By turning on the AA and AF we see a big difference in performance and suddenly the ATI cards are both way ahead of the GeForce FX, especially at the highest resolutions. And to be honest if you spend $400 on a video card you would not expect it to suffer such a performance hit when you turn up the image quality a little, right? We already mentioned a cause for this in our GeForce FX article and in essence it comes down to a lack of memory bandwidth. However upon looking at the scores it is clear that up to 1280x960x32 resolution all cards are more than fast enough for gaming with frame rates faster than 60-fps.

At all resolutions, but especially at the highest, there’s no doubt that the Radeon 9800 Pro takes the performance crown. Already at 1024x786x32 the difference between the Radeon 9800 Pro and the 9700 Pro is 5.5% and more than 27% in comparison to the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. At 1600x1200x32 the Radeon 9800 Pro is more than 22% faster than the 9700 Pro and the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is left trailing behind by 68%.