FX 5900 Ultra vs. R9800 Pro

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Quite simple really. We take nVidia's top offering and pair it up against the current top offering from ATi and let them duke it out till the bitter end. Who will come out on top? We'll see. Admittently, this is not a 100% fair comparison as the GF FX 5900 Ultra is a 256MB Card and the FIC/ATi 9800 Pro is only a 128MB part. Still, we believe the differences would only be slight and should still make for a great head to head battle to see which could be the superior card to have in your box.

 

Manufacturer:	nVidia / ATi
Product:	GF FX 5900 Ultra vs. Radeon 9800 Pro
Price:	USD $499  $399
Written By:	SPeeD

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GeForce FX 5900 Ultra vs. Radeon 9800 Pro

 

VS.

 

 

Introduction

Quite simple really. We take nVidia's top offering and pair it up against the current top offering from ATi and let them duke it out till the bitter end. Who will come out on top? We'll see. Admittently, this is not a 100% fair comparison as the GF FX 5900 Ultra is a 256MB Card and the FIC/ATi 9800 Pro is only a 128MB part. Still, we believe the differences would only be slight and should still make for a great head to head battle to see which could be the superior card to have in your box.

Recently we have reviewed both cards but are quite curious (as I'm sure our readers are also) how they will compare together when running several benchmarks of varying degrees. Let's get this fight started!

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In this corner!

We have the BFG GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256MB Asylum video card. Recently reviewed here on OCAddiction, the nVidia NV35 based card impressed us quite a bit. Does it have what it takes to challenge the mighty ATi Radeon 9800 Pro? We'll soon see. Here are a few key specs of the GF FX 5900 Ultra.

 

Specifications

• GPU NVIDIA® GeForce™ FX 5900 Ultra
• Bus Type AGP
• Memory 256MB DDR
• Core Clock 450MHz
• Memory Clock 850MHz (Effective)
• RAMDAC Dual 400MHz
• API Support Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0, OpenGL
for Microsoft® Windows®
• Connectors VGA, DVI, VIVO
• 338 million vertices/sec.
• 27.2GB/sec. memory bandwidth

 

Features at a Glance
• AGP 8X (compatible with 4X and 2X AGP 2.0
compliant slots)
• Up to 8 pixels per clock rendering engine
• Up to 16 textures per pass
• NVIDIA® CineFX™ 2.0 engine
• Microsoft® DirectX ® 9.0 with Vertex Shader 2.0
and Pixel Shader 2.0
• NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ technology enhances performance of bleeding-edge games that use
complex shadows

 

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And in this corner!

We have the FIC Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB Video Card. Boasting quite a few new features to keep the competition at bay, can it keep the current video card crown? Lets take a look at the specs of this card.

Specifications

• Memory 128MB DDR
• Core/Memory Clock 380MHz / 340MHz
• Memory Interface 256 bit
• Max Res 2048 x 1536 x 75Hz (Impressive.....)
• Advanced 3D Features including Smoothvision™2.0, Trueform™2.0 Smartheader™2.0, Hyper Z™2.0, Videoshader™ (and king of buzzwords™)
• Bus AGP 8x / 4x
• Display support CRT, DVI-I, TV-Out, VGA Connector
• API Support DX9.0, OpenGL
• OS WinME, Win2k, WinXP
 

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At a glance comparison

 

 

 

	ATI Radeon 9800 PRO	NVIDIA GeForceFX 5900 Ultra
Chip Technology	256-bit	256-bit
Process	0.15 Micron	0.13 Micron
Transistors	~107 Million (?)	130 Million
Memory Bus	256-bit DDR	256-bit DDR
Memory Bandwidth	21.8 GB/s	27.2 GB/s
Pixel Fillrate	3.04 Gigapixel/s	- Texelrate (Color+Z): 1800 texel/s - Z-rate (Z): 3600/s - Stencilrate: 3600/s - Texturerate: 3600/s
Anti Aliased Fillrate	18.2 Billion AA Samples/s	~27.2 Billion AA Samples/s
Max FSAA Mode	6x	4x
Triangle Transform Rate	380 M Triangles/s	315 M Triangles/s
AGP Bus	4x/8x	4x/8x
Memory	128MB	256MB
GPU Clock	380 MHz	450 MHz
Memory Clock	340 MHz (680 DDR)	425 MHz (850 DDR)
Memory	BGA 2.8ns	BGA 2.0ns
Vertex Shader	4	FP Array
Pixel Pipelines	8	4 for color & Z 8 for z 8 for stencil 8 for texture
Texture Units Per Pipe	1	1
Textures per Texture Unit	8	16
Vertex S. Version	2	2.0+
Pixel S. Version	2	2.0+
DirectX Generation	9	9.0 (+)
FSAA Modi	MultiSampling	MultiSampling
Memory Optmizations	Hyper Z III+	LMA II Optimized Color Compression
Optmizations	SmartShader 2.1 SmoothVision 2.1	IntelliSample HCT
Display Outputs	2	2
Chip Internal Ramdacs	2 x 400 MHz	2 x 400 MHz
Bits per Color Channel	10	10
Special	TV Encoder On-Chip; FullStream Adaptive Filtering F-Buffer	TV Encoder On-Chip Extended Progammability Adaptive Filtering UltraShadow
Estimated Price	$399	$499

 

 

Well, I'd say the cards look very evenly matched. Even though our particular R9800 Pro only has 128MB of memory, we are confident that the given tests will show very little (if any) benefits from the added 128MB of additional memory on the FX 5900 Ultra. Still, we will try to take this into consideration when possible. Benchmarks anyone?

Next: Setup and Benchmarking >>
 

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