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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
263 Comments | Add A Comment
263 Comments

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).

F1 Challenge: '99-02 Halo
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  • WooDaddy - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Good eye #93. Evan actually mentioned it earlier too.

    Anand/Derek mentioned Nvidia being better at Doom 3. Y'all sneaky son-of-a-guns must be beta testing it in the background or sumthin. I know Carmack said it ran better but I betcha y'all got your hands on a copy. Go ahead. Admit it! Quit holding out on us. We wanna see the benchmark! I got a shiny nickel with your name on it if you put it out there...

    Overall great review. I sorta agree that 1024x768 is kinda like the 640x480 of yesteryear now, but most of us can gather what 1280 will run at. For the fanboys/girls, "You should've included counterstrike and hexen 2. waah!" Honestly, I know how long it can take to set up and benchmark those tests in a _controlled_ environment. Do you guys use automated software testers?

    Question though.Even though FFXI ran slow, is it still playable? I don't want to believe that it runs that slow all the time.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    k, I'm going to ignore everyone who's bitching because they didn't read it and thus haven't already twigged that IQ comparisons will be in part 2

    Re the PCI slot thing, doesn't that apply equally to two-slot cards? If putting a PCI card next to the AGP slot on a one-slot card is bad, surely putting a PCI card in the first slot after a two-slot card isn't exactly smart either? You still lose an extra PCI slot over what you would have with a one-slot card

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    What about Max Payne 2 ? i like to see it in next benchs

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Please use Battlefield 1942 in benchmarking in the future! It's an awesome game and has some very nice and demanding mods like desert combat. Please use desert combat in benchmarking too. Try flying around, blowing up stuff and checking if framerate ever goes to unacceptable levels. Gamers rarely care about average or maximum fps, if game is running 50fps or 150 fps it doesn't matter, but if it ever runs as sluggishly as <10 fps in heat of the battle, it is very annoying.

    Just tell us with your own words, which graphics card brings playable framerates!

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    I would like to see Battlefield 1942 added into the benchmarks. Especially since it is such a popular game and they have battlefield vietnam coming out before too long. Thanks.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Thanks for benching so many games. Since I only play a few games I look for performance in those games in particular. My games were covererd and I really appreciate that.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    I see the fanbois are out in full force. :/

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    over all a sad review, using drivers that are not out for every one to use, no IQ tests to see if the drivers are cheating at all, and then comments like "From these two graphs, it seems like NVIDIA is the clear winner, but in watching this demo run so many times, we noticed that the NVIDIA cards were running choppier than the ATI cards, and we again had some image quality questions we need to answer"

    so that pretty much does it for me. I won't take this with a grain of salt untill they rip apart the drivers, and make sure Nvidia is not up to any "optimazations" Ive lost all trust in Nvidia. I hope the Nv40 can turn this around.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    #69 just because you run games at 1280x1024, doesn't make you the majority representation of gamers. Most gamers run at 1024x768. Most computer users resolution is at 1024x768, like 55% or something like that.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    The "Prescott" string on Page 4 is white?! Just select the 3 last lines from "2.8 GHz ...". Has it been white all the time?
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