HardOCP reviews the the 5600 and 5200 Ultra in an apples to apples comparison to ATI

[Acanthus]

I don't know about the rest of you, but image quality became a BIG factor to me once these games started breaking 100 - 200 FPS. Who buys a $200+ video card JUST to watch frames go by fast?? If you want that, go buy a Ti4200 or a cheap Ti4400.
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Well which first person shooter games are you speaking of? You won't be getting anywhere near 200 fps in ANY farily recent first person shooter game with AA and AF enabled, no matter what card you're using. At 1024x768 with AA and AF enabled in UT2K3 for example, smoothness becomes much more important to me because I'm not getting 200 fps. In this situation, fps is king. The same idea can be applied to many other first person shooter games.
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Appearently(sp?) what he was saying went right over your head, if you run UT with everything off and mipmapping on toilet settings you can get 150+ FPS pretty easily. What hes saying is IQ became important to him when it didnt noticeably hurt the FPS anymore. Which is why you run AA+Aniso, to increase the IQ. Before it would make the game unplayable, with the new more powerful cards that can handle cranked Aniso, AA, Mipmap, Trilinear, etc.. IQ has become more important to the hardcore gamer.

And i agree.

 

[NFS4]

Appearently(sp?) what he was saying went right over your head, if you run UT with everything off and mipmapping on toilet settings you can get 150+ FPS pretty easily. What hes saying is IQ became important to him when it didnt noticeably hurt the FPS anymore. Which is why you run AA+Aniso, to increase the IQ. Before it would make the game unplayable, with the new more powerful cards that can handle cranked Aniso, AA, Mipmap, Trilinear, etc.. IQ has become more important to the hardcore gamer.

And i agree.

That's exactly what I meant...maybe I should have worded it better. When I play BF1942 on my 9700 Pro, I play with all quality settings set to high within the game and with 4x FSAA and 8x Quality AF. Framerates are liquid smooth as well.

Sure, I could get higher framerates if I didn't run AF or FSAA, but it wouldn't look as good. Why skimp out when my card has power to spare?

 

[Looney]

I would agree that IQ is more important than FPS nowadays... at least in most situation. When you're already hitting 100+ fps, i'd sacrifice some for IQ. I didn't spend all that money on videocards and high-end monitors to play the newest and greatest game yet not experience all the eye-candy i can. Maybe i'm not a 'hardcore' enough gamer.

Pure FPS is no longer the only factor in videocard performance... just as one time you had some people choosing playing at 16bit over 32bit for just the extra fps, you're seeing people moving from FPS to IQ as the technology develop and we realize that there isn't a big enough difference from high FPS to extremely high FPS.

 

[NFS4]

Originally posted by: Moralpanic
I would agree that IQ is more important than FPS nowadays... at least in most situation. When you're already hitting 100+ fps, i'd sacrifice some for IQ. I didn't spend all that money on videocards and high-end monitors to play the newest and greatest game yet not experience all the eye-candy i can. Maybe i'm not a 'hardcore' enough gamer.

Pure FPS is no longer the only factor in videocard performance... just as one time you had some people choosing playing at 16bit over 32bit for just the extra fps, you're seeing people moving from FPS to IQ as the technology develop and we realize that there isn't a big enough difference from high FPS to extremely high FPS.

I agree 100%

What's the use in buying the latest most graphically intense FPS (or any game for that matter) and then not use features that are going to make it look the best?

ATI's DX9 cards do BOTH. They score high WITHOUT the pretty stuff on and they score well WITH the pretty stuff on. NVIDIA DX9 cards don't. Plan and simple.