06-09-2003 19:35									#1
	Video Card buy question- Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

One of my friends wants to know if the ASUS FX 5200 is better than a GF4 MX440, he is building a complete new system by the way (P4 2.4 and 512RAM) The price diference is about 2x so... what should I tell him?

	06-09-2003 20:43									#2
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Depends on what he wants to play, both can suck.

	06-09-2003 21:13									#3
	Tired of ads?

Haha, ok

	07-09-2003 01:02									#4
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

FX is a new processor AFAIK and it is supposed to be better than the MX.

The MX though, should be enough for games today, and for the next year or so.


I have a Gainward FX 5200 and I'm very pleased with it

	07-09-2003 01:44									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

Tell him to spend 50$ extra and buy a rad 9600 or fx 5600...

	07-09-2003 02:09									#6
	Put an end to popups!

Stick with nvidia mate

	07-09-2003 02:14									#7
	Inflate your Upload Space

Get what I got, an FX5900

	08-09-2003 08:49									#8
	Inflate your Upload Space

Thx, he will buy the 5200 after all

The 5900 would be waaay too expensive, he doesn´t want to know the price ( )

	08-09-2003 08:56									#9
	Get a bigger avatar today!

The people buying the FX 5900 didn't do their research very well.

It's literally half the speed or less compared to the Radeon 9800 in PixelShader 2.0 code, which won't manifest itself until Half-Life 2 or DOOM 3 comes out that use them extensively...

	08-09-2003 11:19									#10
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

Anandtech's review of FX5900 Ultra with Doom3 (here) puts it ahead of Raedon 9800 Pro.

	08-09-2003 11:21									#11
	Remove this text

That's because the FX5900 is forced to use 16-bit floats instead of 32-bits, once you switch to 32-bit it's ungodly slow. Carmack wrote an entire backend (due to the woeful sadness of OpenGL) for NV30 and NV35, forcing them to use FP16 instead of FP32 because of it.

	08-09-2003 11:24									#12
	Tired of ads?

http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware...desktop/001.htm

Gabe Newell, Valve Software:

quote: We've started some initial DX9 Shader tests, and have seen, so far that NVIDIA NV3x hardware has a hard time.. Will it'll be similar w/ the HL2 Benchmark? "Yep."

John Carmack, id Software:

quote: GD: John, we've found that NVIDIA hardware seems to come to a crawl whenever Pixel Shader's are involved, namely PS 2.0.. Have you witnessed any of this while testing under the Doom3 environment? "Yes. NV30 class hardware can run the ARB2 path that uses ARB_fragment_program, but it is very slow, which is why I have a separate NV30 back end that uses NV_fragment_program to specify most of the operations as 12 or 16 bit instead of 32 bit."

Here in particular shows the weakness of 2.0 support on the NV3x:


and Halo benchmarks for interest: