Since I've never owned a NVidia graphics card/chip (ATI cards and laptop chipsets have worked great for me so far), but the new laptops I'm looking at seem to mostly have NVidia, what are the generic plusses and minuses of each, if there are such? Can discuss desktop graphics cards also, even though my main interest at the moment are the mobile chipsets for laptops.

Whether ATI or NVidia has more performance isn't quite as important to me at the moment, as my backlog is mostly older games anyway, and I rarely buy brand-new games demanding the latest HW (still, I have some, e.g. Witcher 2, and might buy others just to test and show off the new HW). But is there any significant performance cap between the two? I recall from the past, when the subject still interested me, that they were just leap-frogging each others in performance from time to time, there was no clear winner in the long run.

For laptop graphics performance, I am currently aiming at NVidia GTX 560M level, or maybe better (e.g. 570M or even 580M) if I find a good deal. I don't know yet what is the corresponding AMD/ATI offering to e.g. GTX 560M. For some reason it seems to me that pretty much all "gaming laptops" they are selling here from various laptop vendors have NVidia, while the lower-end 500€ non-gaming laptops usually have ATI/AMD. I am not interested into paired "crossfire"/"SLI" settings of Alienware etc.

A couple of rumours I've read:

1. Running older games (GOG or originals) on Windows 7 64bit seems to yield better results with AMD/ATI. Still true or false? Reading e.g. Sacrifice (or was it also Citizen Kabuto) discussions, some people plainly suggest changing NVidia card for an ATI card. Is this general for many older Windows (3D) games, or are some old games vice-versa and NVidia gives better compatibility?

I have several older systems with ATI hardware as a fallback solution, but I'd still prefer my main system to be backwards compatible as well, maybe even trying to install both WinXP (32bit) and Win7 (64bit) on it, if possible.

2. If you use Linux (3D acceleration in it), NVidia is a better choice? I don't care that much about gaming in Linux at the moment, even though I use it for other uses though.

I don't have that many experiences with mobile graphic chips, but I had two laptops with Intel Graphic Chips and those suck... always had problems with flickering screens and games are running really slow of not at all.

I always used nvidia until now, I have an ATI currently, its crap and I cannot wait to get a new NVIDIA card.

Yes, I've ruled those out. I'm looking for laptops with either NVidia or ATI/AMD, even if there may be integrated Intel graphics chips on top of them in the same laptop. E.g. NVidia GTX 560M, let alone 570M or 580M, seems to give gaming performance that is probably quite enough for me for years to come, even for an odd new game. What kind of issues? Compatibility with older games, performance with new games, or something else?

I've had good experience so far, but then I don't have experience with new AMD HW. My laptop has ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series apparently, and my old desktop Radeon X800 (XT?) if I remember right, bought it as new long time ago.

Mostly I am interested whether the NVidia compatibility issues with older games are still valid.

Not sure how useful this comparison will be since the NVidia Cards I have are not remotely comparable to my ATI cards in terms of power, but if I remember correctly, Nvidia does not have backwards OpenGL compatibility, so that might be an important consideration for you.

Quite frankly, any DosBOX game runs fine on any card whatsoever.

If you are looking at newer games, it...unfortunately depends. Whatever laptop card is equivalent to the 560 desktop core (likely the 570M or 580M) is probably your best choice, since the 560 Ti (desktop) is undoubtedly the best card for the money in the current generation.

Using my second mobile nVidia GPU and have no issues whatsoever .
First one was 7900gt and now I have a 460gtx (optimus, so it has an intel chip also).

All new games work 1902x1080 at max settings, with some slowdowns in Metro 2033 and Crysis 2 with all dx11 and texture patches.

Only issue playing a older game was some gliches with SW: Republic Commando, everytinh else works fine.

edit: OpenGL works fine, runs the oldest stuff like GLQuake and Hexen 2.

Strange I went the other way from NV to AMD and loved the change... less heat fewer crashes and driver bugs.. no card destroying driver bugs... frame rates roughly the same as the (more expensive) NV card I also got at the same time... think I'll stick with the AMD stuff thanks

Years back, nvidia was the one making decent drivers and faster cards and they still get a lot of leftover goodwill for that, and AMD gets flak from their history of bad drivers.

But these days they're more or less even.

Build quality (heat/cooling noise/durability/crashing) depends greatly on the company actually making the cards, unfortunately cheap & well built don't come together and customers prefer cheap.

Both companies have just rebadged their old mobile cards, AMD 6xxx -> 7xxxx and nVidia 5xx -> 6xx.

As to original questions, I have an impression (but no factual knowledge) that 2. is still a valid point. Better (if not good) linux support from nvidia camp.

1. Is also maybe perhaps true. My current ATI 4870 has no problems running older games (that I have) while my previous nvidia (7600) struggled and crashed with KotOR and NWN. But that's an obviously ridiculously small sample set...

Thanks, maybe I'll look for an AMD laptop then, even though the best "gaming laptop" deals I've come across so far seemed to be with NVidia hardware.

I was about to ask whether it affects anything that XBox360 has NVidia hardware (e.g. multiplatform games would run better on NVidia hardware; thinking of mainly the early reported ATI problems with id's "Rage"), but I realized only now that 360 has actually ATI/AMD hardware (AMD Xenos), not NVidia. It was the original XBox that had NVidia hardware (NVidia NV2A). I kinda like the fact MS swaps the two competing PC HW manufacturers with their consoles, not becoming too dependent on or favouring either one in the long run.

Flippy forgot that AMD still release Beta drivers during a month to fix specific games btw ;)

But yeah MS switched to ATi (as it was then now AMD) because of NV being dicks.. (refused to drop the price per chip, refused to let them fab their own chip, wouldn't give them the chips internals (so they couldn't produce streamlined dev tools... and so on)) ATi/AMD just sold them the design they don't even fab the chip for them gave them everything they required and helped design the interconnects etc..

Utter bullshit. The fact is: there are more people complaining about drivers issues on ATI cards than those who use NVIDIA cards. Compatibility between newer cards (ATI or NVIDIA) and older 3D games is a bloody roulette, you won't earn a damn nothing on this front going for an ATI card.... Linux is NOT for gaming and never was, end of the story.

I disagree, I have never had so many problems gaming than when I was using nVidia cards. Now, maybe it was PNY's fault or maybe the revisions I was using were particularly buggy, but I had serious issues with nVidia that were never resolved in the time I was using them despite many driver releases.

My AMD card OTOH is completely stable and I can even play Blood II and Evil Genius without having myriad crashes due to the graphics card.