You’ve been living too perfect of a life if you’ve never used the phrase “it’s been a long day,” and for NVIDIA it has most definitely been a very long day. Just over two weeks ago the graphics industry was shook by some very hard hitting comments from Gabe Newell of Valve, primarily relating to the poor performance of NVIDIA cards under Half Life 2. All of the sudden ATI had finally done what they had worked feverishly for years to do, they were finally, seemingly overnight, crowned the king of graphics and more importantly – drivers. There were no comments on Half Life 2 day about ATI having poor drivers, compatibility problems or anything even remotely resembling discussions about ATI from the Radeon 8500 days.

Half Life 2 day was quickly followed up with all sorts of accusations against NVIDIA and their driver team; more and more articles were published with new discoveries, shedding light on other areas where ATI trounced NVIDIA. Everything seemed to all make sense now; even 3DMark was given the credibility of being the “I told you so” benchmark that predicted Half Life 2 performance several months in advance of September 12, 2003. At the end of the day and by the end of the week, NVIDIA had experienced the longest day they’ve had in recent history.

Some of the more powerful accusations went far beyond NVIDIA skimping on image quality to improve performance; these accusations included things like NVIDIA not really being capable of running DirectX 9 titles at their full potential, and one of the more interesting ones – that NVIDIA only optimizes for benchmarks that sites like AnandTech uses. Part of the explanation behind the Half Life 2 fiasco was that even if NVIDIA improves performance through later driver revisions, the performance improvements are only there because the game is used as a benchmark – and not as an attempt to improve the overall quality of their customers’ gaming experience. If that were true, then NVIDIA’s “the way it’s meant to be played” slogan would have to go under some serious rethinking; the way it’s meant to be benchmarked comes to mind.

But rewind a little bit; quite a few of these accusations being thrown at NVIDIA were the same ones thrown at ATI. I seem to remember the launch of the Radeon 9700 Pro being tainted with one accusation in particular – that ATI only made sure their drivers worked on popular benchmarking titles, with the rest of the top 20 games out there hardly working on the new R300. As new as what we’re hearing these days about NVIDIA may seem, let us not be victim to the near sightedness of the graphics industry – this has all happened before with ATI and even good ol’ 3dfx.

So who are you to believe? These days it seems like the clear purchase is ATI, but on what data are we basing that? I won’t try to build up suspense senselessly, the clear recommendation today is ATI (how’s that for hype-less journalism), but not because of Half Life 2 or any other conspiracies we’ve seen floating around the web these days.

For entirely too long we’ve been basing GPU purchases on a small subset of tests, encouraging the hardware vendors to spend the majority of their time and resources optimizing for those games. We’re not just talking about NVIDIA, ATI does it too, and you would as well if you were running either of those two companies. We’ve complained about the lack of games with built-in benchmarks and cited that as a reason to sticking with the suite that we’ve used – but honestly, doing what’s easy isn’t a principle I founded AnandTech on 6+ years ago.

So today we bring you quite a few new things, some may surprise you, some may not. ATI has released their Fall refresh product – the Radeon 9800XT and they are announcing their Radeon 9600XT. NVIDIA has counterattacked by letting us publish benchmarks from their forthcoming NV38 GPU (the successor to the NV35 based GeForce FX 5900 Ultra). But quite possibly more important than any of those announcements is the suite of benchmarks we’re testing these cards in; how does a total of 15 popular games sound? This is the first installment of a multipart series that will help you decide what video card is best for you, and hopefully it will do a better job than we have ever in the past.

The extensive benchmarking we’ve undertaken has forced us to split this into multiple parts, so expect to see more coverage on higher resolutions, image quality, anti-aliasing, CPU scaling and budget card comparisons in the coming weeks. We’re working feverishly to bring it all to you as soon as possible and I’m sure there’s some sort of proverb about patience that I should be reciting from memory to end this sentence but I’ll leave it at that.

Now that the long-winded introduction is done with, let’s talk hardware before we dive into a whole lot of software.

The Newcomers
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  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    #92, for the 100,000,000 time in these comments, doom3 is not dx9.

    How can anyone take your post seriously when you state 'facts' that you just got from the top of your head. Read your post, read the facts and think about how stupid you look.

    btw, great review Anand and to other whiners who keep harping on about IQ and Resolutions being low, it's part one as mentioned at start of review. Read the whole review and you won't look so silly LMAO

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    I want 1600 x 1400 with max aa/af!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Great group of games, though I'm surprised you have time to run so many tests. Hopefully you won't get overwhelmed and have to cut it back down.

    Nitpicky bit, but some corrections to the titles of your games:

    - Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide

    - Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

    Did you get an early copy of Halo? Man you guys get all the good stuff :)
  • Link - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    BAD,BAD,BAD review.
    Why did you choose to use only 2.8Ghz? It's THE limiting factor that is preventing XT from showing its full capability.
    I'd bluntly say this review(er) is favoring FX by not using higer clocked cpu and beta driver for FX.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    How long have those underlined, highlighted words that look like links been ads here? That is one lame form of advertising... very annoying...
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    That invisible Prescott thing is crazy! Why the hell would they do that?
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Are these even DX9 games? If not, who cares.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    PLEASE add Morrowind to test suite!!!
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Sorry I don't have time to read through all the posts, so please forgive me if it's been mentioned above.

    It should be noted that due to a bug with ATI and Halo, ATI cards using Catalyst 3.7 drivers DO NOT USE Shader 2.0, currently only nVidia cards (that are capable) use 2.0

    In the .txt output file, it clearly shows ATI using 1.4 shader, while nVidia (5900) uses 2.0 This is supposed to be fixed in next driver release and/or patch from Halo.

    Supposedly you can force the ATI cards to run in 2.0 but adding a -use20 in the shortcut properties.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Yes. So he's benchmarking unreleased hardware (NV38) with unreleased drivers (52.xx) on an unreleased cpu (Prescott).

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