9800 pro or FX5800

[killercow]

I am a gamer. And as most people know gamers want good graphics, video, and 3d accelerators. To get this you need a good video card. I am looking around with my newly found graduation/birthday money. Should I get a GeForce FX 5800 128/256 MB DDR or an ATI Radeon 9800 PRO. After reading many articles I hear that the 9800 is the best gcard out now. Both have support for direct X 9.0. Most likely half-life 2 will use direct x 9 if you've seen it on tv in reviews and screen shots. Which is better. I need a personal opinion. The FX is MUCH cheaper but will it turn out to be no better than my GF3?
Thanks

[saphalline]

The FX 5800 would indeed turn out to be much more powerful than your GF3, however the 5800 has already been replaced by the infinitely better designed 5900. I don't know if you'll be able to find a 5900 right now, but NVidia has released it so it should be available soon.

The 5800 has several problems/design issues that kept it well below even the Radeon 9700's in terms of performance. First, it still uses the "older" 128-bit RAM bus width of its predecessors instead of the 256-bit bus width used by the latest DX9 cards. Having twice the bus width allows twice the RAM bandwidth with the same speed RAM!! :eek: Needless to say, this held the FX 5800 back quite a bit. Another problem with the 5800 was the huge fan assembly - it was big and loud, like louder than 6 case fans kind of loud! Turned out to be a flaw in the fan blade design that makes the fan constantly scrape its surroundings - I wonder how NVidia missed that??

Anyway, enough of ripping the 5800 apart. Suffice to say everyone should stay away from it. The real contendor to your Radeon 9800 Pro choice is the GeForceFX 5900 when you can buy it. Not too sure on the final specs/benchmarks, but I think they'll be so close in actual performance that only overclocking headroom and price will be the deciding factors. And yes, if you can afford it, I recommend a 256MB card for all those DX9 games. I hear tale that the DoomIII beta demo itself can already eat up the 128MB on current cards!

Either way, you'll be buying quite a boost from your puny, first-gen DX8 card! ;)

[killercow]

I see ... should I worry if my GF3 is running direct x 9 already??? I have it installed somehow on it. Works fine though.

[saphalline]

That's fine, it's just that the DX9-specific effects like Pixel Shader 2.0 won't be used. Every time DirectX goes through an upgrade, it not only adds things but improves on previous things as well. So all the older DX7 games (like Battlefield 1942, NOLF2, MOHAA, etc) run better on DX9 vs DX7 because the DX7 effects have been improved and debugged in DX9 (actually twice since DX8 was inbetween :p ).

DirectX is actually very smart in that it detects which "special features" your graphics card supports. Or rather, it tells the games you run which features they can and can't use.