ATI and Nvidia Stream Processing and speed?

This is a crossroad I am facing myself and I will try my best to explain it as simply as possible. There is no doubt that the Radeon is easily the fastest single gpu card out there right now, it also has incredible power management so how can this card be overshadowed by the 295, an almost 1 year old card by now?

Consider this, the amount and speed of the programmable ALU are fairly comparable to current processors today. You can pit a Intel Atom clocked at 2Ghz against a Core 2 at 2 Ghz and run a program that only saturates one thread, however do you think they will perform similarly? God no.

Truth is AMD loves to add huge amounts of ALU on the die but makes there very small and rudementary, with great architecture this is great stuff in games but GPU based tasks are entirely a different story. Nvidia tend to spend more time on larger more complex ALU that can perform far more complex instructions per ALU without relying on the CPU to fill in the blanks.

Here is where you hit a crossroad, the expanded ALU in both cards are far more prevalent when they are being tasked to handling higher resolution frame with enhancements like FSAA. In short it makes no sense in dropping 400+ dollars on a card that will net you zero benefits because of your monitors limitations specially considering the extra cooling difficulty using one of these two heavyweights.

The basic answer, they both do the same thing. Kind of like a Nissan 2.0L engine and a Ford 2.0L engine, they do the same thing but they are not the exact same engine. Is one better than the other? Well I guess this depends on what company you like more. Unless you are buying a top of the line card, it seems that they pretty much line up. (ATI/AMD has the top of the "best" high end card right now I believe."