Introduction

Recently, I whipped up a guide showing you how to mod an ATI Radeon 9800SE into a full-fledged Radeon 9800 Pro. In that guide, I showed you the performance differences between the various soft-mod methods. But I'll bet you are still hungering for more performance comparisons!

In this article, I'll compare the performance of the modded Radeon 9800SE against the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra! I will test the FX 5950 Ultra at stock speeds to show you the actual performance of this card. The purpose of this article is to show you how well a modded RM 560 (USD 147) card can perform, compared to a RM 1395 (USD 367) card.

Just in case you are wondering, I didn't include the Radeon 9800XT for two reasons.

First, I think you know as well as I do that the Radeon 9800XT would simply blow my card out of the water.

The second reason is, I wanted to compare it with the best that ATI’s competitor has to offer, bar the GeForce 6800 Ultra which was just released. Interesting, eh? Here they are - the two contestants for this evening!