5900 Ultra or 9800 Pro

Hi all,

I'm planning on getting a new GPU. I'm looking for a 128MB card for about £250 - £300 not much more. I'm ruling out the 5950 and 9800XT so the question is which to go for ??

I have a 17" flat screen but only run the resolution at 1024 X 768 (It seems people always run higher but I find the menu's etc get too small to read)

I am looking at either the Gainward 1200XPGS or the Hercules prophet 9800 Pro. I have read LOADS and LOADS on the web about the ATI having better vertex shaders (dunno what this means in the real world) but the 5900 Ultra being faster at low resolutions with AA on etc.

Anyone who has either of these cards can you help out, or can anyone just point me in a good direction. Is one REALLY the clear better GPU ?

ThanX

The Ultra scores better in some raw power tests, but the Radeon 9800 Pro is the better card as it can handle DX9 better which on the 5900 has to be cut down and doesn't run as well or look as good.

Basically, the 5900 will be a bit faster with old games, but the 9800 is better for future games and will be faster on them.

See if you can get the Radeon 9800 TX as it is a bit faster than the 5900 which will pretty much eliminate the old game gap completely, leaving no reason to get the 5900.

What Enverex said basically.

The nVidia card wins on raw power, the ATi wins in pretty much any game using DirectX 9. So if you want to play Halflife 2, the 9800 Pro is the card to get.

aggreed.

Cheers all,

To be honest I was never keen on the 9800 Pro and the only reason was that I have never had an ATI before only 3dFx and Nvidia but I'm going for the ATI now thanks to you guys.

It confirms what I have read but if's it a load of pants I'll be expecting you guys to refund my money .... only kidding ;)

Cheers all.
9800 Pro here I come
(Goes back to bank manager) :eek:

another vote for 9800pro

I would go for the 9800pro.
Just my 2p's worth.

erm no your all forgetting something...

first i would agree that at the moment, if your buying a card you should get a 9800pro simply as its the cheapest of the two cards. But remember this

the 9800pro STILL has some MAJOR compatability issues with games. (Eg screen flickering in Jedi Knight 3, or C.O.D Crashes, or Halo randomly having no textures)
Ati are trying to eliminate them with each driver release but these do not occur on Nvidia cards. The problems are nowhere near as bad as they used to be but they still exist.

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'

However despite this i still have a herc 9800pro - why? I can't justify the extra cost of a 5900ultra when the perfomance gap is so small. however ,if you have the money go for the 59900ultra, no contest

"apparently" the 5900 has trouble rendering certain features in games although i have seen no proof of this and a mate has a 5900U and it works absolutely fine. Personal choice and experience would determine the buy imo

I bought a 9800 Pro about 4 months back now and I love it :D Yes there are a few issues with a few games, these are soon fixed though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spud1

the 9800pro STILL has some MAJOR compatability issues with games. (Eg screen flickering in Jedi Knight 3, or C.O.D Crashes, or Halo randomly having no textures)

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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).

If you can wait a month or 2, you can save yourself some major cash.
I'm holding off an ATI for the main reason that Nvidias driver support is superior to ATIs.

With the latest drivers, the performance gap on DX9 games using the 24bit precision is smaller (but the ATI does still win), but when the higher precision DX9 games come out Nvidias should have a performance gain (Probably not a huge amount though).

Time will tell, but hold if if you can, your wallet will thank you later :)

Why not get an aiw with that money?

Nvidia all the way in my opinion. ATI drivers tend to have many problems with games or with other processes in the OS environment. Where Nvidia on the other hand are now focusing their new drivers to give users better performance and never intefere with any games or other OS processes.
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.
Also, the performance issue in DX 9 games wont be noticable to the naked eye, just to people who strive to get the extra spark on an explosion or slightly higher frame rates... Nvidia get my vote, and i am currently enjoying upgraded gaming from a Geforce 2 MX 400 64mb to a Geforce FX 5600 Ultra XT 256mb :D hasnt't let me down so far and Oc's quite nicely too ;)

9800 Pro between those 2 (& you're spending that much)

or save some $$ and get the 5900 non ultra (great deal) thats as fast as the 5900 Ultra for cheaper

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

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

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)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spud1

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

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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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spud1

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'....

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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??? :D

*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...

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!

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.

Maybe this should have been started as a poll :)

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shad

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).

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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

Quote:

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Originally Posted by |SilentDeath|

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.

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... 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.

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

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

bouncin the point is that the problems shouldnt happen

its shoddy testing on ATI's part, they are releasing drivers that have problems with games. Its pot luck whether the latest game will work with the damn thing

Spud1 maybe for you it is. noone else seems to be botherd. if you want to know why not all games are working fine its becuase different games need different fixes, and it doesnt work by giving each game differnt settings. if the fix for COD was applyed to all games, it might make them look crap or something - a good reson not to include it.
theres plenty of apps that you can use to try to fix it, although cant think of any apart from redline, which comes with sapphire cards - i think its available from sapphires site if you want to d/l it

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spud1

bouncin the point is that the problems shouldnt happen

its shoddy testing on ATI's part, they are releasing drivers that have problems with games. Its pot luck whether the latest game will work with the damn thing

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you can't blame shoddy games development on ATI --- they have a hard nuff time testing on multiple platforms as it is, the sheer variety of devices on PCs makes it impossible to guarantee things will work with all devices, let alone with personal device settings ... Halo is just one example, by default ATI Drivers put texture quality to max - how can you blame ATI for poor development on Bungie's part for not testing with < full quality textures on ATI cards???

Besides you'll find issues with both sets of drivers, it's just that historically ATI have had more bad press for poorly written drivers - but if you look at the situation today you'll find that their drivers are extremely stable and updates are released on a regular basis to address any such games glitches - we are not dealing with consoles or Mac's here !

as a side note I haven't had any game that hasn't worked with ATI drivers - I have had a some very minor issues with a couple over the past year, but nothing major - and these have been ironed out within weeks anyway in a driver update.

obviously the problems will not effect everyone, but you are missing my point

the point is that the Nvidia drivers do not throw up these problems - or at least not to the same magnitude. Nvidia driver problems are mainly perfomance related whereas ATis affect the playability of the games.

I recognise the ATIs current drivers are the most stable that they ever have been yet, and they are clearly gettin better but the point is that nvidia still have better drivers for their cards then ati do.

I don't want to continue arguing over this point, as everyone wil have a different view depending on their experiences so lets agree to disagree right? as we are clearly going off topic ;)

ive had a 5800 ultra ,5900 ultra and swapped out for my radeon 9800 pro first ati i ever bought due to people telling me about driver issues and stuff but im so glad i got it.

I personally like Nvidia better, but all around performance the 9800 Pro seems to be a little stronger, mostly b/c its use 24bit vs 32bit Nvidia is using.

For me its a question of driver stability. I've NEVER had a problem playing any game from GF256, GF2 GTS, GF4ti4600, to currently fx5900nu. Where the driver/game bugs documentation on ATI's cards is usually pages long.

Being that you're on a 1024x768 moniter, you're going to have to turn up AA & AF to get high quality gaming. (in older games with high fps) ATI does seem to handle AA & AF better (more fps) Either card should do you fine, all the fanboy quibbling aside.

Its really just a matter of preference. The both have their weaknesses & strengths. Depends on the game, settings, driver, system, etc.

imo its upto the game developers to get there games fixed before release. 9x00's were out before halo came to the pc, surely the developers of halo would have done some testing on decent hardware to ensure its working properly? - you cant blame the hardware manuf for dodgy coding. you certinly cant blame ati for a game that has problems on release, not only that fixes take time and can affect other games - in which case its probly bestf or the game to be pacthed instead of the drivers, if possible.
spud1 i am going to ignore your point. nvidias drivers are all they have left atm, and they aint THAT good to begin with. the performance of there cards has droped, i dont see any reson why over the next year there drivers wont drop too - i assume with dx9 gfx in games gets a lot more complicated and time consimung to test properly.

"Where the driver/game bugs documentation on ATI's cards is usually pages long."

id like to see an example of that, show me 3 readme's in which ati cards have had a lot of mentions about bugs, where nvidia hasnt, EXCLUDING XBOX OR OTHER CONSOLE PORTS (xbox due to games being desinged around nvidia hardware with no thought of them ever running on ati cards - an example of this being splintercell - doesnt really have any problems apart form being a rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe game in the first place, i think it used to crash before the game was patched, probly on all cards, and also any forced FSAA would make all the lights on the level shine thru everything. this was also proably all cards aswell. the shadows were probbably better on nvidia cards due to having extra option for more complex shadows, but thats about it iirc..)

omg i havent tried splinter cell on the rad yet that could just change my opinion in the world of gfx cards lol