whats better??? [Archive]

Tiburon

12-23-2003, 10:21 PM

i know this has already been figured out but i need to know how much better is 9800pro vs the 5900fx ultra and i am talking about right out the box no moding or overclocking of any kind and i would like to see bench marks and so forths if ppl can provide cuz i was wondering witch one i should buy thanks

iceblue

12-23-2003, 10:55 PM

Both are fast enough for any type of job. Get whichever one you can find cheaper that has the features you need. :t

Plaster

12-23-2003, 11:50 PM

9800 Pro no contest.

scottluebke2003

12-24-2003, 06:14 AM

Right now, the 9800 is only slightly faster than the 5900. However, when AA and AF are heavily used, which is often the case with most gamers, the 9800 really jumps ahead of the 5900. But believe it or not, the 5900 will push some incredible FPS even with AA and AF. And the card is only $200. But if you got something decent right now, like a Ti series card, then just wait until the next line of cards come out(Spring 2004), and then the first generation cards will drop in price and you can buy a 9800Pro for much less than you can now.

Really though, if a card can push games at 60 FPS, what is the need for more? At 60 FPS, its about as smooth as the game will get. Most people play games around 30 FPS, so 60 and above is great. But who needs games at 150 FPS?

If you are using a Gf2 or something like that, then maybe you should snag an FX5900 for under $200. Read reader reviews on www.newegg.com

bblqj78

12-24-2003, 07:04 AM

the 9800pro. As well as being as fast as the Nvidia...everything can look a lot better with AA & AF a retain the FPS good enough to play smooth.

Read this link posted previously

http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/ati_nvidia_aa_performance/index_e.php

Bigjakkstaffa

12-24-2003, 01:17 PM

9800 Pro, comes into its own at high detail, AA and AF levels and is much faster when running games with DX9 features in comparison to the FX series (see the HL2, Halo and Tomb Raider benchies that are floating aroudn the net for details)

--Jakk:t

Bizkitkid2001

12-24-2003, 01:33 PM

Neither. Get eh 5900 FX. The ultra is a waste of money.

The 5900 and Radeon 9800 pro are as equal in performance as one can get. And the ultra only gets 5-10 FPS more than the non-ultra, and than costing $100-$200 more. I just bought me the EVGA 5900 non-Ultra(400/850mhz) and this card can easily be clocked up to 5900 ultra(450/850mhz) speeds and even 5950 ultra speeds(450/950mhz).

So don't listen to all them ATI bias people saying the 9800 pro smokes the FX5900. As they are both the same speed, and the 5900 being $100+ cheaper is also a plus.

Becnhmarks don't lie. :t

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030714/vga_card_guide-12.html
And don't lsiten to anyone who sais "Look at the new HL2 benchmarks" as Valve hasn't had anytime to work on the code for the game to run smooth on geforce cards cause ATI has been shoving money down there throat trying to get them to finish the ATI code int he game first.

Plaster

12-24-2003, 02:33 PM

Originally posted by Bizkitkid2001
The 5900 and Radeon 9800 pro are as equal in performance as one can get.

So don't listen to all them ATI bias people saying the 9800 pro smokes the FX5900. As they are both the same speed, and the 5900 being $100+ cheaper is also a plus.

Becnhmarks don't lie. :t

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030930/radeon_9800-22.html

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTIzLDI=

Nope, they don't lie. heheh

PacNW CE

12-24-2003, 02:34 PM

Make up a spreadsheet with the cards you are comparing, their prices and their scores on similar tests with similar equipment.

Contrast and compare on your own.

www.anandtech.com
www.tomshardware.com

Oh, and don't believe anyone who favors one brand of chipset over the other exclusively. I have had both Nvidia and ATI recently, and They are both good for different reasons.

BTW, The HL2 coding issue for nvidia is due to the NV3x parts are not built around the dx9 spec as microsoft wrote it. ATI built it's technology around the spec, and Valve wrote HL2 around the spec, hence ATI's performance lead in the avalible HL2 benchmarks. Regaurdless, I am sure a fix will be avalible upon release of the game since it is in Valve's interest to sell as many copies of HL2 as possible. Cutting out Nvidia card owners would be foolish to say the least.

Bizkitkid2001

12-24-2003, 02:39 PM

Originally posted by Plaster
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030930/radeon_9800-22.html

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTIzLDI=

Nope, they don't lie. heheh

Don't cheat and get benchmarks/games that were made to perform better on ati cards. Use benchmarks/games that have been around a while and have had all the bugs fixed out of them.

I could probably go out and find many benchmarks that have the 5900 on top and the radeon 9800 far behind. Thats why benchmarks comparing ONE game is not good to use for a comparision between multiple cards.

And i don't like benchmakrs from hardocp as they benchmark wierd and could never really figure out the graphs. I have also heard that they tend to lean towards favoring the main stream card(Wich being ATI right now) Wich you can tell my how they only run the 5900 at one resolution but they runt he radeon 9800 at lower resolutions to make the card look better.

tony_j15

12-24-2003, 02:46 PM

Originally posted by Bizkitkid2001
Neither. Get eh 5900 FX. The ultra is a waste of money.

The 5900 and Radeon 9800 pro are as equal in performance as one can get. And the ultra only gets 5-10 FPS more than the non-ultra, and than costing $100-$200 more. I just bought me the EVGA 5900 non-Ultra(400/850mhz) and this card can easily be clocked up to 5900 ultra(450/850mhz) speeds and even 5950 ultra speeds(450/950mhz).

So don't listen to all them ATI bias people saying the 9800 pro smokes the FX5900. As they are both the same speed, and the 5900 being $100+ cheaper is also a plus.

Becnhmarks don't lie. :t

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030714/vga_card_guide-12.html
And don't lsiten to anyone who sais "Look at the new HL2 benchmarks" as Valve hasn't had anytime to work on the code for the game to run smooth on geforce cards cause ATI has been shoving money down there throat trying to get them to finish the ATI code int he game first.

bizkit, you take potshots at "ati biased" people, when in reality you are heavily nVidia biased yourself:rolleyes: Of course the 5900 is 100 cheaper than the 9800 Pro, but that is a unfair analysis. It battles this way: 5900 vs. 9800 NON PRO( which can be found for 144 according to Pricewatch, whereas lowest on a 5900 is 187) The 5900 Ultra is the correct comparison to the 9800 Pro. Plus, you ignore the facts how the radeons will still hold good FPS with aa/af enabled, whereas the FX cards will falter somewhat. BTW, dragging H-L 2 into this was worthless.

Bizkitkid2001

12-24-2003, 02:57 PM

I'm not Nvdidia biased. Hell, the only nvidia card I like is the 5900fx. And the only comparision the 5900 has with the radeon 9800 non pro is the price. Performance wise the 5900 pulls out ahead of the non pro and is comparible performance wise to the 9800 pro.

At least I don't go out and get rigged benchmakrs in favorable for nvidia as these ATI bias people are doing with the hardocp benchmarks and new DX9 games that havn't had time to fix there code for the geforce line of cards(HL2 and Tomb Raider)

And I have alreadt explained that the ultra is only 5-10fps faster than the non ultra. And that the ULTRA is a waste of money. You can get a non ultra and OC to 5950 speeds. Don't you even read?

And you forgot to look at how the 5900 got second place int he hardocp benchmark running at a HIGHER resolution that the radeon that beat it. See hwot he radeons running at the same resolution as the 5900 ran slow? And find some benchmarks with the 5900 AA and AF enabled and you will see that the 5900 is better at AA and AF than the radeon 9800pro. The benchmarks you guys are pulling out are not a fair comparision as it doesn't test the radeon 5900 full ability.

Rugor

12-24-2003, 03:08 PM

Nvidia cards perform at their best in an OpenGL environment where they can expose their own proprietary OpenGL extensions. ATI has much better Direct3D performance especially under DirectX 9 because their architecture is closer to the published DX9 spec.

You can get a good card from either IHV but when push comes to shove the Radeon 9800 Pro is a better overall performer than the GeForce FX5900 Ultra.

This is especially noticeable in AA, if you read that article on 3DCenter.de you will see that ATI's AA not only looks better but runs faster. So at maximum eye candy settings ATI is a clear winner.

Bizkitkid2001:
The new benchmarking method from HardOCP is actually very informative. The graphs they use show how the cards perform over the duration of a run showing how the frame rate rises and drops. If you have two cards both averaging 40FPS but one spikes to 60 and drops to 15, while the other only spikes to 55 but never drops below 35 you can see the changes. In that case the extra 5fps in maximum won't make up for the 20fps drop in minimum.

As to HL2, I don't know where you got your information but it's flat out wrong. They are on record as having spent five times as much time and effort optimizing for the GfFX architecture as they did for ATI and it still doesn't do well. However, all is not lost for Nvidia users, the Gf4Ti series all work perfectly well in HL2 on the DX8 path, as do most GfFX cards.

Bizkitkid2001

12-24-2003, 03:17 PM

Still hardocp only rant he 5900 at 1280x1024. Of course the radeon 9800pro is going to be faster if its only ran at 1024x768, a lower resolutiont hat what the tested the 5900 at.

At lkeast the THG benchmakr I showed you did an equal comparision of the cards at all reslutions and settings.

Rugor

12-24-2003, 05:00 PM

IF you look at the 3DCenter.de article linked above you can see the Radeon has better quality AA and a lower performance hit when using it than the GeForce FX.

Take a look HERE (http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/ati_nvidia_aa_performance/index_e.php)

tony_j15

12-24-2003, 05:03 PM

At least I don't go out and get rigged benchmakrs in favorable for nvidia as these ATI bias people are doing with the hardocp benchmarks and new DX9 games that havn't had time to fix there code for the geforce line of cards(HL2 and Tomb Raider)

There you go again:rolleyes:

And you forgot to look at how the 5900 got second place int he hardocp benchmark running at a HIGHER resolution that the radeon that beat it. See hwot he radeons running at the same resolution as the 5900 ran slow? And find some benchmarks with the 5900 AA and AF enabled and you will see that the 5900 is better at AA and AF than the radeon 9800pro. The benchmarks you guys are pulling out are not a fair comparision as it doesn't test the radeon 5900 full ability.

I never said anything about [H] now did I? Why drag them into this? They are definately not my first choice for bench results. And your statement that the 5900 is better with aa/af enabled is clearly wrong.

Rugor: wise words!

Plaster

12-24-2003, 05:50 PM

Anyone who believes that the FX5900 Ultra is worth the money when pitted against the 9800 Pro is living in Fantasy Land. They're both priced the same and one is actually DX9 compliant. They're both fast in DX8 with the 5900 coming out on top, barely. In DX9 even the lowly 9600 Pro doesn't have a hard time hanging with the 5900 Ultra. The FX line is a bust when compared to the Radeon 9X00 line. They're not a waste of money. They simply aren't as good as the ATi cards in their price bracket. This isn't fanboyism, this is fact.

Fanboyism is looking at benchmarks where the FX series chokes then claiming ATi is throwing money at the devs to cripple nvidia hardware. Fanboyism is thinking that the FX is faster because it can pull 400fps in Quake 3 while the Radeon 9800 Pro can only manage 360fps. If you absolutely must have 400+FPS in Quake 3, get an FX. If you can live with the lowly and unplayable 360fps in Quake 3 get the 9800. At least with the later you know you won't have to run a DX9 game with DX8 codepaths for decent performance.

RailFan

12-24-2003, 06:22 PM

Originally posted by Plaster
9800 Pro no contest.

Yea but theyre so expensive!! Id love to have one, but for now as far as that upgrade, I want what you have Plas, 9600 XT.

RailFan

12-24-2003, 06:23 PM

Originally posted by Plaster
Anyone who believes that the FX5900 Ultra is worth the money when pitted against the 9800 Pro is living in Fantasy Land.

Thats what im talking about! It will be marked down in a year or 2, just like all the other $400 cards!

Bizkitkid2001

12-24-2003, 07:38 PM

I'm not talking about the ULTRA! Yes the ultra is a waste of money. I'm comparing more towards 5900 and Radeon9800pro. The 5900 ultra is barely faster than a 5900 nonultra(Wich can be OC to 5950ultra speeds, faster than 5900 ultra) I'm saying that between the 5900nonultra and the radeon 9800pro the 5900 is a better buy. Why? Because its a hell of alot cheaper than the radeon 9800pro and it gives the radeon 9800 a good run for its money performance wise as well.

Give nvidia some time, and they will come out with a new driver soon to help thier DX9 problem. Here is the forum I learned that nvidia was the best at drivers.

Plaster

12-24-2003, 08:37 PM

It's nice that you were refering to the vanilla 5900 and all, but the thread pits the 9800 Pro vs. the 5900 Ultra.

tony_j15

12-24-2003, 08:59 PM

Here's the problem: a lack of DX9 games. By this time next year, we will have proof as to whether nVidia cards have problems with DX9. Right now, we can only make guesses. Most of us have made the right guess I hope.

Give nvidia some time, and they will come out with a new driver soon to help thier DX9 problem. Here is the forum I learned that nvidia was the best at drivers.

The 50 series drivers utilizes something I could only call an emulator. Dig: Because of incompatibilities with the DX9 HLSL(high level shader language), FX cards use a program that decodes the hlsl and re-encodes it to an nvidia friendly format on the fly. Here's the thing. nVidia has had full disclosure of the DX9 format, why didnt they do a better job of making it work with their cards. Now they gotta use this emulator program, which is suspect in many ways. How can one do a apples to apples comparison when the HLSL is not actually being used by FX cards? I would just rather be safe than sorry. While I too learned here that nVidia had the better drivers, that was years ago. Since then, ATI has come along very well and their drivers are just as robust as nVidia's.

Rugor

12-24-2003, 09:01 PM

In the FX series Nvidia essentially designed a very very fast DX8.1 card with limited DX9 capabilities. It's a good contender in DX8 level and OpenGL games but it cannot catch up to the new ATI cards in DX9.

Unfortunately no driver revision is ever going to give Nvidia's FX cards even near performance parity with ATI in DX9. The architecture just can't do it. The hardware has fewer and much weaker pixel shaders, so they execute shader-heavy applications much more slowly than ATI. Even if the shaders are re-ordered to reduce register usage (the FX's Achilles heel) they are still unable to compete directly.

It's the age old problem of a 4-pipe card against an 8-pipe one, it can't really keep up unless it has a much bigger speed advantage than Nvidia possesses. ATI won this round, it's up to Nvidia to rethink and come back in the NV4x generation.

Bizkitkid2001

12-24-2003, 10:13 PM

But a 5900 has 8 pipes, or are you just using that as an example?

Rugor

12-25-2003, 02:47 PM

Sorry, but a 5900 doesn't actually have eight pipes. It's a four-pipe architecture that can perform some operations as if it had eight pipes. Essentially it's a standard 4x2 architecture (pipes x TMUs) that can do some ops as an 8x0 architecture as opposed to ATI's 8x1 architecture.

Essentially it works as an eight-pipe chip unless doing color and Z data, when it works as a four-pipe chip. Unfortunately any pixel that is actually output to the screen requires both color and Z data. So while it can do some ops as an eight-pipe setup it can never output more than four pixels per clock making it a four-pipe architecture.

Yoshi

12-25-2003, 07:43 PM

FOR GODS SAKE THEY BOTH WILL DO THE JOB OF HIGH END END GAMING JUST FIND.

Tweb

12-25-2003, 10:02 PM

I have a 5900FX an it roars in all my games, The game I play most is OpenGL an the FX cards, IMAO, out perform in OpenGL the ATI, The only DX game I play limits the FPS to 50 an niether the ATI or Nvidia would do any better 'cause of the games limiting the FPS. I perfer OpenGL to DX anytime!!!

Rugor

12-25-2003, 10:16 PM

The FX5900 is a good choice for OpenGL, especially since it's easy to expose Nvidia's specific extensions in OGL. I still prefer the Radeon 9800 but that's because I'm an AA freak and ATI does that better.

Imperion1

12-25-2003, 11:20 PM

Get the 9800 Pro.

And I'm not biased, I currently have a EVGA 5700Ultra that I just bought about 4 weeks ago.

Anymore of this card is better than that card, or constantly saying the same **** over and over will get this thread closed.

Bizkitkid2001

12-26-2003, 01:58 AM

Originally posted by Rugor
In the FX series Nvidia essentially designed a very very fast DX8.1 card with limited DX9 capabilities. It's a good contender in DX8 level and OpenGL games but it cannot catch up to the new ATI cards in DX9.

Unfortunately no driver revision is ever going to give Nvidia's FX cards even near performance parity with ATI in DX9. The architecture just can't do it. The hardware has fewer and much weaker pixel shaders, so they execute shader-heavy applications much more slowly than ATI. Even if the shaders are re-ordered to reduce register usage (the FX's Achilles heel) they are still unable to compete directly.

It's the age old problem of a 4-pipe card against an 8-pipe one, it can't really keep up unless it has a much bigger speed advantage than Nvidia possesses. ATI won this round, it's up to Nvidia to rethink and come back in the NV4x generation.

Thanks for clearing that up.:t

Bizkitkid2001

12-26-2003, 01:59 AM

Originally posted by Imperion1
Get the 9800 Pro.

And I'm not biased, I currently have a EVGA 5700Ultra that I just bought about 4 weeks ago.

Anymore of this card is better than that card, or constantly saying the same **** over and over will get this thread closed.

geeze, did someone not get what they wanted for christmas? I mean come on, if it wasn't for threads like these, what else would we talk about?:p

i'm j/k, you know i'm your pal:t