REVIEW: Point Of View 5900XT and Sapphire 9600XT @Driverheaven

Veridian3

We've just posted our latest review, this time we take a look at the Geforce FX 5900XT and the Radeon 9600XT.

"A few months ago we reviewed the Geforce FX 5700 Ultra, at the time it was Nvidia’s direct competitor to the Radeon 9600XT. At that time we were one of the few websites to suggest that the 9600XT was the better card and that the 5700Ultra just wasn’t quite good enough. Today we have our first look at the 5900XT, Nvidia’s new challenger for the mainstream market. Retailing at £170/$200 which is just above the 9600XT at £140 and the 9800 at £200 it should make a very interesting product. We also have a look at Sapphires 9600XT, Sapphire is my number one choice of powered by ATI products and I’m very interested to see how their card stacks up against the 5900XT."

Read the full article here: 5900XT + 9600XT

Discuss: Here.

Judas

that was rather quite good... looks like the nvidia card is pulling it's own quite well...

toddsmack2k

Great review V! Nice to see how well the Nvidia card performs and looks like maybe the new best bang for the buck to me.

drakesteakn

awsome review, the new NVidia card looks likea good card.

Chaos

Great job on the review, and good one for nVidia for a change.

it would have been interesting to throw a 9700 Pro and 9800np into the mix

Erroneus

A 9800 pro in the mix would really be interesting, I think the 9800 pro with a price 40$ above 5900XT has to be a better buy, because it's faster the current games and will be much more faster in future dx9 games.

{Sniping}Waste

Why was a 9700 not used? Its still out there and for the same price as the 5900XT.
How is the 5900XT in the same price range with 9600XT? Its about $20 to $50 more so a 5700 is in the right price range. Its like puting a 9800 to a 5700.
Why did you use the 3Dmark 03 with 53.03? There not aproved and have cheats to boost the score. There are rules by FM about useing unaproved drivers in reviews. You could be sued for this by FM.

toddsmack2k

I think you are taking to much into 3dMark. Can we help it the 53 drivers are not FM approved yet but they are WHQL. When in fact FM states themselves that the 52 series are approved but also state they have a specific optimisation for the pixel shader in them. Anyways the 53 was the only driver that works on the 5900XT, plus it is WHQL and it was as level a playing field as possible. The scores were synonymous throughout the review. The 5900XT did not win in just 3dMark so how can we wait on FM to give us FM approved drivers just to do reviews , we cant!

Zardon

well until FM get a "certified driver" that works with this card, it will stay as is. im not passing on reviewing this hardware because there isnt a certified driver available from them. and if you had read the recent article on rojakpot you might wonder just how the whole concept works. The driver is WHQL.

http://www.rojakpot.com/ (bottom left) "Futuremark's Approved NVIDIA Drivers For 3DMark03!"

So really I dont personally class futuremarks classifications as 100% accurate either. Certainly not going on the educated reading ive done over the net in the last months.

"Futuremark asked me to remove the Rev. 53.05 results because they were not from a certified driver and presumably open to hanky-panky by NVIDIA's driver team. This apparently makes them unsuitable for comparisons against results from other GPUs.

But why recommend the Rev. 52.16 driver as the only certified NVIDIA driver? As they have stated on their website, the Rev. 52.16 drivers have
"3DMark03 specific optimization for the Pixel Shader 2.0 test and that score is solely comparable between NVIDIA cards"? The Rev. 52.16 drivers
clearly cannot be used to provide a valid and comparable 3DMark03 result."

If nvidia are cheating on 3dmark03 then they are cheating on everything we used in the review as the article as a whole shows the 5900XT beating the 9600 XT across the board. We studied the whole review and compared results between tests and the findings were that 3dmark03 in comparision to all the other test results were in line, so we felt there werent any specific 2003 optimisations, if there were then 3dmark03 would be vastly higher comparitively to all the other result figures.

We are looking into this driver set and have already contacted futuremark about it, so if I hear anything or have anymore findings ill be posting them. its just so messed up that we have to spend so much time trying to work out what is legit and what are cheats rather than reviewing the actual hardware itself. I really am also beginning to feel microsoft need to step in here and improve the WHQL video card driver process, so that when they give a set their certification they are at least sure the company involved whether its ATI, matrox or nvidia arent cheating on IQ for performance. Personally I feel a little part of this is down to Microsoft, after all who wants to pay $400 for a video card and find out the company who make it are making low IQ drivers to compete with a competitor and microsoft certification isnt stopping it?

I mean what can we do if NO other driver works on the 5900XT except a driver they supply which is incidentally approved by Microsoft? cancel the review on a hot new product which everyone is interested in? or do our best with what we have and then investigate all avenues to verify the findings. we included 6 games as well as synthetic benchmarks from several companies. We can still see in a game like NFSU which is heavily DX9 shader dependent the ATI product wins on half the tests.

To be honest, im seriously contemplating removing all FM benchmarks from our future reviews, its certainly not worth our while to be spending so much time looking into these benchmarks and the possible cheats involved with them.

Why review it against the 9600 XT? because they are both companies flagship product for mid range - one of the largest selling sectors. and incidentally the 5900XT is only £10 more here.

Optimummind

Do you know what the definition of the word "range" means?? In this context, it means: An amount or extent of variation.

In that case, then, the 5900XT being $20 to $50 more expensive is still within the price range of the mainstream product market. You idiot.

Edit:

Here is the price range of the 9600XT cards sold at Newegg:

Cheapest 9600XT: $151.00
Highest-priced: $209.99


Now, the 5900XT at Newegg:

Cheapest 5900XT: $185.00
Highest priced: $195.00

So, it seems that the 5900XT is really the better value.

Zardon

lets keep it civil guys.

{Sniping}Waste

So is a 9700Pro and newegg has it for $202 and will beat the 5900XT in about 90% of the test so the 9700Pro is a better value then the 5900XT.

Zardon

9700 isnt on the current ATI list. it was never released as a mid range product and its been replaced by the 9800.

digitalwanderer

It doesn't matter if it's WHQL or not, you violated the user agreement in 3dm2k3 when you used it in a public review using un-certified drivers.

This is NOT Futuremark's fault, this is nVidia's fault for not putting out a set of drivers that doesn't contain 3dm2k3 cheats.

Zardon

did you read the text above on the 52.16 FM certified set? I suggest everyone heads to rojakpot and reads up.

This is seriously the last time we use 3dmarks in our reviews, im dropping them.

digitalwanderer

What does Rojak have to do with this? Seriously Z, that's a hella-lame argument. Rojak was wrong, the reason the 52.16 set were approved even with the PS optimizations is simply because they ARE NO OTHER SETS OF NVIDIA DRIVERS THAT DON'T CONTAIN CHEATS THAT AFFECT THE FINAL SCORE OF THE BENCHMARK.

That's as close as FM can come to keeping nVidia honest it seems. I don't like it either, but you are NOT helping the problem by dissing FM and using drivers that make nVidia look better than they are.

If you can't use it right, I seriously suggest you don't use it anymore.

Zardon

yeah I guess so, ill pass your comments onto stu digitalwanderer, expressed in your usual mature and constructive manner. cheers. in the meantime everyone else can bicker about who is cheating who, because im sick reading about optimisations, cheating, who is doing what and FM and their "approved" drivers. Meanwhile lets hope FM and MS get their act together and stop it before it even starts altogether. (whql - seems meaningless to me)

lar1r

I think you have the segments wrong. The 5900XT should be matched against a 9800 product (which is in the same price range).

Personally the better value is the 9800 Pro for $217 (for less than $30) more.
The 5900XT is $40 more than the lowest price I've seen on a 9600XT.
I'm using pricewatch. Is there a website that lists lowest prices in Europe?

Also is 5900XT only a web order product? I haven't seen it yet in retail stores.

Veridian3

I've only just had the chance to read through what has been an interesting discussion. Here's my take on the situation.

I have spent countless hours infront of my PC over the past couple of years running copious amounts of
benchmarks. If something isn't right in 3dmark, Aquamark or Unreal Tournament or any of the other tests then I'm going to spot it very, very quickly. 2 very good examples that I want to point you too are the volari review and our aquamark preview:

http://www.driverheaven.net/articles...rk3/index3.htm

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/...agequality.htm

As you can see if things are not right then we are not going to let it go without comment. No matter how many people the results pi** off (and believe me we got slated for both). On both of the above reviews I spent a long time examining each discrepancy and in the case of Aquamark Zardon spent additional time with IQ comparisons and flash animation examples.

With the 5900XT, as I commented on in the conclusion, you would find it hard top tell the difference between both cards IQ in 3D (including 3dmark). I also commented in a recent FX review that 3d IQ has improved on the FX in recent drivers. I also commented in this review on the fact that 2D is nicer on the Radeon.

Regarding the comments of how comparable the cards themselves are the prices over here are £140 for a retail bundle 96XT, £150 for a retail 59XT, £200+ for a 98p and this alone makes them comparable for the European market. I appreciate the cards fall into slightly different retail brackets in North America however I'm sure the prices are completely different in Asia too so which do we go on? I feel its only fair to go on the market I'm in. In the end when someone reads this review they will see my final comment stating that they should look at which they can afford and they will go off and look at the prices in their area. If it
turns out there is a difference then they will make their decision based on that. Additionally the 9800p in NA is still in the "Enthusiast" bracket price wise where as the 96/59XT's are bang on mainstream and its very rare for the average user to spend that bit extra to go enthusiast.

Finally, cheats and Futuremark. The comment that its not up to Futuremark to fix, its up to Nvidia not to cheat is, in my opinion, completely wrong. It's up to both however more so Futuremark. Futuremark created a program the purpose of which was to compare hardware. You have 2 chances to get things
right. Firstly you can make a design/product that is fit for purpose from the start. In this case part of the functional specification should have been that the program was as cheat proof as possible. They have obviously failed in this. The second option is to provide support after release which resolves any defects within a reasonable timeframe. They did go down this path to begin with and this has now stopped which means they are failing their customers (especially bad as many people pay for the pro version). If
providing adequate support means employing a team to work on de-optimising then so be it. As I see it they are currently loosing money through the damage this whole issue has done to their eputation...some of the biggest sites don't use it anymore and I'm sure they would make more money from actively fixing and providing a reliable product than leaving as is. Whatever the case where possible we will always use certified drivers. Where this is not possible we shall state the drivers are not certified. It is up
to the end user what they take from that.

To give you further insight into our review process I spend a lot of time on these. The final product is only a fraction of the tests I perform. Firstly I run the tests at 1024x768, 1280x640/1024 and 1600x1200 3 times. Then with each review I run a small amount of AA/AF tests with different settings to check there is nothing funny going on with particular settings which allows me to decide on specific settings for that review like all with 2xaa 4xaf or all with 4aa/8af etc. Finally I run all of the aa/af tests 3x at all resolutions. When all of this is complete I take the most interesting of all the results and include them in the review. This is why some sections have just average FPS, some have CPU usage, some have min max etc. All the time these tests are running I'm constantly looking at IQ and making note of any possible issues which I then check before writing up the review (providing examples if needed).

In the case of the 59XT it is a solid card all round and does excel in some areas. Having used it for a good few weeks now I am very happy with it which came as a surprise to me. When you add these results and comment/observations to the real world tests you get the full picture which can rarely be skewed and this is why I stand by my decision to include the 3dmark/53.03 results in this article.

I hope the above has clarified my reasoning and resolved your concerns. Have a nice day everyone.


EDIT: On a slightly different note, its interesting to see you all come out with these comments in a review where an NV product comes off well...where were you when we did the exact same thing with the Volari review a few weeks ago? Unceritfied driver with a warning...exact same situation other than Nv wasnt winning anything there...

Zardon

I made a choice as the owner of this site to remove 3dmark from our last 5900 XT review, there will no more reviews on this site incorporating the 3dmarks as we spend more time debating, bickering and commenting on Futuremarks stance on drivers, whether nvidia are cheating or not etc, ad infinitum...... im not quoting or linking to the many editorials on numerous sites strewn all over the net on this subject. its getting old. It doesnt even seem to matter anymore if a set is WHQL certified. Rename the exes? used to work, not anymore.

Reviewing hardware is a laborous process and rather than the actual overall content of our reviews (and the other tests we run of which there are might I add, quite a few) the topic of conversation always spirals into a Futuremark/nvidia debate - is it only me who is bored to tears reading this? I was always very pro Futuremark, but having read the many articles on the net over the last months I seriously doubt the validity of 3dmark benching, it could be strongly argued nvidia have ruined it as a useful tool - perhaps not, nonetheless unless we all wait for months after a new product is released and futuremark have had time to dissect the related driver its not a worthwhile exercise attempting to ascertain "cheats" when we could be doing more productive editorials for the site. A wide variety of real game tests will feature from this point onwards.