Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 Review

Features
By Florian Charpentier
published

Unreal Tournament III

Strangely, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 drivers did not support antialiasing when running Unreal Tournament 3 in DirectX 10 mode, despite the fact that we used the latest drivers and patches, which are supposed to work. Furthermore, we notice that when antialiasing is disabled, the dual-GPU cards are the most powerful with a gain between 40% to 57% for the 9800 GX2, compared to the 8800 Ultra (as well as 11% to 41% compared to the 3870 X2). The lead drops to 16% in 1920x1200 + antialiasing before the 9800 GX2 literally falls flat at 2560x1600 + filters, because of too little memory (512 MB only).

We question the utility of dual GPU cards in Unreal Tournament III, since the benefits they bring are only seen in a situation where an 8800 Ultra is already enough for a smooth display, the latter being undefeated in extreme cases...

Florian Charpentier
7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dwfresch
    This author continues to refer to ATI as AMD in multiple articles. Not only does this bring into question this author's competence, it also causes me to question the accuracy of all articles on Tom's Hardware since the editors have overlooked such a blatant error.
    Reply
  • ProphetMK1
    I am wondering about your competence. What does it matter if he refers to the parent company of ATI. If you aren't aware or have been MIA from the tech world in the last year. AMD owns ATI at a large 5.4 billion dollar so far debt that has yet to help my AMD shares.
    Reply
  • AvatarC
    I think you owe an apology to the site, dwfresch. When was the last time you visited www.ati.com and what did you first notice?
    Reply
  • honestly, i know amd owns ati, but the two are totally seperate entities. the product solutions for one are different and when i talk about graphics card, i refer to them as ATI or NVIDIA, rather than AMD and Intel. If I stood up in front of you trying to convince you to gain our market share and talk to you about our products, im not going to say "The new AMD Radeon HD 3800 Series" because its NOT AMD, its ATI. And if i make simple stupid errors like that, how do you know that the rest of my information is right? My facts on resolution, memory bus, core speed, may all be just as wrong as getting the ACTUAL COMPANY NAME THAT PRODUCED THE PRODUCT wrong. Attention to detail gentleman. Having 200 cars isnt the same as having 500. Having a Mayback Exelero isnt the same as a Kia Rio. The LAPD is not the NYPD. Get the drift? Thank you
    Reply
  • Its AMD NOT ATI, and I think the above comment has lost the point completely tbh.
    Reply
  • aww yer ana a 550watt power supply
    Reply
  • listen what is the best value for money graphics card that can play crysis cuz im upgrading with a 64 bit 3.06 gig hert processoer asus p5n sli and a gforce 7600GT
    so yer i dont wanna spend grands on my rig id b happy with a rig thats 80% up dere with the market cuz getting 100% up with the market is to expensive
    Reply