Digital-Daily : Video : fx5900-vs-radeon9800pro

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FX5900 vs Radeon9800Pro

Benchmarking

All the video cards arrived with the most up-to-date official drivers pre-installed. To date, these are Detonator 44.03 for all the nVidia cards and Catalyst 3.4 for all ATI's cards of the Radeon line. Those were just these drivers recorded on the bundled CDs.

What's nice, Asus started marking the driver version straight on the disk surface. Formerly, you had to insert the disk to find out the info. A very good initiative - why not to add it to the armory for all the manufacturers!

Today's unofficial version are Detonator 44,45 and Catalyst3,5. But unofficial drivers merit a special review.

To test products of this class, we've got to proceed from the two prerequisites. First, cards at $400-500 are never fitted into a weak PC, and secondly - on the market there aren't any solutions able revealing their potentials to the full. Both FX5900 and Radeon9800Pro are "future-proof" video cards. Even Quake 3 shows incredibly high fps rate over 500 fps at default settings, and these results produced with outdated benchmarks can no longer be trusted. Game developers lag behind hardware manufacturers. Two more years of the lag and consumers might cease striving for novelties - there won't be solutions to give enough load to the hardware. Intel and AMD suffer from this state of affairs to the full either.

The first new-generation game will certainly be the creature of ID Software - Doom3. But it's still half a year until it is released. But the demo currently on testers' hands is still very raw. The guys are creating models, working out the plot, drawing the levels and ignore the optimization - what matters is that it simply works. Concurrently, optimization for all the VPUs existing on the market is under way, so no one except ID Software could tell at what point all these works are progressing and which VPU is better. Once the release or at least the official demo is out, then we can run tests.

Test bed:

CPU	P4 2.4Mhz (Northwood Ñ1)
Motherboard	Epox 4PDA (i865PE)
Memory	PC2700 2x256MB in the dual-channel mode Timings set to 2:6:3:3
Video cards	Asus V9950 128 Mb (FX5900) Gigabyte Radeon9800Pro 128Mb Gigabyte Radeon9800Pro 256Mb ATI Radeon 9700Pro 128Mb MSI Ti4800SE-8x 128Mb
OS	WinXP + SP1
Drivers	Detonator 44.03 Catalyst 3.4

Benchmarking software used:

1. 3DMark2003
2. 3DMark2001SE
3. Comanche 4 Bench
4. Codecreatures Benchmark Pro
5. Village Mark
6. RightMark Video Analyzer v0.4
7. Unreal Tournament 2003

We did a series of synthetic and gaming tests with benchmarks able somehow to provide enough load to ATI 9800 PRO è FX5900. All the tests were conducted with the 4xAA/8xAF options enabled. The weaker ATI 9700 PRO and Ti4800 were also posed into the same hard conditions. Mind you, it doesn't make any sense to buy a video card to enjoy the "ladders" and jagged lines. Gaming video cards of the top price sector are aimed exclusively at implementing the highest image quality at high resolutions with the good gameplay preserved.

Let me put it straight in advance - the results are not going to be high. We are not pursuing ultimate score points as is the case with testing CPUs and motherboards - we simply want to load these monsters to the full and see their worth.

Notes:

Why Ti4800 was taken for comparisons? Not a previous generation card on NV30, but NV28? Just for your awareness, the NV30 hasn't gained a wide distribution and users almost don't have it on hands, but Ti4200-4800 have been sold in huge quantities. Their owners will better see the difference in results between what they already have and what is offered..

Another note - in fact, we tested TWO VERSIONS of 9800PRO - with 128 and 256 MB both made by Gigabyte. But the cards have shown ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL figures in all the tests despite the differences in 350 MHz memory speeds for the 256 MB make and 340 MHz for the 128 MB version. We were first puzzled by the identical results - this simply can't be that way! To spend $400 for a 128 MB card or $500 for a 256 MB and see no difference in any of the tests.. The clue was behind the memory organization - Gigabyte had to double the number of memory chips and all the extra was all eaten up by the doubled wiring and load. Another conclusion that comes out of this fact is this - modern gaming applications and benchmarks do not load up even 128 MB of the video memory.

Third note: you won't notice any difference in 3D image quality in real-world applications. Only using specialized test images and their further analysis with Photoshop allows to detect different positions of some pixels which make up the image. By now, the hot debates on the need for using the 32-bit color mode have died down quite a long time ago (in 3DMark2003, the 16-bit mode has been removed) and to date it's absolutely absurd to compare "image quality with the FSAA&AA enabled". The image quality is fantastic in games either, and there's no visible difference between R350 and NV35.

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	Content:
	Specifications Differences of the generations Benchmarking methods Benchmarking results Conclusions

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