DirectX 10 Shootout: Nvidia vs. ATI

Cumulative Frame Rate, Pricing And Performance For The Money

While the Geforce 8800 Ultra offers twice the performance of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, it also costs twice as much. Looking at the results, we agree with ATI's appraisal of the performance difference between the Radeon HD 2900 XT and the Geforce 8800 GTS. At any rate, ATI's chip is not the faster of the two in our benchmarks - indeed, it is slightly slower and costs more.

The Radeon 2400 XT through 2600 XT loose important points in the overall frame rate score due to their crashes in Bioshock. If these cards ran Bioshock correctly, we estimate that they would reach the following cumulative frame rates: 2400 Pro 128 fps, 2400 XT 192 fps, 2600 Pro 338 fps, 2600 XT (256 MB) 437 fps, and 2600 XT (512) 446 fps.

[US Editor's Note: We left prices in Euros, because the main thrust of this section is to provide the relative price performance data in the two tables following this one.]

*(Prices current at time of publication)

The Geforce 8600 GT and the Geforce 8800 GTS with 320 MB offer the most performance for your money. Per frame, the Radeon HD 2900 XT costs almost as much as the Geforce 8800 Ultra. The smaller Radeon chips become very expensive because their cumulative result is dragged down by their issues in Bioshock.

In the second price / performance table, we used our estimates for the smaller Radeons' cumulative frame rate without Bioshock crashes. This should reduce the impact of the problematic driver somewhat. In this ranking, the Radeon HD 2600 XT jumps ahead, coming in third behind the 8600 GT and the 8800 GTS 320.