Well here we go again another round of VGA test benchmarks and rhetoric on the subject of video cards and their benefits to the future would be user. NVIDIA and ATI have been going head to head for the past year or so in an attempt to dominate and control vast shares of the market by garnering your hard earned cash at the check out line of your local or web based parts dealer. Confusion as to what does what and what is better is a sticky mess of benchmarks and opinions based off what the reviewer at hand is seeing form his/her results translated into a review. Why has this whole ATI VS NVIDIA thing taken on such a following is beyond me, as both companies make a superior product with the only real differences being in the true support of Direct-X 9 and frame rate variances, that in most case will not effect the gamer in any substantial way as both the RADEON and GeForce series of cards play most games well across the board with the exception of Half-Life 2 that has shown problems running on the FX 5900 series with DX9.
Okay then, that being said what and why is the reasoning behind buying one card over the other? In reality it usually comes down to personal choice and finance with the finer points of technology being lost somewhere in the mix. The 5900 series has taken quite the beating in the market this year in the high-end department for gamers as the 9800 Pro has shown itself to be a serious threat to the whole NVIDIA VGA line because it has shown both better DX9 and driver support than NVIDIA due in part to Terry Makedon and his driver team that has shaped up and redefined the way ATI releases VGA drivers. NVIDIA built their reputation on strong driver releases that used to be the forte of their cards but lately scandal and speculation has cast a shadow over what was once considered the top dog as issues with benchmarking and DX9 plague them. I used older drivers to eliminate the controversy and stay within the accepted guidelines of Futuremark's approved driver list.
Things such as disabling certain fog table elements and other performance dampening features have caused a major ruckus among the masses and made NVIDIA look bad in their attempt to show higher frame rates and compatibility by altering these drivers. This is bad form for NVIDIA but does not really affect the other manufactures making cards with this chipset as many of them use their own in-house drivers to propel their version of the card. Utterly what really counts is the cards ability to function in different applications without error and play games to their full potential with all the DX9 features enabled on games that take advantage of that technology. ASUS themselves have always made products that stand out in the crowd and this card is no exception to that rule as it is by far the fastest and quietest 5900 Ultra on the market and it also has a solid driver and software package that rounds out the retail product in a strong way. Read on and see what this package has to offer you I think you will like what you see.
