Nvidia NV38 vs. ATI 9800XT

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The guy's over at AnandTech have thrown up their Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT article! which includes benchmarks for Nvidia's NV38 (Drivers used 52.14) against ATI's 9800XT (Catalyst 3.7 ) and were run on a Intel Prescott 2.8GHz CPU! Here's a rip.

The XT line of Radeon 9x00 cards is specifically targeted at the very high end of the gaming market. With AMD and their Athlon 64 FX, Intel and the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, it?s not too surprising to see even more companies going this direction. With an ultra-premium part like the Radeon 9800 XT the profit margins are high and more importantly, the PR opportunities are huge ? claiming the title of world?s fastest desktop GPU never hurts. Finally we have the NV38, NVIDIA?s Fall refresh part; we won?t see NV40 and R4x0 until next Spring so both companies are bringing out higher clocked versions of their current cards in order to compete during the holidays.

Just like the Radeon 9800 XT, the NV38 is basically a higher clocked version of the NV35 (GeForce FX 5900 Ultra) with a new cooling system. Now running at 475/475 (950MHz DDR), the NV38 boasts a 5% increase in core clock and an 11% increase in memory frequency. The card will officially be launched next month but we?re going to be able to bring you a preview of the NV38?s performance today.

Nvidia NV38 vs. ATI 9800XT