ATI"s upcoming contender for the graphics chip performance crown is a clear winner over Nvidia"s latest offering, according to new tests from ZDNet Labs -- at least where it comes to top-end features. ATI and Nvidia dominate the market for consumer graphics chips. While most consumers would not pay £250 or so for the latest high-end add-in card, the publicity value around making the No. 1 chip can be valuable in selling to the mainstream market. ATI has been exploiting this fact for the past few months as it attempts to claw market share away from leader Nvidia on the strengths of higher-performance technology.
The new ATI Radeon 9800 Pro should reinforce that strategy, according to labs tests, delivering significantly better performance when using the chip"s most advanced features. The Radeon 9800 Pro was tested against the GeForce FX 5800, Nvidia"s own top-of-the-line card, under a variety of settings, and in many rounds the two cards were neck-and-neck, the labs said. However, when features such as anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) -- two high-end features for adding realism to 3D environments -- were turned on, the Radeon card was "the unanimous winner", according to the tests.