Slashdot Mirror
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."
With the benchmark-favoring drivers fiasco, just how much can we be expected to trust a review which relies so heavily on this testing method?
And the winner is.........The FIC ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. We compared these cards in every category we could think of and in the end, we saw better performance overall from the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Did the FX 5900 fail to impress us? No, not at all. We believe both cards are worthy of any good system but we do have to tip our hats to the excellent performance that the Radeon 9800 Pro has showed us here today.
But it looked pretty damn close in most of the benchmarks. Interesting that in 3DMARK, the FX 5900 ran away with it. Hmmmm.. Oh well, I doubt 5% of the people who post comments on this are going to buy one soon anyway. I know i'm not in the market.
Is anyone still buying Nvidia cards any more these days
Hi! Yes, we buy them at work all the time. We do a lot of 3D graphics work on Linux, and support for ATI cards under Linux was pretty pathetic until very recently. I'm told this has improved, but it's still not as easy as using the NVidia drivers, and we don't really trust ATI's software now. (Apparently the Radeon Mobility is not supported under Linux either - this has made my search for a new laptop very difficult.)
It's not the most interesting thing to read for pleasure, but I find it useful since I am currently looking for a new video card. I would like to decide for myself which one is better. It's nice to see tests done on several games, so you know its not a single game that just happens to be optimized more for one card than the other. At least now they include things beyond frame rates, like image quality.
At least I now know (actually I knew before since it is good to check several reviews) that I can get the ATI 9800 and know that the extra $100 for the 5900 would not have been worth it. I would still think this even if the 5900 was 1% faster on every test which would likely cause the conclusion to be that the 5900 was better.
Besides, most reviews have a nice navigation thing at the bottom that lets you skip to the exact benchmark you want to see, or straight to the conclusion.
HardOCP's coverage of all this is disgraceful. When Extremetech originally broke the story, HardOCP practically accused them of making it up, and said they had "motives of their own" for writing the article outlining the problem. Instead of investigating on their own, apparently the procedure at HardOCP is to question the findings of the other, more competent, tech sites.
... As if _they_ broke the story. As if _they_ are responsible for causing a patch to be posted. No apology to Extremetech, either (in fact, no mention of them at all)
Then, when the fix is posted, they write "This is in response to the news item we posted last week."
And now, they're making unfounded accusations that 3DMark is taking bribes to skew the benchmark results? WTF? Why doesn't HardOCP just hire Jayson Blair to write their "articles"? At least then, they'd have less spelling errors.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I agree with you, hardware sites in general tend to make way too big a deal out of minimal increases in performance. That said, I'll probably end up buying an FX series card eventually for one reason - DX9 support. (Almost all the cool new features are also supported as OGL extensions. See also: Doom 3). It's gonna suck for my wallet, but when you're attempting to get into graphics development, hey, it happens. :)
I guess I wouldn't be as pissed if it was a genuinely interesting article, rather than a collection of specs and benchmarks.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
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
My next card will probably be a full DX9 card, and I'll wait until it's about a hundred bucks. My DX8-capable card is probably enough until Longhorn comes out in 2005 though :D I only bought THIS card because neverwinter nights was too slow at higher resolutions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On the other hand, ATI has really turned themselves around recently by all accounts, and started writing good drivers. Unfortunately in the low to medium end market, around $100 (anyone else remember when $100 was still quite a bit to spend on a video card? hooray for nostalgia) nVidia was the clear winner when I bought my GF4Ti4200 - It was the same price as a 9500 and faster than the 9500; The 9500 pro is supposedly faster than IT is, but it was like $40 more at the time. So, I went nVidia.
As long as nVidia cards are cheaper in the low end market, which is where I hang out because I'm not fricken mr. moneybags any more (not that I was ever rich, but I was certainly well-off, unlike now) I'll keep buying nVidia. ATI doesn't care about my money :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who really cares? I'm not about to drop $500 on a video card, nor are most people on slashdot. Honestly, the video card market is totally uninteresting these days. There aren't many games available right now that take advantage of the features of these cards. And when games really start appearing, the cards will be available for much less. NVidia vs. ATI, I mean seriously, who cares? Both companies are full of lying sleazeballs, both companies offer similar products at similar prices, and both companies pay off "hardware review" sites to give their products favorable reviews.
"Brand loyalty" in video cards is a joke. It's like having brand loyalty on paper clips. This holy war between NVidia and ATI fans is retarded, it's like people are TRYING to find something to argue over. Neither company offers a product that really distinguishes itself from the other, so it's all a wash anyway. Can we please stop posting these "reviews," as they're all obviously biased in one way or another (based upon the "reviewer's" chosen side in the holy war.) It's just a goddamn video card, not the cure for cancer.
Well since I don't need the power of my new video card to run benchmarks or UT2003 (that game blows anyway), here's benchmarks that are actually worth reading!
e fo rce_fx_5900-11.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030512/g
Like I really care about 500FPS in UT2003 or comanche, my GF3 runs them fine. So when I buy the newest card, I should be thinking about the games I'm buying it for!
With all that testing, did anybody consider compatibility? I run Red Hat and Windows on the same boot system so I need compatible hardware that will run in both environments and the Radeon 8500 does just that.
A few nanoseconds in a game is well and good but if you plan on running two or more operating systems on a single machine you might check into that aspect of your video card.
Just a thought.