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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.
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.
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
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...
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.