Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 1, 2003 3:02 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
We’ll limit the talk about the new batch of $500 cards to the first few lines of this conclusion. The Radeon 9800 XT offers a marginal performance improvement over the regular Radeon 9800 Pro, definitely not worth upgrading to for current 9800 Pro owners.
As far as people looking to upgrade once for the long run, with new architectures due out in 6 months, a $500 investment today would be significantly more out of date than if you purchase a card right before a refresh. We rarely recommend that you buy the fastest performing card on the market; in fact the last time we did that was with the Radeon 9700 Pro – the impact of which is clearly not equaled by the Radeon 9800 XT (nor were we expecting it to). Whether spending $500 is worth it today is your call, but you can definitely get very similar performance out of a used Radeon 9700 Pro or even a non-Pro Radeon 9800 at much better price points. If money is no object, then we’re sure that ATI wouldn’t mind shipping a few more XTs in your direction.
We’re quite wary of recommending any of the current NVIDIA cards at this point, for two major reasons. First, with NV38 coming right around the corner any FX 5900 Ultra purchases wouldn’t be wise investments. Also, given the marginal performance improvements you can expect out of a 5% core clock increase, don’t have incredibly high expectations for the NV38. We can’t recommend the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra because NVIDIA has already indicated that NV36 (the 5600 Ultra’s successor) will be here shortly to replace it and should offer significantly greater performance. So if you’re looking to buy a video card right now, ATI is the way to go.
Looking at the stats, ATI clearly wins in 6 games, NVIDIA wins in 4 games and the two come very close in 5 games. Games such as Command & Conquer Generals: Ground Zero and Simcity 4: Rush Hour are examples where ATI clearly has the lead over NVIDIA and the argument could be made that ATI holds the lead because they optimize for all games, while NVIDIA just optimizes for benchmark titles. However, looking at games like Homeworld 2 and Neverwinter Nights you could make the exact opposite argument.
What’s clear is that both manufacturers optimize for the more popular games and the focus of optimizations is obviously greater on more visible games. With that said, we’re hoping that by expanding our test suite we will be able to encourage optimizations to make more games run better. We’ll see how the picture we’ve depicted here today changes as time goes on.
Although we did provide some insight into the “next generation” of games with scores from Halo, the real question on everyone’s mind is still Half Life 2 as well as Doom3. The performance crown under Doom3 is still in NVIDIA’s camp apparently, and although the latest drivers have closed the gap significantly, ATI is still ahead in Half Life 2. The numbers we’ve seen indicate that in most tests ATI only holds single digit percentage leads (< 5%), although in some cases ATI manages to pull ahead by double digits.
There’s much more to come, but for now we’ve given you quite a bit to chew on…
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Anonymous User - Friday, October 24, 2003 - link
I believe a few of these benchmarks are misleading. The flight simulator 2004 results are a perfect example. It's obvious that the frame rates are limited to the refresh rate of the selected resolution, which is different for different cards (example: 125 Hz, 75 Hz, and 60 Hz). I would suggest fixing your method of benchmarking or removing the games with incorrect results from your benchmark suite, since it misrepresents the NVIDIA card's true performance. I would have thought the stepped frame rates on cards of WIDELY varying performance would have clued you guys in on the problem, but I guess not.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link
Anand have refused to give ATi the credit they deserve. In every bench where ATi prevailed they managed to find some fault with the benchmark rather than find fault with nVidia's cards\drivers. Those 5 "Marginal" benches belong to ATi ...but Anand can't very well award them or it looks too one sided. The summing up recommends ATi, but not because the cards are better, apparently it's because you can't predict what the future holds (???). It's time Anand got it's hand out of nVidia's pocket and told it like it really is ...The current crop of nVidia FX cards Suck as much as they Blow. They can't produce the goods without cheating and favourable reviewers. To those that would choose nVidia over any other manufacturer, no matter what they produce! You just got Screwed over.Anonymous User - Monday, October 20, 2003 - link
Thank God! At last a review that means something!Anonymous User - Thursday, October 16, 2003 - link
The 9800 XT is already on my upgrade list. Thanks you Anandtech once again for helping me make an imformed decision. One game I would like to see is Papy's Nascar Racing 2003 as it can be a real bear to run.Anonymous User - Sunday, October 12, 2003 - link
OMG I predicted this a few months ago. That Nvidia would start messing with the filtering. Setting it to a lower value than what the end user thinks it is set at.An analogy: What if you set your graphics card to 1280 rez but in the game the driver forces the game to load at 1024 or even 800x600 rez.
Well I know most of you would figure it out but I know lots of people that could be fooled.
Take it a step further and use bilinear filtering when the person sets it at trilinear. This is not as obvious, it forces the card to do 1/2 the work it would be doing if tri filtering was invoked.
So basically Nvidia drivers have fooled Anandtech into praises. It makes Anand either look like a fool or greedy.
Either way this review is tainted.
Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link
Everyone should read this article. It explains what Anandtech could not.http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/detonator_52.14/ind...
Added on October 9, 2003:
AnandTech made an extremely extensive article about the performance and image quality of the current high-end graphic cards like Radeon 9800XT and GeForceFX 5950 Ultra (NV38). Beside the game benchmarks with 18 games, the image quality tests made with each of those games are strongly worth to be mentioned. AnandTech uses the Catalyst 3.7 on ATi side and the Detonator 52.14 on the nVidia side to compare the image quality. In contrast to the statements of our youngest driver comparison, AnandTech didn’t notice any general differences of the image quality between the Detonator 52.14 and 45.23 and therefore AnandTech praises the new driver a little into the sky.
This however not even absolutely contradicts itself with our realizations. The nVidia-"optimizations" of the anisotropic filter with texture stages 1 till 7 in Control panel mode (only a 2x anisotropic filter is uses, regardless if there were made higher settings) are only to find with proper searching for it, besides most image quality comparisons by AnandTech were concerned without the anisotropic filter and therefore it’s impossible to find any differences on those pictures. The generally forced "optimization" of the trilinear filter into a pseudo trilinear filter by the Detonator 52.14 is besides nearly not possible to see on fixed images of real games, because the trilinear filter was created in order to prevent nearly only the MIP-Banding which can be seen in motion.
Thus it can be stated that the determined "optimizations" of the Detonator 52.14 won’t be recognized with the view of screenshots, if you do not look for them explicitly (why however AnandTech awards the driver 52.14 a finer filter quality than the driver 51.75 is a mystery for us, then the only difference between them is a correctly working Application mode of the Detonator 52.14). Thus the "optimizations" of nVidia are not to be really seen
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
Has any else noticed that the Nvidia 5600 ULTRA gets whooped by the ATI 9600 Pro in this article? This is sharp contrast to the AnandTech's last review on the two cards here==>www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1821. What's going on here??avijay - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
I have a problem the viewing the results of the tests they way they are now posted. Could it be possible to put the graphs the way it used to be, i.e., not use flash. Cos I access the site thru a public network and flash movies or similar things don't load and hence I haven't been able to view the graphs for the past few articles now. Thanks.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
I am only interested in 1600x1200 or higher, with AA & AF turned on. I could not imagine spending >$500 and using 1024x768, etc. Perhaps AnandTech could include benchmarks at the high end of resolutions, AA & AF, especially considering they are reviewing the "best" or "most expensive" graphics card available to the consumer.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind can be a great benchmark, with a little .ini file tweaking so that it shows the FPS in the corner.