5900 Ultra or 9800 Pro

[Agent]

Oh, and ill go Nvidia due to better Linux support
Not an issue for most, but for some

[unrealrocks]

NVIDIA all the way - drivers, compatibility far greater!

I have had experience with both ATi and NVIDIA cards and overall my fave was the FX5900 (standard) keeping price in mind ... can you say 21,000 3DMarks (3400XP@2.4Ghz)

[Shad]

Shad i have probs with Halo and my 9800pro..its all the 9xxx series

What sort of problems? Everyone I've seen with a 9800 on the Gearbox support forum hasn't had problems with the 9800, only the 92 and 9600.

[Korky]

major problems with games! bah, i think the nvidiab0ys are having a field day with this line, the problems are minor and not with many games. It does however beat rumbling through archives of nvidia drivers in their xx.xx amounts, trying to find that one that will let ur pc shut down properly/ work with ur card/ play a certain game.

If your lookin to buy a gfx card atm then the 9800pro is the best u can buy, and will also run hl2 very well if ur worried about futureproofing.

[Spud1]

My problems that I have personally encountered with my 9800 pro are

Flickering textures in Jedi Knight 3
Occasionally Halo will refuse to draw all textures, and just render blank models
Call of duty reverts back to 16 bit textures whenever i die
Simpsons hit and Run Contants Crashes to desktop after random time periods

They are the only ones that i have personally experienced :/ still i like the card tho, it works well when it works

[SilentDeath]

im staying with my 9700 @ 9800pro perf. ati rule.

the comment about ati cards haveing lower precision is a typical fanboy comment. games do not need that much precision yet. the more operations done on a pixel with only 16 bit precision for example, the worse it will look, as with each operation, if the pixel needs more accuracy, that accuracy is missed off, resulting in some games looking horrible where too much has been done. 24bit is fine for current games. nvidia current cards are slow at doing 32bit precision, it will never be faster than current ati cards doing 24bit, only that nvidia gfx will look better (a very small amount) in future games - i DOUBT well be seeing any needing 32bit for decent quality this side of 2005. the next cards will have more features and iirc full 32bit precision will be added in the r420

also ati have confirmed opengl1.5 support, and have commented that opengl2 support is very likely (opengl should get better than dx9 around that time - its faster, easyer to code, and standardised shaders - the whole point in opengl2, should make opengl good).

also read up on how many shader operations can be done per cycle on each card - ati cards in theory can do 3x more iirc.

spud1: halo is from what ive heard a crap console port. it runs slow on very good pcs and the gfx aint even that good. imo it should be illegail for console ports to be used as benchmarks.
jedi knight 3 was based on q3 engine wasnt it? dunno why thats still got probs. - opengl aswell?
have you got the cat3.9-COD patch or the 3.10 drivers which iirc include it? (i havent played it, might not fix that problem..)
cant comment on simpsons game...

i cant see how you can say ati drivers are bad due to a few minor game problems. also note that these may be the developers fault in the first place (esp if the game uses opengl for graphics, due to the main functions being different for shaders - not standardised yet - wait for opengl2)

also ati cards have the better arcitecture, and can beat nvidia card swith much lower clock speeds. in feb when the 0.13nm ati cards get released (r420) they should have eqivalent clocks and then overclock very far past that aswell. nvidia cards, from what i know, are basicly at there limits and only major arcitecture changes will help them.

MurphmanL, you are a muppet. "The ATI cards may have a slight gain in speed, but not enough to warrant a purchase considering the lack of support ATI offers.
I am currently running a card i have just purchased and have had no problems, plug and play, update to latest drivers and thats it! No problems on any games, i can run just about anything full steam on high resolutions."
lack of support? there drivers are fine, released on a monthly basis. have you had any problems or even owned a ati card? have you contacted ati support about any problems? stfu about there support.
why did you spend extra for a 256mb version of a slow card, esp when the extra mem makes a rediculusly low difference in performance except in rare occasions..?
oh, btw, i can run most newly released games fine in 1600*1200 with 6xaa and 16xaf. the only game that start to go slow on mine due to gfx is nfs:u. even doom3 alpha runs like a dream.
also may i point out the fx cards have had more than there share of in game problems, for example TR:AOD.

oh, also nvidia invented driver cheating - lowering quality for benchmarks and in certain games against the users wishes - giving higher bench scores. afaik ati have never done any cheating of this kind, although they were forced to remove proper driver improvements by nvidia fanboys complaining even htough they didnt affect image quality.

also developers atm seem to be prefering ati cards, them being the ones deciding on how well the game will run on any card, are the ones id most likely listen to about this kind of subject.
having said that, a ti4200 is still fine for all current games, i dont usually upgrade stuff untill whats released is twice as fast (including the o/c i run it at) but that wont be happening any time soon, and ive got too much money... if you can get a ti4200 or ti4400 for around £50 then use one of them, the only card worth upgrading to imo is 9800SE AIW due to ability to softmod on some cards.

sorry for the rant, but it has to be said, too many fanboys on here. nvidia is like a religion, ati is like a science. http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=9552
please feel free to tear apart my post, FLAME ME!!! try to keep it on topic though.

[Applecrusher]

erm no your all forgetting something...
...
Also the nvidia cards are techincally more advanced than atis current breed. Its all to do with the way that they process the information. Ati cheat and only use 24-bit 'processing' (note i can't remember the exact thing thats done this way - i think its the pixel shaders but i'm not sure) whilst Nvidia use full32-bit - something that the Ati cards cannot do. However at the moment no DX9 games are written to support the full 32bit mode, therefore Nvidias cards have to do more work to output the image - hence the lower performace with the current crop of games. In the future this will change tho, when developers write games to support this 32 bit 'processing'....

I though it was the other way around... there was a link on the hexus home page at one stage thaqt explained it.. just cant find it in the archives... can anyone else find it???

[Spud1]

*cough* ati fanboy here *cough*

the problems with the games are not minor, and are entirely driver based. (diff cats work with diff games, we cant be expected to change drivers every time we want to play one of the 'troublesome' games. Yes i've tried the COD fix, it stops it crashing but the texture probs still exist

I'm not no Nvidia fanboy, if i was i would never have got a 9800pro. i'm just going by facts and my experiences...

[paradidle]

I never had ANY problems with either Nvidia or ATI, Ive had Hercules 32mb and a Ti4200 128mb Nvidia cards, both ran fine, and recently a 9800pro - which is excellent. I've never noticed any difference in 2D imagery from all cards, however, when I learned about AA + AF, and realised how much it impaired the performance of my Ti4200, it was time to get a card from ATI.

Just go to the reviews section!!

simple as!

[KraniX]

i vote for the 9800, i have a 9700 np at the mo, drivers and stability are superb. not had any major compatibility problems except full version of splinter cell was screwed big time, patch sorted it though.

i ain't no fan boy, i buy the best and fastest versus price card, but i gotta say the latest set of cards from nvidia really ain't looked much cop. lets hope the next cycle sees some improvements.

[unrealrocks]

Maybe this should have been started as a poll

[Skii]

As almost exclusively a flight-simmer, ATI all the way at the moment. The major attraction with these cards is the ability to run 4x / 6x Anti-Aliasing with no effect on framerate.

[BlackSheep]

Halo has no problems with the 9800, but has problems with 9200's and 9600's. I've had absolutely no problems playing Halo on my system (other than the sound.. grrr).

Halo runs badly on pretty much everything - it's a nasty port - and I'm pretty sure somebody could write a better xbox emulator and run it as a rom through this with better results - or you could say that's what bungie actually did - call me a sceptic

btw I still pld and completed it on hard and enjoyed it, despite the huge fps drops in certain areas - for a game that is so dated in terms of graphics it's massively inefficient. The sound imo isn't so dated, it 0wn3d especially if you wear a nice set of headphones whilst playing the forest scenes ... it feels like rain *is* actually hitting your helmet - noice

I didn't notice any texture issues on 9700pro or 9800pro

[BlackSheep]

oh, btw, i can run most newly released games fine in 1600*1200 with 6xaa and 16xaf. the only game that start to go slow on mine due to gfx is nfs:u. even doom3 alpha runs like a dream.

... slight exaggeration there (try World Champ Snooker 2003 or Tiger Woods 2004 or Worms 3D or ... well anything else recent)

but your other comments are bang on the mark, even NFSU runs at 1280x1024 @ above 70fps consistently which plays very nicely

I really like NVidia as a company and really hope that they can surpass ATI in the their next gen architecture, however, at present ATI rules <insert FULL STOP here>

... rememeber this ... competition is a good thing, perhaps the best thing for us, the consumer and threads like this just go to show how close the competition is.

[bouncin]

erm every 9800 pro problem gets fixed within days i only had a prob with halo and fixed it in minutes by turning up all minimap and texture details to full

and chris i got 20,700 the other day on 3d mark yippee just thought id say

[royce]

I have both cards, and I'd go with the Radeon... I run the ultra most of the time on this rig though...