Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT

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once for the long run, with new architectures due out in 6 months, a $500 investment today would be significantly more out of date than if you purchase a card right before a refresh.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