Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 1, 2003 3:02 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
F1 Challenge ’99-‘02
We’ve had plenty of requests to benchmark with a racing simulation. When we were designing the new testing suit this was one of the first games that came to mind. The game is faced paced, has lots of graphics options, and could keep someone who is into F1 racing busy for weeks at a time. Combine all of that with a nice replay feature and we have a very useful benchmark. We just ran a lap at Australia and counted the framerate of the replay via FRAPS while following one of the drivers in the middle of the pack.
In this bench, everyone seems to being doing really well with the exception of the two lowest end cards. It seems very clear that this test is CPU bound, and we are looking forward to benching some CPUs with this game (as well as trying to push the highend cards with some higher resolution tests). There really is no clear winner, but NV38 does come out at the top of the pile.
When we flip the filter switch, the 9800 XT drops the least in frame rate, and takes a clear lead over NV38 and the 9800 Pro. Usually NVIDIA is the camp gaining the most ground after AA and AF are enabled, but it is very much worth noting that in this benchmark (and others we will point out later) AA and AF didn't really seem to work as well on the NVIDIA cards as it did on the ATI cards. There was some difference between the two, but we will have to do more research into this area before we can bring forth anything conclusive.
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Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
FSAA does work in Halo you need to add two lines to the config.txt file to enable it. FSAA is working fine in Halo now.Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Where are the DX9 benchmarks?What is going on at Anandtech? Why all the Dx9 titles?
Old cards can do dx8 well I want to see how dx9 titles run. Aquamark is mostly dx8.
You for some reason are using buggy Nvidia drivers for this test why?
Something is fishy here. I smell a sellout.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Good article and nice new testing sweet. But look into adding SOE's Planetside to the mix that game eats anything less then a 5600 for lunch running at no more then 20 fps. my heavily oced 5600 (350/550) never gets over 70 or so.Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
#206everything that was able to run aa/af was run in aa/af ... how can you complain about that?
There is exactly one (sucky) dx9 game out that they didn't test: TRAOD ...
meh
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
I'd like to see Nascar Racing 2003 tested, rather than F1Challenge. Since F1C is CPU limited, it makes the results rather useless for GPU testing.As #159 notes, starting from the back of a full-field AI race will definitely show what your hardware is capable of doing. But the AI calculations may eat up a lot of CPU cycles. (FWIW, NR2003 is multithreaded and MP-aware, so this scenario might make for a good CPU/system test.)
However, one could create a _replay_ of a full-field race. The replay is then repeatable on any system. And, although I haven't tested this, I imagine the replay might be more GPU-intensive since there's less real-time AI and physics processing happening.
OTOH, both games have DX8.x graphics engines AFAIK.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Almost all the games were cpu-limited.Relatively few used AA/AF, which is even more important with a slow cpu, given that you have videocard power to burn. Another failure.
Few of the games were DX9. Is this some sort of sop for Nvidia?
All-in-all a very annoying and disappointing non-review.
rms
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Still using Flash for benchmarks.. again? Come on, cut that out.Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
i dont even play games at 1024x768 cause i have an nvidia and it does suck!Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Pete --The ATI 9600 Pro would not run Homeworld 2 at all ... Oops on leaving that out of the write up, but that's a good catch on your part.
NWN problems are known, but didn't exist until introduced by the Cats released *after* NWN was on the shelves (so says Bioware iirc).
But we will touch on this in the next article.
The 9600 Pro will be addressed when we do our budget card section of the roundup ...
J Derek Wilson
(Wading through 180 posts as I work on the next set of benchies and IQ tests)