FX5900 vs Radeon9800Pro
Findings
To start with, here is an instructive story. Since the beginning of opposition of the three graphics monsters - 3dfx, ATI and nVidia, a special karma has been pursuing them for years:
3dfx are terrible snobs too arrogant even towards their fans, absolutely confident in their holiness, right of the first born and everlasting leadership, which played a bad trick to them. For the time being there, these guys have contrived to arrange no more than a single presentation, no party, no seminar and no press conference outside the USA! It was absolutely impossible to persuade them for a meeting... In the end, they changed their ways to the better... After their closing, they gave interviews here and there making up for the past lost years.
ATI is a marvelous team of technical engineers with everlastingly poor drivers and awful marketing. Just fancy their entangled numeration for products and names for endless drivers until Catalyst finally appeared. That's terrible!
nVidia is the youngest, energetic and impudent a team. Their chips hit precisely to the market boiling point, and their unified driver polished to mirror reflection has turned into a symbol of the company now demonstrates exceptional performance and stability. One can't help noticing their correct and aggressive marketing and close relationships with game developers. Since the day of their inception, their slogan has been "we'll do it!".
All this was lasting for years until things started changing as if through acquisition of 3dfx nVidia caught a mortal virus. The NV30 chip released by the united team "nVidia/3dfx" proved to be a failure. They are two causes to that:
- the erroneous stake made on DDR-II, but we have already mentioned it and won't repeat again. Already fixed..
- and secondly the new architecture of the chip implied creating a compiler for the new chip from scratch. The depleted team of Nick Tiantos failed to cope with the posed task in good time. It depleted due to the only simple reason - the departure of some employees with further establishment of an independent team of developers which concluded the only contract. Guess with whom! With ATI! It's just this team that has developed Catalyst, a unified driver for ATI.
One lagged behind, another caught up with the rest - it turns out both companies to date have approximately equal potentials. From the consumer's viewpoint, this outcome is the best. The lack of sure favorite makes shifting the competition to the price range.
Assuming the chosen cards absolutely precisely reflect the essence of opposition between R350 and NV35, things look like this:
- In most tests that we conducted, ATI 9800Pro demonstrates advantages over FX5900. Let's list them: RightMark Video Analyzer, Unreal Tournament 2003, Village Mark, Codecreatures Benchmark Pro, Comanche 4 Bench, 3DMark2001 SE Pro. In fact, the only test where nVidia takes a lead over ATI was 3DMark2003. But that's true provided the FSAA functions are enabled in the drivers; if disabled, things will look like this:
Isn't it a curious graph? :) At least, it's visually seen what we pay for.
While FX5800 in due time was unable to outrun Radeon9700Pro, this time FX5900 in most tests lags behind Radeon9800Pro a little bit. But nVidia has the Ultra option in stock and things may change about it. At least, Gainward's FX5900 whose frequencies (440/900) strongly differ from the canonical (425/800Mhz) already demonstrates some advantages and things are not the way they seem. This is to say that frequencies in the Ultra version will be much higher.
In our review we tried to compare just the chips without digressing towards video cards and assuming them as the "reference". But reality is such that every manufacturer experiments with the values of core and memory speed, cooling systems, functionality, let alone the package bundle etc.. In the near future, we'll be doing a detailed round-up of Asus V9950 and Gainward Ultra/1200 (both based on FX5900) which are worth each other.
Big thanks to:
- Asus & IT-Labs - for the sample Asus V9950 video card
- Gigabyte for submitting Gigabyte RADEON 9800 PRO sample;
- Atlantik for presenting a Radeon9700Pro sample.
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