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

    - no contrast between AVAILABLE nvidia detonators and the UNRELEASED drivers used to benchmark.
    - it was unclear which games were using dx8 or dx9 features for these benchmarks without having previous knowledge.
    - more focus placed on performance with older existing games i.e. dx8, Arent top of the line $500 gfx cards intended for use with future games? i.e. dx9
    - image quality issues not adequately discussed (major issues glazed over leaving false impressions of performance in 'some' cards), they may be covered in an upcoming article however alone this particular article may be misleading.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    #38 Well i made it hard for you to understand I guess because you are the only one who complained. Btw. I did not post #36. So there are more of us... :)

    Will sign with the whiner for now.

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

    I don't mind either. I still have my 3DFX Voodoo 3 and 32bit at all is only for whiners!
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    OK, you didn't mistype it, you just made it totally unclear and impossible for anyone to really understand. No big deal.

    However, to imply that Anandtech should have spent time doing IQ testing instead of NV38 testing is nothing sort of ridiculous. No one (except you apparently) wants to see IQ testing instead of NV38 testing.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    I d like to see q3 in your benchmarking suite again.
    it s still the only q3engine game where a brand new graphics card can run smoothly with Fsaa and AF on highest quality settings
    important is also that the timedemo is full of action an filled with a lot of players
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    I have always been an Nvidia fanboy, and I don’t mind running my card in 16bit texture quality.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    So I'm the only one who picked up on the "we'll do IQ in part 2" thing?
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Not that reviews was the subject. LOL Well, perhaps I don't know grammar better than you but I did not mistype anything.

    Fact is that "they" can only refer to "the other sites" and not Anandtech.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Okay, on other sites is not a subject but "they" can not refer to "reviews" (the context forbids that). So hopefully you understand now that "they" can only refer to "the other sites" since I did not mention Anandtech there. :)
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    #32 Okay a second time and I will take you by the hand (please respond with a joke about me being gay):

    This is what I wrote (the whole paragraph):

    "Perhaps YOU are clueless. I don't need to wait for complete reviews on other sites. And yes, they might have had more time as they did not benchmark NV38. However that they did not get NV38 makes this review even more suspicious."

    I wrote about reviews on other sites there. You see? From that moment on every "they" automatically refers to "the other sites" until I come up with a new subject? Okay? That is grammar and hard to understand but you will get there.

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