Hi and Hello.
I whas hoping that i could ask you à question.
I have à dualboot pc since i dont have space or money to have 2 Pc
I have ran into à problem where My grafic card is soon dead.
Since i also game some i whas looking to buy à good grafic card
Im looking at Ati 6870 or The nvidia 560ti
Is there any if ati vs nvidia that fall at risk of cousing issues with cubase 6?
/Jesper
I’ve been a computer user since childhood and an IT technician professionally for over 11 years now. I am a die hard nVidia fan. My boss is as well. I don’t have links, proof, or documentation to backup my personal opinion so please take it just as that - one guy on the internets opinion. In all my years there have been countless issues with ATI drivers. Even now at my current firm there are laptops which the ATI driver bluescreens windows and it’s a documented issue. It’s resolved by a driver update however, but I have personally never had issues with nVidia cards and drivers crashing my machines or causing any serious problems. I have with ATI on my personal machines and work machines. So these days it’s nvidia all the way for me.
Of course, others will have differing and countering opinions than I. So take this with a grain of salt.
Rev.
Ati’s drivers aren’t always up to the task as much as nvidia’s, but Ati’s pricepoint is very tempting. For instance Ati have great difficulty getting proper OpenGL support in their drivers, taking several driver versions for OpenGL games to work properly. This isn’t really an issue anymore since Brink is quite probably the last game ever to draw all its power from OpenGL.
It’s really a gamble, noone can guarantee their cards work in all builds perfectly, ATI can’t, but neither can Nvidia so it’s a guess. I’m personally very happy with my Ati card, but be prepared to try different driver versions if things don’t work out well at the first try.
I bought a 3D Nvidia GTX460 gfxcard last year for my old DAW Asus P5K deluxe mobo, as my G8800GTS was faulty. This didn’t work out at all, as I had high periodic PDC latency peaks all the time, which resulted in bad ASIO performance (8000ms red peaks). I even tried the MSI drivers the followed with the card, but also tried the Nvidia drivers. None of them worked, probably since they’re based on the same driver model from Nvidia.
I couldn’t push the ASIO driver up to more than about 50-60% before I could hear clicks in the audio path. Then I borrowed an old passive cooled ATI X1550 gfx card, and checked the PDC latency again. This time it was down to nearly zero 
Now I’m really not sure, if the bad performance was because of the modern GTX460 card in an old motherboard, or the Nvidia driver model just was so bad, introducing lots of PDC latency?!
But I would guess, since the PCIe interface on the GTX460 is back compatible with older PCIe x 16 standards, that the Nvidia driver model for the card was very bad, and that the ATI driver was so much better. But I think it depends all on how good the driver is made for both Nvidia & ATI.
Personally I’m thinking of buying either a HD6970 or a GTX570 gfxcard for my upcomming DAW system, as I do a little gaming on a second partition But not sure of which has the better driver for stable PDC latency.
SLL
I use a very simple passive cooled nvidia card which also gives spikes when nearing 70 % CPU utilization.
As a general rule (for me!) I do not use game cards. The cards design is to maximise graphic quality and speed experience so the games are playable. This would mean that the driver could do thing in favor of graphics and thus grabbing resources needed for background threads such as vst, vsti’s etc. etc. so realtime application such as Cubase / premiere can suffer lack in resources giving all kind of problems
Just curious, not doubting in any way, how did you find out the video card is causing those spikes?
Rev.
By turning of the nvidia driver and falling back to the original VESA driver which it has when doing an clean install.
Before I thought of this I did a lot of other rule-outs, like swapping memory, FW card, cables and more like an OS reinstall 