Geez.I just got a new pc with 5900 Ultra and 3.2 Ghz and now all of these reviews are saying 9800 Pro blows 5900 Ultra away.Any truth?Tim

True; but Don't worry about it. The 5900 Ultra will do a good job for you.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Most of the "concerns" about the 5900 revolves around DX9 games. Note that these games are not on the market yet. If you're dealing with DX8 games, the two (9800 and 5900) are pretty close to each other. In some benchmarks, the 5900 is better than the 9800 and vice versa. In all of these, both provide extremely good performance. If you're worried about 205 fps as opposed to 215 fps, who cares? You know what I mean?What happens when DX9 games come to market remains to be seen. However, from all that is currently available, it seems as though Nvidia made some hardware choices that hurt them with DX9. Time will tell.I wouldn't worry about your recent purchase. I am able to run every single game I want at graphic levels as high as they will go with extremely high frame rates. That's all I care about. I'm sure you're the same. I have read articles that indicate that we'll have nothing to worry about with HL2, and when it comes to games like Doom III, the Nvidia cards beat out the ATI cards hands-down.FWIW, this issue has been hashed, rehashed, thrown up and rehashed again in this forum and others. Jim

bump

The 9800 Pro 128MB outperforms the 5900 Ultra 256MB in 60% of the benchmarks. 20% are on par, and the last 20% the 5900 Ultra 256MB beats the 9800 Pro 128MB.So overall, the 128MB version of the 9800 Pro is even better than the 5900 Ultra 256MB!I'll try to find the link where I saw all the benchmarks.Nvidia really blew it this round.....Regards

That certainly doesn't jive with what I've seen. With that said, if I had it to do over, I would probably choose an ATI over Nvidia just because I have more confidence in ATI's ability to meet the needs of DX9. However, as I've said before, time will tell. After all, it's only money.Jim

Doesn't jive with what I've seen either. All reviews pitting the two cards together that I've read all say that's it comes down to personal preference.Here's one I found: http://www.hardavenue.com/reviews/5900u9800p.shtmlThe dx9 thing does have me worried, but I don't see the developers not making games that aren't 100% Nvidia compatable, that's just stupid business sense. Nvidia is still a huge chunk of the market and they'll want that money.

Okay.Both Best Buy and Circuit City allow you to buy and return video cards within 14 days without any issues. With this said, I'm thinking about getting the Radeon 9800 Pro tomorrow night and compare.Is this good or should I just stick with 5900 Ultra and wait for the 51.xx driver?Tim

"Is this good or should I just stick with 5900 Ultra and wait for the 51.xx driver?"Stick with the 5900 at least until you have a chance to try the new drivers. Then if you're not happy with what they give you, head on down to BestBuy or Circuit City.

Reports seem to indicate that the 51.xx series drivers have degraded image quality to a very noticable degree in order to get better framerates. With that said, I am a HUGE believer in not coming to any conclusions until you actually see products release. Therefore, I'm not worried about DX9 titles or the 51.xx drivers with my 5900. Here's the way I look at it:* My 5900 runs all of the games that I want to play now VERY fast and with NO problems.* The image quality on my 5900 is superb in my opinion (and mine is the only one that counts when I'm the one playing).* The UltraShadow technology that is exclusive to Nvidia cards is something that I like very much and something that gives Nvidia an edge in games such as Doom 3 (but as I've said before, time will tell).* I have no driver issues with any of my games. None.Jim

I heard the problem with the Nvidia graphic hardware is with Pixel Shader 2.0 - the new DX9 shader that John Carmack insisted on and microsoft agreed to and developed.Apparently the FX series can't handle 2.0 because it's harwired to 16bit floating point percision. The 51xx drivers are an attempt to emulate Pixel Shader 2.0 using the older Pixel shader 1.4. The result being, what Jim said, some noticeably low quality graphics.ATI uses 24bit and inheirently doesn't have this problem.Nvidia is confident that they can sucessfully emulate PS 2.0 without any quality loss and minimal framerate loss. I sure as heck hope they do, I can't afford another 400 bucks for a card.As said before though, there are no games on the market yet that even use this, so I'm having a blast now playing Soldier of Fortune 2 at 150fps with every slider available maxed. :(What does make me mad is the lazy game developers that just pile on the poly's and eye-candy with reckless disreguard for the hardware. Almost every new game that comes out can't be played with maxed settings until the hardware catches up 1-2 ears later. It's getting annoying having to fully upgrade every 8-10 months.

The latest 3DMark benchmarks test PS 2.0 and it runs great on my 5900. Jim

It can run ps2.0, but can't always run it true.Here's an excellent article about it that explains things more clearly: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/ps-precision/Couple of quotes:"Ideally the floating-point arithmetic precision should comply with s23e8 (32bit single precision) numbers. Later, obviously after some lobbying from NVIDIA, PS 2.0 standard was extended with "partial precision" execution of the floating point operations. Note that this "partial precision" flag for PS operation is only a hint for a videocard's driver that operations do not need a fully precise result. But the driver can ignore this flag and execute PS command in the normal/full precision mode.""But the s10e5 numbers precision is the area where programmers should be very accurate. Obviously, precision of 16 bit numbers[Nvidia] won't let making a correct raytracer, like it was demonstrated by ATi, but even calculation of texture coordinates in pixel shaders may lead to undesirable results. Precision of s10e5 numbers won't even let us correctly address textures of the size larger than 1024 pixels for one dimension with the bilinear filtering enabled. NVIDIA perfectly understands these limitations and has already started training game developers so that they can find areas where the insufficient precision of s10e5 numbers lead to incorrect results. NVIDIA also pushes ahead all high precision calculations in vertex shaders. "

Did you guys think I would stay out of this thread? ;) Don't worry, no flamebait here though. Honestly, the 5900 Ultra is a fine card and will run DX8/8.1 games wonderfully! As mentioned though, DX9 performance is somewhat lacking. If I were in the same situation and had to make a choice, I'd choose ATI without hesitation due to better DX9 performance without image quality degradation. That being said, there's always something better just around the corner and both ATI's R420 and Nvidia's NV40 look to be screamers! I'll be holding out for an R420 myself but I don't doubt the NV40 will right some of the wrongs of NV3x's architecture.-Max Cowgill

Straight from NVidia's CTO. See this article here:http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/kirk_interview/David