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
Final Fantasy XI
The Final Fantasy series has always been popular, and will probably always be popular. I have a personal affinity towards the series, but I’m not so sure about the Massively Multiplayer Online style they are going for this time around. The benchmark is much more straightforward than the success of their future game: we set it to high-res benchmark mode (1024x768) and record the number of frames that get rendered (in the bottom right hand corner). Then we divide that by the length of time the benchmark runs to get an average frames per second.
The two most expensive ATI cards manage to nudge out the rest of the pack which are mostly tied. Again, the 9700 Pro does a good job of remaining competitive, and the 9600 Pro is still hanging on while doing a good job of clearly beating the 5600 Ultra. Unlike the Aquanox3 style of benchmark which has a set number of frames to render, this benchmark has a set time to move through a scene and render as many frames as possible while doing so. That makes image comparison a little more difficult. No matter what hardware this benchmark is run on, there seems to be a lot of motion blur and antialiasing is not an available option (and doesn't work even if its enabled at the driver level).
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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)