GeForceFX 5900 Ultra vs Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

Two new video cards. NVIDIA’s GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. ATI’s Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. Head to head IQ and Performance!

It has certainly been a long road for NVIDIA this past product cycle. Considering NVIDIA???????ˉs high-flying past of fast and feature rich cards, the result of the GeForceFX series was shocking to us all. Delays in manufacturing on the .13 micron process, delays in availability of DDR-II RAM chips, and other hold-ups made this series of cards late to the DX9 game. In wasn’t long before talks of a kind of “3dfx curse” started making its way around the message boards. A couple parallels existed between the NV30 launch and 3dfx???????ˉs old Voodoo5 launch: a slower performing part compared to the competition, and one that was being released much later than it should have.

ATI has had their DX9 part out since September of 2002 along with an announcement of the R300 in July of that year. They shocked everyone by creating a card with more raw memory bandwidth than any card at the time, all thanks to their 256-bit memory bus. It nearly doubled the bandwidth of what was already established as the fastest card at the time, the Ti4600. For the next 5 months, ATI would be the only company to have a fully functional DX9 video card that not only had the features, but also the best AA/AF image quality and performance available.

News Source : [H]ardOCP