Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout

Final Words

If anyone actually made it this far without skipping around, please let me express my sincere appreciation to your dedication. This article has definitely been an entity with a mind of its own, and it continued to grow regardless how much we hacked at it. There are benchmarks we had to leave out, and there is still so much more I want to do with these cards and games.

The 5950 hasn't been shown to perform much better than the 5900, but it definitely has an acceptable performance increase for a Fall refresh product. So far, we like what we have seen from the 9800XT, and we are anxious to test out ATIs OverDriver feature.

The new 52.14 drivers are much better than either the 51.xx or the 45.xx series. The image quality issues are corrected from 51.xx, and a lot of speed has been inked out over the 45.xx drivers. We have actually been very impressed with the speed, image quality, and playability enhancements we have seen. As long as NVIDIA doesn't take a step backwards before the official 50 series drivers are released, we think everyone who owns a GeForce FX card will be very pleased with what they get. NVIDIA should have never pushed the press to benchmark with the 51 series as no one used it for Half Life 2 and in the end the bugs in the drivers did nothing more than tarnish NVIDIA's name. Regaining the credibility they have lost will definitely take NVIDIA some time.

If you made it all the way through the section on TRAOD, you'll remember the miniboss named compilers. The very large performance gains we saw in Halo, Aquamark3, X2 and Tomb Raider can be attributed to the enhancements of NVIDIAs compiler technology in the 52.xx series of drivers. Whether a developer writes code in HLSL or Cg, NVIDIAs goal is to be able to take that code and find the optimum way to achieve the desired result on their hardware. Eliminating the need for developers to spend extra time hand optimizing code specifically for NVIDIA hardware is in everyone's best interest. If NVIDIA can continue to extract the kinds of performance gains from unoptimized DX9 code as they have done with the 52.14 drivers (without sacrificing image quality), they will be well on their way to taking the performance crown back from ATI by the time NV40 and R400 drop. NVIDIAs GPU architecture is a solid one, but it just needs to be treated the right way. From our angle, at this point, compiler technology is NVIDIAs wildcard. Depending on what they are able to do with it, things could go either way.

Right now NVIDIA is at a disadvantage; ATI's hardware is much easier to code for and the performance on Microsoft's HLSL compiler clearly favors the R3x0 over the NV3x. NVIDIA has a long road ahead of them in order to improve their compilers to the point where game developers won't have to hand-code special NV3x codepaths, but for now ATI seems to have won the battle. Next year will be the year of DX9 titles, and it will be under the next generation of games that we will finally be able to crown a true DX9 winner. Until then, anyone's guess is fair game.

ATI is still the recommendation, but NVIDIA is not a bad card to have by any stretch of the imagination. We still urge our readers not to buy a card until the game they want to play shows up on the street. For those of you who need a card now, we'll be doing a value card round up as part of this series as well.

Keep in mind that ATI's Catalyst 3.8 drivers are coming out this week, and rest assured that we will be doing a follow up as quickly as possible to fill in the gaps. To say this has been a very interesting month in the graphics world would be a definite understatement. If this hasn't been an overload of information, stay tuned, because there is so much more to come.