Between the 2, I see reviews that compare them both and every review is somthing different. Tomshardware shows that the FX 5800 beats the 9700 in most of its test and Anandtech shows 9700 beats 5800 in most of the tests. Which one should I beleive?
It depends. Neither of them are completely accurate, or perhaps saying both of them are slightly misleading is better. Straight up they are both close to the same speed, the difference comes when you apply AA and AF. What settings you use to compare them isn't exactly equal. ATi uses a more agressive LOD bias then nVidia does which introduces texture aliasing, and their performance mode AF runs bilinear filtering. Anand looked at the LOD bias setting alone and declared ATi's solution to be clearly superior to nVidia's 'Agressive' setting and expanded that out to state that it was also superior to their 'Balanced' and then compared nV's 'balanced' setting to ATi's 'performance'. Using those settings ATi has very clear mip boundaries rolling around, despite Anand stating that there was nigh no difference between quality and performance(the impression he gives is that he has never played a game using a R300 based board).
When you add AA, nV's implementation is nigh identical to ATi's running 2x setting, however at 4x their is a sizeable image quality gap between the two and ATi's 6x is better then anything nVidia has to offer on the FX currently. Not only that, but the performance hit taken by the 9700Pro is less then that of the 5800Ultra adding insult to injury.
Then you have the fact that the R9700Pro has dropped in price by $100 and is that same amount cheaper then the MSRP on the 5800Ultra.
From an overall performance perspective, I would say that the R9700Pro was the faster card and without a doubt
I would buy a 5800 comparing the two. I bought in to the hype and picked up a Radeon9500Pro about three weeks ago and still haven't got it to work properly. Their are flaws in the hardware design(improper filtering circuitry leading to rolling lines for many people through your monitor using VGA out forcing you to use DVI out which requires an adaptor and makes the 2D quality clearly inferior to that of the better nV boards), lack of features(W buffer), buggy drivers(my most frequently played game has major image corruption problems and has for six months according to those that had launch boards) and horrible support.
I don't have a FX board as of now so I can't say for certain that it doesn't have serious issues of its own. But I know what issues ATi has and if I had it to do over again I would have kept my money and my old board over buying ATi.
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