My curiosity was aroused by the ATI proponents' statements. I try to be objective when comparing brands, and though I've used both nVidia and ATI cards, I'm more familiar with nVidia-based products. So I went to Tom's Hardware and looked up the comparative test results.
The FX5700 soundly thrashes the Radeon 9600 in 15 out of 19 tests, by a wide margin in most cases (upto 70%). The Radeon 9600 scored higher in 4 cases, mostly by a smaller margin.
In some cases, the FX5700 is closely comparable even to the Radeon 9600 PRO and even beats it in a few cases. Of course, it would be more logical to compare the 9600 Pro to the FX5700 Ultra, in which case the FX5700-U comes out on top again.
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