Big-Ticket Graphics

If you want the best desktop graphics performance money can buy, check out cards based on either of two new graphics chips, ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and NVidia's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Both delivered strong performance--and they pack an equally robust $500 price tag. In our tests of boards using these chips, the production-level 9800 XT outran the 5950 Ultra reference board in PC World's new minisuite of gaming benchmarks. Both chips modestly outpaced their immediate predecessors.

But with the release dates for the two biggest reasons to buy these cards--the highly anticipated games Doom III and Half-Life 2--still indeterminate, even serious graphics aficionados should debate the merits of buying now.

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To create the new 9800 XT, ATI tweaked its existing 9800 Pro graphics chip. The older 9800 Pro ran at 380 MHz and held one of two memory configurations: 128MB of DDR memory running at 340 MHz or 256MB of DDR2 memory running at 350 MHz. For its part, the 9800 XT runs at 412 MHz with 256MB of DDR memory running at 365 MHz.

ATI both builds its own boards and sells its chips to other board makers. The ATI boards include an updated cooler that permits a new feature called Overdrive, which the company says safely revs the chip past its listed speeds (we did not test this feature).

Like ATI, NVidia fine-tuned its most recent top-of-the-line chip--the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra--to create the 5950 Ultra. The new chip has a clock speed and a memory speed of 475 MHz, up from 450 MHz and 425 MHz, respectively. Cards based on the chip will include 256MB of DDR memory. (NVidia also offers overclocking via Registry tweaks, which we did not test.) NVidia doesn't sell its own boards, but cards equipped with the 5950 Ultra are now shipping.

The Tests

Obviously, the biggest draw of these high-end graphics chips is their ability to handle very demanding games, many of which use DirectX 9. DX9 is Microsoft's latest graphics application programming interface, and games that utilize its capabilities should offer dramatically more detail.

We had hoped to test these boards using Half-Life 2, but with that game delayed (and Id Software's Doom III likely even farther away), the PC World Test Center opted for two DX9 games--Eidos Interactive's Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, and Microsoft's Halo--to get a snapshot of each chip's current abilities.

To gauge each board's performance relative to that of the cards based on its processor's predecessor, we also retested an ATI 9800 Pro board and an MSI 5900 Ultra board. All of the boards included 256MB of memory. We used the latest drivers available at test time from each company: Catalyst 3.8 from ATI and ForceWare 52.16 from NVidia. Our tests evaluated how many frames per second (fps) each chip produced at various resolutions. A higher fps score translates into smoother on-screen action; meanwhile, higher resolution shows more detail but can lower frame rates.

In our Halo tests, the performance differences between the 9800 XT and the 5950 Ultra were minimal, as was the improvement over the previous generation.

At a resolution of 1280 by 1024 and 32 bits, the 9800 XT board hit 39 fps, an imperceptible 1 fps faster than the competing 5950 Ultra reference board (both previous-generation cards managed 36 fps).

At a higher resolution of 1600 by 1200, frame rates dropped, but the pattern held steady: a virtual dead heat between the two new cards and modest improvement over their older siblings. (See "ATI's 9800 Slips Past NVidia's 5950 Ultra" for a chart detailing our test results.)

ATI dominated the Tomb Raider tests. At 1280 by 1024 and 32 bits, the 9800 XT managed 44 fps versus the 5950 Ultra's score of 30 fps; ATI's older chip reached 41 fps, while NVidia's notched 29 fps. At 1600 by 1200 and 32 bits, the new and older ATI cards posted 32 fps and 30 fps, respectively, while the new and older NVidias managed 22 fps and 21 fps, respectively.

Our limited number of preliminary tests show ATI's Radeon 9800 XT--and in many cases, the older 9800 Pro--with a small edge over NVidia's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. The 9800 XT is tops, but in view of its $500 price tag and the fact that it remains untested with Half-Life 2 and Doom III, it feels like an expensive bet. If you can't wait, look for a deal on a board with the departing ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.

--Tom Mainelli