Conclusion: Drivers Defeat Hardware
This test clearly demonstrated one thing: a superior chip design alone is not enough to win in a comparative test. We expected far more from the purely theoretical perusal of the key figures for the Radeon/ FGL 9700 VPU and the benchmark results from the games area. Experience suggested that the ATi FireGL X1 should have bested the Quadro4 980XGL. The driver developers at Nvidia showed that this needn't be the case. This makes it clear why Nvidia entered the test with optimism, while ATi was hesitant about putting its test candidates into the ring. Several weeks passed after the official launch before they sent products. Nvidia, on the other hand, delivered immediately.
In our last comparison, 3DLabs and its Wildcat VP cards swept the field. At the time, Nvidia had to deal with the fact that its drivers were still failing to get the most out of its products. Nevertheless, Nvidia used the last few months to improve performance substantially. The Quadro4 980XGL (NV28) reaped an automatic benefit from this because, with the exception of the AGP8X interface, no new technological advances have been made to the Quadro4 900XGL (NV25). And that's not all - apart from a few exceptions, the 900XGL and the 980XGL are on the same level. Hence the argument for AGP8X does not pull any weight in an age when graphics card are equipped with 128 MB of memory and thus are no longer dependent on improved AGP interfaces.
These results do not mean that ATi is a dead loss, though. The 9700 chip on the FireGL X1 does indeed have great potential. However, it will only be fit for use once the driver developers have done a lot more homework. If you're banking on this, then the X1 is still a good investment in the future. After completion of the tests, ATi told us that they will release a completely revamped version of their X1 driver next week.
