Im wondering about this myself.
ATI prices arent falling drastically like I hoped , before christmas.
In fact they seemed to have firmed and gone a bit up a little.
On the otherhand they did supposedly improved the drivers for the 5600
and the price has fallen drastically at a few places. The problem is
there are so many models out now and changes that its hard to get a
clear review comparing the latest versions with other cards.
My goal was to skip the 9600 though I havent read up on the other
weird variations theyve come up with the ultra and go for the 9700/pro
but its price hasnt budged at all.
Driver improvements? Take a look at
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030918/index.html.
Basicly, it's saying that, even it's only circumstantial evidence, that
NVidia is cheating with it's drivers. If you look at the screenshots of a
couple of driver versions, you can see that the newest drivers don't render
everything, resulting in a higher score. The 45.23 drivers offers almost
100% performance increase compared to 43.03 with the FX5900Ultra card! The
FX5600 Ultra has similair "optimilalisations".
And in this particulair benchmark, the 9600Pro even outperforms the 5900 FX
Ultra. And take a look at
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030912/index.html. That's a half-life
2 benchmark. Take a look at the graphs and see for yourself...
Like (e-mail address removed), I think you should wait a while because the arrival of
the ATi TX cards will trigger pricedrops, but if you do eventually get a
new card, I would go for an ATi, and definitely not for an NVidia card.
Halfgaar
