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once for the long run, with new architectures due out in 6 months, a $500 investment today would be significantly more out of date than if you purchase a card right before a refresh.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 - 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.