Benchmarks are subjective tests so everyone's tests will have slightly different results.
The Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB version) has a much more efficient memory architecture, despite the Geforce's slightly higher bandwidth. ATI makes much better use of multiple shaders on current games, their shadow and lighting optimizations render just about any scene noticeably more realistically than nVidia's offering, and it can apply FSAA and AF concurrently on high-polygon scenes with a relatively small loss in frame rate.
From nearly every benchmark rundown I have seen, the Radeon maintained a higher frame rate in 6 out of 10 tests, especially when the resolution was cranked up to 1600x1200 and FSAA and AF were activated concurrently.
Bottomline:
Both card's are priced the same, but the Radeon seems to have the edge in today's games, especially in Direct X games and persistent world games (like MMORPG's). The Geforce will ultimately only find usefulness in the game's of tomorrow--games that will be extremely taxing on the Geforce's amazing shader technology and likely use up the card's 26GB/s of memory bandwidth constantly. Games like Half-Life 2 and Doom III (end of 2003) will really show us what the card can do. But by that time ATI will already have their new core ready and be prepared to release a new Radeon, possibly leaving nVidia in the dust.
The new Geforce FX 5900 is not nearly as loud as the now late Geforce FX 5800. The Flow FX system it used with the massive fan is now gone. But the card still manages to take up two slots (the AGP slot and one PCI slot), whereas the Radeon takes up just one. But who really cares about that anyway?
Oh, and the driver angle no longer applies for nVidia fanboys. For the longest time, nVidia dominated with their driver releases. They were plentiful, efficient, user-friendly, and boosted performance more than the competition. But the FX 5900 is already starting out with driver issues while ATI's catalyst driver seems to improve daily.
Anyway, I have a Radeon 9700 Pro and I could not be happier with it. nVidia just can't measure up anymore. My card, which is nearly 1 year old performs nearly as well as the Geforce FX 5900. With as much time as nVidia had to capitalize, the FX 5900 should not be on par with the Radeon 9800 Pro, it should far surpass it. But alas, it does not. In fact, the Radeon (in most benchmarks) seems to have the advantage 60% of the time, as I said earlier.
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