Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
#41, maybe you and your wife should start a website, you could benchmark ATI cards exclusively. That way ATI would always wind up on top. Admittedly, I'm an ATI junkie (I own a Radeon 8500 and plan to buy a 9600XT ASAP), but enough is enough. (By the way, what's up with the bread/butter analogy? You seem very fond of it.) Seriously, though, either of these cards are really fast and aside from IQ differences, you couldn't tell a difference. A little question for anyone who would know, though: How much does IQ drop going from PS2.0 to PS1.4? I have Halo and I'm wondering how much better it would look on a DX9 card instead of DX8.1.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
if you look at the gunmetal screenshots, that is my only beef with ATI, the scenes are not rendering completely or properly it has happened to me in a lot of games, black areas.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
The article does seem somewhat comprehensive that is true, but: a)other sites reviewing the software did not come to the same conclusions, mainly problems with trilinear and AF again.... b)I have yet to see a review that claims to be unbiased have this much opinion sprinkled all over, mainly pro nVidia which relies on IQ comparison which i refer to in a c)the drivers are beta and not whql so who knows what we'll get as consumers d)the hardware is not yet anounced formally by nVidia e)it seems the choice of what to show on graphs is very subjective,TRAOD shows percentage drops with PS 2.0 but what are the framerates?I do hope this review is correct because it means nvidia are back but due to the above stated qualms I have I can't trust this review.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
The article is extremely comprehensive, as one would expect from Anandtech. Some issues of note:1. It was pointed out that the 5900 and the 5950, in many areas, performed almost identically. This doesn't pose well for nVidia.
2. I'm bothered by the tremendous frame rate difference between ATi and nVidia in some of the titles. It leads me to believe there's something underlying going on, and it's not just a simple card/driver issue.
3. It's nice to see the IQ back to where it should be, as visual quality should never be compromised for performance, unless the user makes the adjustments to do so.
4. I will admit it sort of seems that there is some bias towards ATi, but it's not flamingly apparent. Again, it is just my perception, and doesn't necessarily mean that there is.
5. The most accurate remark made in this review is simply that we are not in the world of DX9 games...yet. To that end, DX9 performance is not nearly as important as it will be. When it is, I think things will step up a few notches.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
Nicely detailed article, and I appreciate the additional games for benchmarking. Any chance we could seee the use of a flight/combat sim program like IL-2 or Mechwarrior?Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
I don't know why everyone is believing the IQ results (or even trying to use Photoshop to check the differences). These pics are JPG's! They're already manipulated by the compression logic, and who's to say these pics are true?Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
Loooooong time reader, new poster.Excellent work Anand and Co. I found the article very informative, and although certain folks don't enjoy reading your "opinions" on some of the benchmarks, I thought they were very appropriate. It will be interesting to see how the official driver releases function under the latest and greatest DX9 and OpenGL games...
Thanks for all your hard work and effort!
Mike
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
#78The shots has not been taken in the same frame.
Gunmetal, contrary to Aquamark don't have such option....that's why so many screenshots are taken at the beginning of a scene or a dead spot.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
#67I seriously suggest that you upgrade everything else in your machine, reinstal drivers, game and defrag.
Mine runs perfectly at 1280*1024 with the max AF and displays between 40-60fps all the way using the cg_draw command and that's GAMEPLAY framerates .... with sound, AI and all the whistles. I see no need for AA at that resolution thou (not a nice IQ/performance trade there)....at 1024 it does wonders thou.
capodeloscapos - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
Why nobody said anything about IQ in GUN METAL???Only NvIdia 52.14 shows the fire in Mech's Gun.
What happened there???