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GF FX 5900 Ultra vs. ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
Mack writes "OCAddiction.com has their GF FX 5900 Ultra vs. ATi Radeon 9800 Pro article online detailing which card is more powerful. Running a plethora of benchmarks we were anxious to see which card outperformed the other. Quite simple really. We take nVidia's top offering and pair it up against the current top offering from ATi and let them duke it out till the bitter end. Who will come out on top? Let's take a look."
who finds these types of articles really, really, really boring?
.03% increase in one card over the other is just tearingly boring to me. I often find myself skipping right through to the end just to see the final "verdict"
Staring at graphs indicating a
Why, oh why, can't we get some interesting writing in the field of online hardware reviews?
that way, we are forced to have a look at the article, thus preventing uninformed rants. Yes, it requires a tad more effort, but I think Slashdotters need that =)
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Which one has non-NDA documentation or Open Source drivers available for it? I know it won't be the nVidia, but have ATI released anything yet?
Thats what I figured.
It's cheaper, it apparently runs faster, and I also hear that it doesn't need TWO SLOTS like the FX 5900.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The 9800 Pro wins in all but 2 benchmarks. I think every tech site on the web was shown the ATI to be superior to the Nvidia. (This is not a troll, I don't play 3d games or even own a card from ATI or Nvidia. I only casually follow 3d graphics cards, but obviously the /. editors don't at all.)
I'll do what I always do. Wait for my current card not to be able to keep up at the optimal resolution for my screens with the games I like, then pick a £100 card that does.
*pats his shiney new GF4 Ti 4200*
Sure, I have to upgrade more often, but it seems to be a lot less painful for me than for early adopters - and there are plenty of homes for older cards in my secondary and tertiary boxes, and then a final home put out to pasture in the render farm.
Beep beep.
Becaues the guy who submitted the article is from the website that wrote the article... He obviously wants a billion slashbots to raise their ad revenue. If he gave away the ending, fewer people would read his article.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Call it a troll if you want, i just trust benchmarks as much as i trust political surveys. IOW both of those are only tools for the people who publish them, not for the people who are actually reading them ( Sadly, there was time when that wasn't so true... not anymore. )
Anyways, i wouldn't buy an FX ultra, because of the 2 slots you have to give it. Yeah that's kinda BS and also is a good sign of design flaw. Aside for that minor detail, i would, like always, trust the products from Nvidia. I've never had any problems with those, they always gave me very good performances and are painless to install. I can't say the same thing for ATI products. I have a big list of frustating memories from ATI and their open source drivers aren't good enough to clear that list. In fact these drivers are a fsckin PITA and i still can't make them work with the DRI under gentoo.
Guess what? The nvidia drivers do not require the DRI. Woot! Guess what? The nvidia drivers only take 5 secs to install and work. Guess what? The drivers are closed source and i don't give a #$!%#@. ( yeah that kind of thinking usually ends up costing me 100$ more... oh well can't have everything.. )
Sorry ATI, but I use Linux... If ATI supported Linux as much as nvidia does mayby I'd buy one. But till then I'll stick to nvidia, no matter if it's slower then ATI's card.
What really sucks when playing games is a huge drop in your frame rate. You want the card that has the best minimum frames per second (with the best image quality).
Also, who cares about these synthetic benchmarks. Gamers should only care about performance in games that are actually out there - cover all the major 3D engines.
WBGG
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
Am I the only one who automatically ignores any benchmark whose result isn't in FPS? I learned a long ago, from PC Mags 3d benchmarks, that synthetic benchmarks are absolutely useless!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
With such amazing performance from both cards the ultimate benchmark has to be the picture quality - which OCAddition gave to ATI Hands Down.
Given that both these cards are going to be able to give a decent frame rate with whatever program is thrown at them i would be looking at the picture quality - which after all is what we have to look at.
You are of course quite correct. Kyle is merely an idiot with a website, as are many others these days, who is acting as nVidia's PR puppet. He has been ridiculed by many, yet seems intent on maintaining his wicked ways. Unfortunately, thousands of less informed internet users frequent his site, propagating his misinformation.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
I learned a long ago, from PC Mags 3d benchmarks, that synthetic benchmarks are absolutely useless!
And what exactly differentiates a real benchmark from a synthetic benchmark? While Futuremark does report the fill rate (both single-texturing and multi-texturing), it is simply extraneous information, which is in no way used to determine the resulting 3DMark score; the score is determined by running four game demos, which use engines akin to those used in "real games." The individual game results are reported by 3DMark, multiplied by certain coefficients, and then added together, rendering the result (3DMarks).
The reason 3DMark03 is invalid is not because it is a "synthetic" benchmark, but because nVidia mucked it up with their shenanigans. The frightful truth of the matter is, however, that the same illegitimate "optimizations" (i.e. static clip planes) that were used by nVidia in 3DMark can just as easily be used in any and all timedemo. Hence, your precious "real" benchmarks are just as susceptible, and may be just as compromised and invalid as 3DMark03. To make matters worse, unlike 3DMark03, which offers advanced diagnostic tools that allowed nVidia's dubious actions to be exposed, "real" benchmarks have no such tools. Therefore, exposing cheating in "real" benchmarks is much more difficult; however, just because something cannot be proven does not make it false.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Great theory, except for the fact that nVidia dropped out of 3DMark's developer program last fall. I doubt they're ponying up anything.
I think it's also been firmly established as well that nVidia BS'd its way through build 330 by way of straight-up cheating, not by paying any one off.
And your numbers are generally irrelevant. Smaller core means cheaper, means lower temperature, but by does not really translate to *faster*. Neither do the frequencies. 850MHz is the *DDR* speed, so the first comparison is actually 450/425, so we can toss that one out. Second one is equally useless because nVidia core vs. ATI core is apples to oranges. Two very different ways of getting to the same point, so you can't use MHz as a rule of thumb. Those bandwidth limits are also purely theoretical and both companies use slightly different math to get there.
Lastly, how are UT2k3, Quake 3, et al considired "real-world" benchmarks, while 3DMark flythroughs are not? Is someone under the impression that the benchmark is basically going through some kind of special video clip? No. Every one of 3DMark's flythroughs is operating in a complete, three-dimensional environment. Those with the developer version of 3DMark can attest to this, as they are free to move the camera around the environment as they please.
The flythroughs are not "synthetic." The multitexturing tests, the image quality test, the CPU tests--yes, all synthetic. But those don't factor into the damn score anyway. Timedemos are effectively identical--and just as prone to fiddling. Get informed, people. There's nothing sacred about any of your benchmarks.
Anyone else see a trend here? I have an ATI card, blah blah blah its so much better. I have a NVIDIA card, blah blah blah its so much better. Can't they just agree both are pretty much the same and both are good products? That the benchmarks are so close that it really doesn't matter whos on top? Just find what card is cheaper and buy it. And for the record, BOTH cheated on benchmarks. So unfairly saying one is better "cuz the other cheats in benchmarks" is retarded logic.
I dunno: FPS benchmarks aren't all that helpful either, because they are inevitably averages of demo performance. What I want to know is the lowest FPS score: how bad it gets during the most intense action in a game. It's not the constant framerate throughout the game that I worry about, since I know pretty well that a given card can manage a given game at a certain level. It's the "hitches" that I worry about, and want to know if they are eliminated by the card.