Which card should I use?

[jamon51]

I have two computers that are roughly similar--my wife's and my own. In my computer I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 card. My wife's machine has a GeForce FX 5500 256 card (and never uses its capabilities).

I've been having problems with the dual monitor setup on my ATI card and so I've been thinking of swapping to the GeForce card. Problem is, my work demands heavy 3D rendering capability and I'm not sure if that will suffer.

So my question is:

Which is a faster / more capable card?
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 256MB

One thing that is working in the NVIDIA card's favor is that its dual monitor capabilities are better. I know nothing about the difference in performance.

Thank you in advance,

- jamon

 

[mpjesse]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2003/10/15/facelift/page8.html

Review all those benchmarks. I couldn't find a review that compared the 5500 to the 9800 directly, but this comes close. As you can see the 9800 kicks the 5600 Ultra's ass in everything. (5600 is one step up from your 5500).

So basically that 5500 sucks balls compared to a 9800 Pro. IMO, the whole 5xxx line up of nVidia cards sucks. That was nVidia's darkest year...

Considering getting a whole new card.

-mpjesse

 

[jamon51]

Wow mp, I didn't realize there was such a difference. No kidding...it sure does suck compared to the 9800. It seems to game ok but then I'm not trying to run anything too advanced on it. My 9800 does just fine on Far Cry or BF2.

I can't justify the expense of a new AGP card. If I'm going to upgrade I might as well upgrade my computer or at least my mobo to get a PCIx vid card.

-jamon

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

One thing that is working in the NVIDIA card's favor is that its dual monitor capabilities are better.

Depending on what you're doing each one has it's strengths/weaknesses, but personally I'd say if you're serious get a true multi-monitor software like UltraMon;

Realtime's Homepgae


Download page

3rd party software is far better than the bundled nView and Hydravision, but they are capable for casual users on their own. Make sure you update your vesrion of the drivers (including Hydravision) before you decide to switch. But do yourself a favour if you're not happy try adding UltraMon to your tools.

 

[Crashman]

Don't pay attention to gaming benchmarks as those are totally irrelavent to 3D Modeling. Look for something that compares the cards in professional applications, such as the benchmark suite Spec Viewperf.

Generally speaking, FX cards sucked in Direct 3D but did fairly well in Open GL, which is what you need. I'm not certain about the 5500 though since it's a low-end model of the FX series.

 

[Crashman]

Once again, what do you know? Showing a bunch of Direct 3D benchmarks to a guy who wants to do 3D Modeling?

How about telling him that the 6600GT beats an X800 XT in 3D Modeling? You didn't know that? Well then try looking up some SPEC Viewperf charts for the 5500 and 9800.

 

[jamon51]

Thanks for the tips, Crashman. I also game with this machine so because of the difference in performance I wouldn't want to downgrade so severely in that category.

- j

 

[cleeve]

If you game, throw away your Geforce 5500.

It is a glorified Geforce 5200, which is one of the worst gaming cards this planet has had the misfortune of giving birth to.

Get a cheep 6600, a 6600GT would be ideal - and would game better than the 9800 PRO, while offering great OpenGL performance to boot.