When the Smoke Clears & Prices Settle: GeForce 9600 GT vs. Radeon HD 3870
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 22, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT vs. ATI Radeon HD 3870
Across 9 games and 12 benchmarks the Radeon HD 3870 and the GeForce 9600 GT trade blows. If you want specifics, the 3870 wins 7 benchmarks while the 9600 GT wins 5. However, whenever the 9600 GT manages a win it is usually by a larger margin - an average of 24% across our benchmarks compared to a 9.9% average margin of victory for the Radeon HD 3870.
The 9600 GT's average margin of victory in the games it does well in is so great mainly because of two titles: Quake Wars and Call of Duty 4. The strange thing is that we've seen ATI GPUs do better in both games, only to see performance go down in the last driver update. Quake Wars also recently got updated to the 1.5 patch so it's possible that the new patch also slowed things down for the Radeon HD 3870, but we suspect that both of these performance outliers are driver related and can be remedied. If ATI could achieve performance parity in these two titles that would reduce the 9600 GT's average margin of victory to 8.9%, very close to the 3870's current advantage in the benchmarks it does win.
However we must recommend based on presently available data, and right now it looks like the GeForce 9600 GT is the better buy. It's cheaper than the Radeon HD 3870 and offers a better overall performance case thanks to its larger margin of victory when it comes ahead in a game.
If you look at the cheapest available Radeon HD 3870 ($184.99 from Newegg) then the 9600 GT price advantage all but disappears, and if you don't play Quake Wars or CoD4 then the 3870 ends up being just as good of an option as the 9600 GT.
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madgonad - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
Is it even possible to benchmark an MMO due to the required server interaction?Sinerider - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
I've seen several OLD benchmarks. Heck, I've used FRAPS plenty of times... I suppose there are problems with latency, connection, etc - but it'd be nice to get ballparks between brands.leexgx - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
mmo norm need more cpu then any thing els and an ok video cardSinerider - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
I've always found it strange that nobody seems to include MMORPG's in the game performance review sections - WOW, EQII - these are games that draw high upgrade ratio's, and when I did play, I was always desperately looking for larger review bases that included them - especially EQII.Probably doesn't matter much because it's an old game, but sheesh - hundreds of thousands, or in WOW's case, millions play, and a tonne are always upgrading - would seem worthwhile to me.
More directly related to the article: It's a tough call for me between this new 9600 or waiting to see what AMD has up it's sleeve... either way, looks like I'll be holding off just a little bit longer for an upgrade. I would say though, this seems to be a great time for midrange!
-Sinerider
wht1986 - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
I agree. I play EQII about 95% of my gaming time. I am using an OC MSI 3870 now @ 1920x1200, but like any geek (err computer enthusiast) I always want to see more framerates/ete candy/etc. Would love to see an eq2 comparison.DigitalFreak - Sunday, February 24, 2008 - link
EQ2's engine was created when CPUs were projected to reach 10Ghz by now. It uses the CPU for stuff that should definitely be done on the GPU. Having a faster CPU will get you much more of a performance increase than upgrading beyond a Geforce 7x series.KnightProdigy - Saturday, February 23, 2008 - link
MMOs are not included as network speed and server lag come into play and do not accurately depict HW perfomance numbers.LostPassword - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
clubit has better prices for 9600gt, but shipping is slow for meStupidMonkey - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
how would this compare to a 7800GT?leexgx - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
my 8800 gtx is faster then 2x 7800 gtx cards in SLI so 1 7800 ant goign to be an show stopper the 9600 gt is just under 8800 GT speeds (but do rember that 9600 gt 64, as the 8800 gt has 112? so when the 9800 type of cards come out thay should be 2x as fast as Nvidia stated then an 8800)