nVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra & ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256mb

HotHardware has reviewed a sample of ATI's new Radeon 9800 Pro with 256mb of RAM. Overall, they say that today's games do not demand the extra RAM:

At default clock speeds, the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro is an extremely fast video card. We have to admit that seeing this card released with the same core clock speed as the 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro was a bit of a let down though. Every video card we have tested based on an R3xx GPU has had quite a bit of headroom left, so we were hoping ATi would release this card with higher clock speeds than previous models.

They also have a review of nVIDIA's reference GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, which takes top spot in benchmark numbers:

All told, the NV35 is a very competitive product that surpassed ATi's current high end offering by a significant margin, in almost every test we ran. We'll be coming back to a side by side with the 256MB R9800 card but all indications are that the extra 128MB of lower latency memory didn't buy the new Radeon 9800 Pro all that much. For now, we're impressed with the potential the NV35 has to offer. If NVIDIA's excellent track record for driver optimizations holds true, we'll see incremental performance increases in the near future for the NV35 and hopefully they'll tighten up that AA a bit too. With a few board OEMs growing their own cooling solutions, things could get really exciting for the NV35 and it's various flavors, this summer. The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is officially slated to hit volume in June. ATi is now talking openly about a "Summer refresh" with their high end R350 products, so we'll have to see how the chips fall then. However for now, NVIDIA has taken back the raw performance lead in the high end PC Graphic arena. Welcome back NVIDIA; let the games begin.

More 5900 reviews: Adrenaline Vault, AnandTech, Bit-Tech, Hexus.net, Sudhian, The Tech Report, Tom's Hardware & NeoSeeker.