whats better???

[tony_j15]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Rugor]

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]

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

[Tweb]

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]

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]

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]

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.