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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."
If you haven't heard about the controversy with MadOnion/Futuremark/3dmark2003, check out This article. Kyle @ HardOCP suggests that if you give Futuremark more $$$, they will 'optimize' their benchmark to help out your video card's score.
Now, in this review, we see that GeForceFX 5900 clearly dominates the hardware side of things: .13 vs .15 micron process, 450/850 vs. 380/340 (GPU/Core), 27.2 GB/sec vs. 21.8 GB/sec memory bandwidth, etc. Yet when we start looking at real-world scores, the 9800 keeps up pretty well & even beats the faster GeForceFX 5900 in most tests.
The big exception is the 3DMark2003 score - the GeForceFX 5900 wins 3477 to 2837!!! (!!!).
This can be attributed to one of three things;
1.Speed isn't everything (e.g., AMD vs. Intel CPU's). But of course, the slower Radeon 9800 *is* faster even though it's slower in all the real-world tests.
2.The GeForceFX used WHQL drivers... But despite these 'superior' drivers, the Radeon 9800 still reigned in all the real world tests!
3.3DMark2003 added unfair optimizations to their program to make the nvidia card seem better than ATi's
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?
Why didn't the poster tell who won? Now I have to actually read the article.
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?
I mean, damn! Four more FPS! For only $499 (plus tax ans S&H)! Where's my credit card...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
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.
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!
Yes, it's an evil satanic conspiracy.
Did you know that "Mature Furk" is an anagram for "Futuremark"? Google for it, and be enlightened.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
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.
Duke Nukem Forever was released?? Woo-hoo!!
Let's see here, they compare two cards that shouldn't compare in real life.
The GeForce card has:
* Twice as much memory (256 MB vs. 128MB)
* More memory bandwidth (27 GB/s vs. 21 GB/s)
* Faster memory (3 ns vs. 3.8 ns chips)
And the GeForce still got it's ass handed to it by the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, which, by the way, doesn't even need a leaf-blower attachment just to keep it from overheating!
Is anyone still buying Nvidia cards any more these days (other than the blindly trusting fanboys, that is)?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Let's see now.
:)
1/ Both cards can display current games at 2 quajillion fps, the winner beating the loser by 3fps
2/ The economy of well, the world, is in the dumps
3/ Quite a few cool and very demanding games (Doom3, Halflife) will come out Soon(tm) but Definately Not Yet(tm). (Personally I wouldnt be surprised if it would be @ christmas time
4/ At X-mas time (or whenever these demanding games start to come out) newer, faster cards will be out, and/or these cards will be cheaper.
5/ At X-mas time people will actually have some money set aside to buy rad new videocards for.. eh.. their girlfriends.
So who would buy this?
(No, I haven't actually -read- the article
3dmark2003
GF FX: 999999
Ati Raedon: 40394
Weird outcome! It was strange though, because during the gf fx test, it just flashed and gave me my score! Awesome speed!
Keep up the good work, NVIDIA!
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
The 9800 is still the better purchase, the 5900 has little to no overclocking room and needs a massive heatsink to remain "cool". The manufacture process for the 9800 is more mature on the other hand, and it usually clocks about 60Mhz beyond stock for the GPU and about 20Mhz for the RAM giving 440/370, which makes it comfortably faster than the 5900.
Right-oh.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
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.
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.. )
After buying a 7500 and tinkering with it for a few days, I decided that I didn't want to try anymore, and then traded it for a GeForce 4. It worked perfectly on the first try. I'm not a huge fan of either company, but yes, I still like to buy Nvidia cards.
To quote the article:
For some reason I thought of "Iron Chef" when I read this.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
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.
9800 has a faster transform engine, is slightly ahead at lower resolutions.
5900 has a higher fill rate, is slightly ahead at high resolutions.
Otherwise there are no real differences between the benchmarks and it all comes down to differences any layperson could understand:
The 5900 takes up 2 slots (WTF?) and the 9800 is $100 cheaper (although $399 for a graphics card is still nuts if you ask me).
BTW, the ATI 9800 won the "shootout".
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
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.
NVIDIA cards because ATI's Linux drivers are not very good compared to NVIDIA's. I won't be buying an ATI card until ATI supports Linux fully like NVIDIA. I do play Linux native-port games in Linux.
This hasn't been true for quite some time.
I have owned numerous high end nvidia and radeon cards, and have never had anything resembling stability from the nvidia cards using the nvidia binary driver (and yes, I've tried all of the tweaks and suggestions Nvidia and others suggest vis-a-vis AGP settings, etc.). This has been true on numerous machines, both single and dual Intel P3 and Athlon XP/MP boxes, with a variety of motherboards, memory configurations, and Linux kernels.
ATI radeon cards on the other hand have been pretty solid, with excellent support via the xfree DRI drivers for most cards, and adequate, reasonably stable support from ATI via their firegl binary-only drivers for those not yet supported.
NVidia has not been king of the Linux hill for quite sometime, and while I have had my gripes with ATI as well, the notorious instability of the Nvidia binary drivers and lackluster support via the xfree DRI drivers has placed me (and my employer) firmly in the ATI camp.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
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.'"
WHQL doesn't mean they're better drives, it just means that they passed some MSFT testing bits. If anything, non-WHQL drivers have potential to have higher performance (think a car engine that doesn't have to worry about passing emissions), since they don't have to worry so much about playing nice with -all- available hardware.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I NEED to know which one is cooler than the other. I can't be going to school tomorrow and know I have the wrong video card in my computer. If the other kids find out, I will be the laughing stock of the A/V club!
I had a sucky sig.
They may be useless to you, since you're a gamer and you just want to know how fast your games will run, but when I need a card to run 3dmark as fast as possible, I know which test I'm looking for.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
a) A Pentium-4 >=2500mhz
:)
b) An nVidia FX 5900 gpu
c) 19 inch monitor
If you set it to turn on in the morning time, the FX 5900 also doubles as an alarm clock/wake-up service.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The new Radeon Catalyst drivers (2.5) have this very interesting note in the change log: "The 3DMark2003 shader optimizations found in previous CATALYST(TM) releases have been removed" Yet Nvidia gets to keep THEIR optimizations... hrm.
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.
For those Windows / dual boot users looking a little on the lower end of the performance and price curve, I just found this hacked driver page and this thread that basically turns certain Radeon 9500 cards (~$135) into 9700s (~$200) by unlocking 4 pixel pipelines on the chip. It doesn't work on all cards, producing visual artifacts on some (some workarounds exist for some users) but given the right hardware, you might pull a good deal of performance out of a mid-priced piece of hardware.
Bleh!
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.
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.
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.
It seems to be readily apparent in the Radeon screenshot (at least the full quality AA screenshot). I use it all the time, it makes 640x480 gaming look a heck of a lot better (which is good for games that are old and don't support higher resolutions). Ultimately, though, it's just one more feature for the list on the side of the box.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.