BTW is the "willy waving" of machine specs supposed to impress us??

Well from the TS' pov it may have been because those are the company's they were already with the moment they bought their rigs, which may not be the case if they chose it themselves.

Afaik, NVIDIA provides faster improvements/updates than ATI, hence making it the best for me. But you can always try either, or both at the same time, if you wish to see which is which for yourself!

My Macbook Pro has nVidia graphics in it and it works a lot better than the other Macbook Pro with ATi graphics for gaming and designing. There is just something in the architecture that makes it work much more seamlessly.

I guess nvidia. nvidia and ati are same, but nvidia has just one plus it is Phyx. Other wise both are quality companies that rule the market.

Ati is my favorite... Nividia have nice products but ati have better

It really depends on the tier of the product in the end. For web designing, I always feel combined with a good Intel processor, nVidia has great performance.

I don't even know what's in my workstation, but I have 2 cards powering 3 monitors. All I know is I got the second or third tier cards for < $100 each. I think the one powering my 2 22" monitors was around $50, and the one powering my 30" was around $100. No sense getting the latest most powerful card unless you're gaming. For $150, I'm powering a sick monitor setup, and I run Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, Flash, and even 3DS Max perfectly without a single graphics problem. And being a dual Quad-core Xeon, processor power never became a problem. RAM ultimately has always been my bottleneck. This setup is 4-5 years old, too, and still runs solid.