newbs can't live with them and can't hunt them with high powered weapons... legally.
Fact is, we've only rehashed this exact subject in various forms about 300 times in the last 3 months. On top of that is the entire nvidia cheating fiasco where they degrade image quality to increase frame rates. On top of that, the radeons have a better fsaa alg that causes less jaggies in vertical lines. Yawn, but here's some crap for ya.
see bottom chart:
<A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031023/nvidia-nv38-nv36-42.html" target="_new">http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031023/nvidia-nv38-nv36-42.html</A>
Summary:
No fsaa/aniso on 5700u is:
dx8: 2 Games Faster, 4 Games Same, 0 Games Slower
dx9: 2 Games Same, 1 Game Slower
4xfsaa 8xaniso
dx8: 2 Games Faster, 2 Games Same, 4 Games Slower
dx9: 1 Game Faster, 2 Games Slower
So by that article it's slightly faster in dx8, slower in dx9. Unless you turn on fsaa and aniso in which case it is always slower.
<A HREF="http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTQw" target="_new">http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTQw</A>
Summary: The ATI 9600XT/9500Pro outperform the 5700Ultra, but the Ultra is still a hell of a good card. They also note the driver isn't doing what it should be with trilinear filtering and while they notice no iq degrades its possible they're just missing them.
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1910" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1910</A>
Summary: Vast majority are a tie, but wins more than it looses overall, but doesn't have fsaa aniso on at all.
No matter where you go if you look at them with fsaa/aniso on you are going to see the ati cards take the advantage. Anytime you see IQ compared you are going to see th ati card take the advantage. Yes, the new 5700 ultra card can keep up (unlike the older 5600 ultra) but for the most part it can't perform as well with the eye candy turned on and in anything dx9 it will generally loose to the ati card. Shrug. Buy what you want mano, we've argued this into the floor several times, go read old threads if you want all the links and sh!t. General consensous is-- 5950 and 5700 are upgrades to be sure, but they're still a bit underpar, the 5700 slightly and the 5950 more significantly and until nvidia is in the clear from cheating for several months (by lowering IQ to get higher frames) I don't honestly thing hardly anyone who is responsible will recommend a fx presently. Personally, I've owned geforces since the geforce256, but as a professional custom pc builder and a person who takes responsibility for the suggestions he makes to people, I can't recommend the current generation of cards due to 1) Performance in DX9, 2) Performance with FSAA, 3) Cheating, 4) Image Quality. ATi is just presently the better choice. Shrug take it how you like it, if that's biased so be it. Personally I'm waiting for another generation of cards (Q1/Q2 2004) before I purchase anything... the 9600xt and 9800xt are just mhz ramped versions of the older cards and hte 5700 and 5950 aren't much better.
Shadus