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once for the long run, with new architectures due out in 6 months, a $500 investment today would be significantly more out of date than if you purchase a card right before a refresh.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
I think that the new reviews should include Half-life 2....when availableAlso when UT2k4 comes out toward the end of the year (or is available to anand), UT2k3 should be replaced as a benchmarking tool. It seems likely that the graphics engine will be tweaked and better looking, as well as include very large levels in UT2k4
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
This is what I want to see used for CPU articles. Your old crap tests suck (well, unreal 2003 is still used). This is MUCH more useful to someone trying to find out how the latest games will run on their new cpu. Why use quake3 in cpu articles when you can use a bunch of games like this? Do people care more about quake3 or the batch of games you're using here for tesing vid cards? The very same games apply to picking a new cpu. NOT Q3. That game is DEAD.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
You guys should really indicate what the API used for each game is -- DX8, 8.1, 9 or Open GL. That would help out a lot in determining if a company optimizes for an API, a single game, or everything... not everyone follows the game industry enough to know which games are programmed in which graphics API....Jeff7181 - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Just so ya know... overclocking will dramatically increase the performance... check this thread I created here for some overclock GeForceFX5900 results...http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=...
Davegod - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
"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."
Worth repeating since least 3/4 of whiners seem to have not noticed it. About 1/4 remains for the driver 'issues', which isnt mentioned but still might be/hopefully is intended, although I'd assume it to take at least as much time as the entire rest of the roundup.
Ye, hopefully parts I-III will include something to give more of an indication of Dx9. With a bit of luck it'll be the HL2 bench - the delay of which maybe being the reason for little in the way of Dx9?
- DG
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
please include every game that has been made in the past 5 years, so everyone will be happy and will shut the hell up! :)Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
regarding AA on halo, disabling the alpha render targets prevents the game from turning it off.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
nvidia can compete only in dx.7 and dx.8 or opengl 1.2 games due to wrong strategy of their ceo mr.hu ho ha nv 35 architecture has failed do you really think that nvidia can force microsoft to include nvidia custom shader language [code] in dx.9Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
While I can appreciate the work it took to generate all these benchmarks...what a complete and utter waste of time! Less than 10% bumps in the clockspeed? Zzzzzzz. I'd have sent it back to ATI and told them to call when they had something interesting.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
It would be much more helpful if you included an older video card for reference. Like a geforce 4200, 4600. I am sure there are several users like myself who bought one of these cards in the past year or so and would like to see how it compares to what is new to see how benificial a new upgrade would be.