Theoretical performance
We'll start off looking at the PowerColor's performance via 3DMark03's fillrate and shader performance.
Remember that, for most of the time, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra behaves like a a 4-pipe / 2 texturing unit GPU. That's why its performance is comparatively poor here. The PowerColor XT has a theoretical single-texturing fillrate of over 3GPixels/s.
A 4x2 design with 475MHz core pushes the FX 5950 Ultra 256MB to the top. The PowerColor 9800XT is right where we expect it to be, sandwiched between the 9800 Pro and 5950 Ultra.
The reason behind including the framerates from 3DMark's Battle of Proxycon test is to show that under certain circumstances the 9800XT is more than just a bump in clock speeds. The 21% performance increase cannot solely be attributed to the XT's faster clocks. The 9800XT is the pinnacle of ATI's current DX9 lineup, so PowerColor knows it's already on to a performance winner. More important than the gap back to the 256Mb 9800 Pro, perhaps, is the performance difference between it and the FX 5950 Ultra 256MB card. Both vye for a similar customer.
