Past EED rants

Labels

Live leaderboard

Poker leaderboard

Voice of EED

Tuesday 23 September 2003

That's not a graphics card... [lurks]

This is a graphics card! It's a 256MB Asus Geforce FX 5900 Ultra. It just doesn't get any faster than this at the moment. Two fans on the bastard! Fortunately they're pretty quiet. It replaces a Radeon 9600 I had in this rig for awhile, a non 'Pro' version. Does the Asus look like it's worth 4 times as much in comparison?
All I need to do is run some benches. So far I've just been enjoying playing Tron 2.0 in 1280 x 1024 with 4X AA and Anisotropic filtering...

11 comments:

  1. I'd love to see just how that compares to the Radeon 9800 Pro - from what I've seen, they're pretty much of a muchness overall.
    I'm also not sure on this 128/256Mb argument. Is AA and Anisotropic filtering at high (1280x1024+) resolutions important enough to justify the big whack-up in pricing, because that's all a 256Mb card is going to give you right now.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So how much is this card's RRP then?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Now, I don't *actually* see that as a problem, because the card is a 110% investment which'll play everything at full max res etc. for years to come. However, that really does preclude the vast majority of gamers (even the hardcore ones) from buying it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, I wasn't for one minute suggesting that this makes sense to buy or anything. I don't think it's a good investment particularly either, you're better off buying a high-mid range card now and then the same thing again a few months down the line. The Radeon 9600 256Mb above is almost a third of the price that I paid for a Geforce 3 ti500 - and it's a hell of a lot better card. One should count the inexorable march of technology into the equation and only buy the absolute best if you want the absolute best now. Not because you think it's going to last longer, that's false economy.

    ReplyDelete
  5. By the looks of it the radeon is cheaper and faster. Only 128M tho.Oh yeah, almost forgot. There is talk of ATi bundling HL2 with a 9800 at HL2 launch time. No details about model or teritories yet.And another thing. I found a test that is almost guaranteed to bring your current rig to it's knees. Grab a copy of IL2 Sturmovik Forgotten Battles and run the 'Black Death' demo track on full detail (open gl, perfect mode) with fraps. I get Avg: 21.365 - Min: 9 - Max: 43 on a 2.2 athy & 9700 pro. 3Ghz time I think.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, it's cheaper for sure. Picking one benchmark it does a load better on does not just mean it's faster though. Unless you happen to own a Radeon card and want to feel good about yourself, eh? :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Shrug, shrug, Shrug, Shrug,
    If I was looking for a card (which I'm not) I'd wait for a The R360 which ships at end of Sept, not because of any misplaced sense of brand loyalty but because it'll probably be excelent vfm, and fast as fuck. Sure I'd like a 9800 but not because I have a 9700.

    ReplyDelete
  8. As expected, most of those links prove it's about the same speed for most games and not at all like the first link you pasted (which was a story trying to get Nvidia to explain why one game performed very badly on their hardware).At any rate, I'd agree with you. If I was buying a card, I'd buy an ATI. The FX5900 Ultra is basically Nvidias last ditch attempt to clock their architecture high enough to be competitive and because it has such high spec parts, it's ridiculously expensive.There's something else which needs to be mentioned though, a lot of the discrepency can be boiled down to the fact that ATI and Nvidia can't be directly compared at the same internal colour precision. Nvidia seem to have made a poor choice in computing to a higher precision at the cost of speed when ATI demonstrate that their level is enough for excellent visual quality and reap the speed benefits.I suspect the next Nvidia part will be directly comparable because they'll support the same internal precision. You might also note that Carmack is a bit of an FX5900 groupie. That's probably the only game coming up that will actually need cards of this spec...Heh, as I had a few cards in my machine, I ran the X2 rolling demo. This is a pretty ninja DX9 demo that looks pretty taxing. I got some pretty mad results;Geforce 3 TI500: 44.949 fpsRadeon 9600 standard: 51.211 fpsRadeon 9600 overclocked: 56.372 fpsGeforce FX5900 Ultra: 61.141 fpsHaha! It's possible I'm running out of CPU but I doubt it, this is about Athlon XP 1900+ level. The Geforce 3 was unacceptable on this test, it was jerking and chopping around, it's a 64mb card. The Radeon 9600 is fine and that's a £100 card! So the dilemma is, do you run out and spend an extra £320 to get an extra 5fps? :-)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Bung it on ebay while you can still get a decent price...'Other ATI related news; the 9800SE and 9800XT lines are starting to hit store shelves at certain vendors. Unfortunately, a lot of information is still under NDA, but you can assure yourselves we will have more to come!' - Anandtech
    That's really odd, stuff being sold before NDAs are lifted :)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Righty, I've come back to revisit the tests, this time with a 2GHz Athlon Barton CPU rather than a 1.7ish Palomino. Also time to try out the top of the line current generation Radeon vs the Nvidia in the same X demo.Geforce FX5900 Ultra: 70.025 fpsSapphire 9800 Pro All-in-Wonder: 84.347 fpsThat ATI card, despite having a radio and TV tuner, video and audio capture and dual outputs etc, is still cheaper than the Nvidia card. Oh dear.

    ReplyDelete