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
Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour
The recently released expansion to the very popular Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game Command & Conquer Generals seems to do a good job of living up to the standards set by its prestigious ancestry. RTS games usually get overlooked in GPU roundups and comparisons as they aren’t considered graphically intense. However, smoothness is very important to gameplay; goodness knows I’ve blamed plenty of lost armies on ill timed drops in framerate. For this benchmark, we created a multiplayer game consisting of 6 hard armies on one team with us, and one easy army. We then used the replay feature in conjunction with FRAPS to measure performance. This was done with and without 4xAA/8xAF.
In this first test we can see that all the ATI cards are huddled together at the top while the nvidia cards lag behind. Clearly this game favors the ATI architecture. One of NVIDIAs strong points, memory bandwidth, doesn't get a chance to shine in this game as its mostly small textures and low poly objects with some pretty cool particle effects. That kind of setup just doesn't tilt in NVIDIAs favor.
Even with AA and AF enabled neither camp is severely hampered; and the only card that really drops off significantly is the 9600 Pro. The fact that the FX 5900 and NV38 are neck and neck suggests that the reason for NVIDIAs performance in this benchmark has something to do with an aspect of the architecture that isn't directly (or significantly?) affected by GPU core clock or memory bus bandwidth/speed; more than likely we're talking about driver issues here.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#92, for the 100,000,000 time in these comments, doom3 is not dx9.How can anyone take your post seriously when you state 'facts' that you just got from the top of your head. Read your post, read the facts and think about how stupid you look.
btw, great review Anand and to other whiners who keep harping on about IQ and Resolutions being low, it's part one as mentioned at start of review. Read the whole review and you won't look so silly LMAO
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I want 1600 x 1400 with max aa/af!!!!!!!!!!!!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Great group of games, though I'm surprised you have time to run so many tests. Hopefully you won't get overwhelmed and have to cut it back down.Nitpicky bit, but some corrections to the titles of your games:
- Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide
- Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
Did you get an early copy of Halo? Man you guys get all the good stuff :)
Link - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
BAD,BAD,BAD review.Why did you choose to use only 2.8Ghz? It's THE limiting factor that is preventing XT from showing its full capability.
I'd bluntly say this review(er) is favoring FX by not using higer clocked cpu and beta driver for FX.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
How long have those underlined, highlighted words that look like links been ads here? That is one lame form of advertising... very annoying...Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
That invisible Prescott thing is crazy! Why the hell would they do that?Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Are these even DX9 games? If not, who cares.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
PLEASE add Morrowind to test suite!!!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Sorry I don't have time to read through all the posts, so please forgive me if it's been mentioned above.It should be noted that due to a bug with ATI and Halo, ATI cards using Catalyst 3.7 drivers DO NOT USE Shader 2.0, currently only nVidia cards (that are capable) use 2.0
In the .txt output file, it clearly shows ATI using 1.4 shader, while nVidia (5900) uses 2.0 This is supposed to be fixed in next driver release and/or patch from Halo.
Supposedly you can force the ATI cards to run in 2.0 but adding a -use20 in the shortcut properties.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Yes. So he's benchmarking unreleased hardware (NV38) with unreleased drivers (52.xx) on an unreleased cpu (Prescott).