All the cards tested here will play most of the games titles currently available on the market with their shortcoming being slower performance and or Direct-X support for the latest graphics features discussed earlier in the review. The FX-5900 after being dissected shows performance levels between a RADEON 9700 Pro and a 9800 Pro, which is nothing to slouch at and shows the card as a contender for your money. Playing games and doing rendering in Photoshop all worked well with the MSI FX-5900 and with the advanced controls settings left at default it played every game I installed without any glitches or failures whatsoever.
I have to say that overall the FX-5900 was a more compatible card than that of the RADEON 9700-9800 series as I had to use patches on some game using the ATI card's and no patches were ever needed to run the games using the NVIDIA card's. NVIDIA got slapped in the face recently for trying to modify their driver to enable the 3Dmark 2003 scores to show higher marks by disabling some features and scenes when running the tests allowing them to show much higher than real scores. Futuremark has released a fix for this little shenanigan and the RADEON card only showed a small performance difference with the patch installed while the NVIDIA card took a much higher performance hit. All scores seen here are with the Fix-Patch installed for fairness across the board.
Test system
- Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X
- CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton Core)
- Memory: 2X 256 MB CORSAIR PC3200 DDR SDRAM
- Cooling: AHANIX Iceberg
- Hard Drive: Maxtor ATA133 40GB 7200RPM
- CD: MSI 52X ATA33
Software
- Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1
- DirectX 9.0
- Desktop 1024x768, 32-bit color, 75Hz refresh
- ATI Catalyst 3.5 driver
- NVIDIA 44.03 driver
