also doesn't put as strong of an emphasis on the professional market as Nvidia, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that most ATI cards (and users) are primarily gaming oriented, at least more so then Nvidia.[/citation]
You should also be aware your comparing a really low end card with what use to be a top of the line card.. honestly their performance should be somewhat smiler with the 7800 being better ( but thats just from some logical thought ) By the way ati does make a line of cards for professionals.. If you buy a low end video card expect it to perform like one. If you need professional get it but don't complain when your $40 video card cant do what the one you should be using does. (now this is assuming it is used for as you put it serious productivity.)
quote: In Windows games, probably never. In anything else, DirectX hardly figures, and it is all OpenGL.
Simple answer no.. To many people have to much say in what can and cant go into it. one of the major flaws in the "open source" approach. #1 reason imo linux hasn't done anything its promised to do against windows since i read about it before even xp came out. to many people to little standardization to much time messing around.