Final Thoughts
After reviewing the benchmark results, it becomes clear that while the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra can equal the Radeon 9800 Pro in some benchmarks (and even beat it in a few with both anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled), it falls behind its competition in at least as many others and never manages to outperform the Radeon 9800 Pro in any of the benchmarked games with both 4x AA and 4x AF enabled.
Architecturally speaking, the GeForce FX is very interesting. Despite all the specifications and performance figures, we still don't know precisely how it is organized internally, hence the 8x1/4x2 pipeline issue. The R300/R350 core, on the other hand, is a known quantity with performance that is very much expected from looking at its specs. Perhaps the GeForce FX will improve as drivers and applications are optimized to better suite the architecture, or visa versa.
The performance of the GeForce FX is quite respectable in relation to the GeForce 4, so perhaps the real surprise is not the NV30, but rather ATI's R300/350 core, and the impressive performance it has demonstrated thus far. The Radeon 9800 Pro makes incremental performance improvements over the Radeon 9700 Pro thanks to its increase core and memory clockspeeds. With its $399 price tag, the Radeon 9800 Pro is unlikely to entice current Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX owners, though it should provide a significant upgrade for GeForce 4 and Radeon 8500 owners.
Boasting vertex and pixel shader specifications that exceed DirectX 9 VS and PS 2.0, the GeForce FX is likely the most future-proof GPU currently on the market in terms of feature set. Where it's not so future-proof is the performance. NVIDIA claims the GeForce FX is at its best when running more advanced applications like the upcoming DOOM3. The Radeon 9800 Pro, on the other hand, delivers better performance for today's games, and should deliver solid framerates well into the future.
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
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