L O L. The 9800 pro straight up sucked mad D because it could only do brilinear, it only had partial precision fragment shaders, and the only z-buffer format was partial precision (which ironically was a mistake nvidia would copy with the Geforce 6/7 series). basically, ATi's transistor budget was biased completely towards performance so it sucked. The Geforce FX would've been good for its time had full precision been full speed rather than half speed, had the drivers not forced trilinear optimization, and if it had used properly rotated grid AA patterns. personally, i think they should've made the AA sample pattern properly rotated grid, dropped the w-buffer support, dropped 24 bit fixed point z-buffers, made full shader precision full speed, and had z-buffer formats D24FS8 and D32 only. the Geforce 6/7 series sucked too. it had rotated grid AA, but that didnt work with 64 bit float ARGB, its shaders couldnt do integers calculations, and it only had partial precision z-buffer which made matters even worse since the w-buffer was removed. so the Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS 640 were the first nvidia products that didnt suck in my opinion and they were actually quite good other than the fact that they didnt work properly with double agent. matrox and 3dfx kicked nvidia and ATi in the ass.
As for the 5870/50, the only good thing I can say about it is that it works better with Splinter Cell Double Agent than nvidia GPUs do.