We recently received a batch of new cards in the lab and have had the time to test the Radeon 9800 Pro against a final GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, a Radeon 9700 Pro, and the top Nvidia card from late last year, the AGP 8X-enabled GeForce4 Ti 4800. If you're considering one of the high-end cards, you should know that the performance differences between the recent ATI and Nvidia models are really noticeable only at high resolutions. But if you play games at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 for the extra crisp images, then you'll appreciate the solid frame rates these cards provide, even with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering turned on to improve image quality even further.

At high resolutions such as 1600x1200, the 9800 Pro significantly outperforms the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra when antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled, and it's also up to 20 percent faster than the 9700 Pro. For instance, at 1600x1200 with the quality settings maxed, the 9800 Pro is 22 percent faster than the 5800 in 3DMark 2003, and 45 percent faster in the Unreal Tournament 2003 flyby test. At 1024x768, the performance difference is not as great--and we even saw a few instances of the 5800 performing slighter better than the 9800 Pro. It is at high resolution and with advanced feature sets enabled where the 9800 Pro really proves its mettle.

Given the new card announcements from both companies today, ATI and Nvidia don't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. Although the high-profile fight is over the high-end performance crown, the real war is being fought in the trenches to sell lots of sub-$200 cards. ATI has had its 9500 Pro out for a couple months, but the faster 9600 Pro and Nvidia's just-announced 5600 and 5600 Ultra are all going to help greatly increase the installed base for DirectX 9 hardware, which in turn should mean more games that support all the whiz-bang features. Ultimately, it's the games that will benefit from the extra performance, and we know that games like Doom III will put such intense demands on PC hardware to deliver next-generation visual effects that every last bit of performance will matter.

How we tested: All tests were run on a system based on an AMD Athlon 3000+ (Barton) processor, with 1GB of DDR400, an nForce2 motherboard, and Windows XP Professional installed. For more details, check out the CNET Labs Web site.

« Previous Page

Back to GameSpot »