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 - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Bigsot here again as I remembered what i forgot to say...The 2xAA of the ATI is even beter than nvidias best!
ATI cards are the bestest!
Nvidia card owners must be crying!
Not me! Cause I got me an ATI!!!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
how can they test aquamark3 without a image quality some sites says that nvidia quality in aquamark 3 sucks i dont know why they dont put that resultsAnonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Maybe there should be another video card manufacturer like ATI since NVidia is sinking, so the competition would be higher and new monster video cards would be developed for the good of the gamers. =) just like meAnonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
I heard that the new ATI 9600XT will blow away even the NV5900-ultra cards!ATI ROCKS! Nvidia sucks!
Bigshot over and out of here! yeah!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Fantastic Suite....finally someone (other than SimHQis using FS2004!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
These score are worthless, clearly even the FS2004 test where not set up as fs willmake adjustments according to hardware it sees that have to be manualy changed. You can also add that the NV cards are AAing the whole scene as compared to the ATI cards that do not AA the clouds, Trees and other Alpha textures.Why no AA was used is also beyond logic, what are we back in 1994? ROTFLOL!!!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
irrelevance is the quantity of ignoranceAnonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
#164, I'm not so sure about that. From what I've read about it, and seeing the screenshots, the 64-bit mode of Far Cry is probably real. The only question is if it's all it's hyped up to be, but considering the screenshots and movies I've seen, it would be interesting even if the 64-bit mode turned out to be nothing special (not that I'd expect that, though)Pete - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Derek/Anand,Evan suggested I repost this here. I didn't do so originally b/c I doubted you'd slog through 180 other comments, but on the off chance you do... ;)
I'm curious why 9600P results were left out of the Homeworld 2 benches. I also thought ATi's framerate problems with NWN were known, because the devs coded the engine around nVidia cards (though I also know ATi seems to be working to fix this).
I'd appreciate a reply if either of you could spare the time.
Thanks,
Pete
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
I would like to see some image quality comparisons like they do on HardOCP. I've heard that the new beta dets really screw up the image in favour of speed.