Is the NVIDIA GeForce GT220 or the ATI Radeon HD 4650 better?

The nvidia card has 1GB of discrete GDDR3. The ATI card is only listed as having 1GB of video memory which may be shared (not 100% sure) from that system's 8GB of DDR2 SDRAM. I don't know a lot about how GPUs are rated but I get the impression that the nvidia card is better. I'd like to know if it's a lot better or if I won't notice the difference.



I'm comparing two computers from Best Buy, the (Asus - Essentio) CG5270-BP003 and the (Gateway) DX4300-03. The nvidia card comes with the Asus; the ATI card is with the Gateway.



links:

(Asus) http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?…

(Gateway) http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?…



I don't need anything that's top of the line; as long as these graphics cards are both mid-level or better they'll work fine for me. Thanks in advance for any replies :)|||I have been researching the heck out of these low end cards. So here are some things I have seen.



The ATI card will likely have GDDR2 and all of the 1gb is on the card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=hd+4650+1gb



The Nvidia card uses GDDR3 which is much faster than the GDDR2. The reviews (really speculation) say the GT 220 should perform between a 9500 and 9600 Nvidia card.



If you look here.



http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-q3-2009-mainstream-quality/3DMark06-v1.1.0-3DMark-Score,1374.html



you will have to interpolate but you can guess that it should be a wash, performance wise, between the 2 cards.



I have a 4670 512mb GDDR3 in this Vista Ultimate 64 bit machine I am typing on. The drivers throttle the card down in frequency when just surfing or typing so it has a very low power / noise signature. I don't know if the Nvidia card drivers will do that. I can also tell you that I have watched Blu-rays with this card with no flicker. The same was true with my old 3870. I guess it is accepted fact that radeon cards are good at off-loading video decoding from the CPU. Also, The Nvidia is a new release whereas the Radeon is a proven / tested design.|||Read reviews. Nvidia and ATI always like to make near carbon-copies of eachother's GPUs