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 - 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).