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
Homeworld 2
This game is a space based RTS with plenty of particle effects and eye candy. Framerates can jump wildly from hundreds down to the teens depending on how close you want to get to the action. We decided to run two benchmarks (both with FRAPS), one on an in game cut scene (benchmark 1), and the second on a brief skirmish (benchmark 2) that was easily repeatable (the AI responded consistently to my inaction after the cut scene, so we could easily watch the same destruction occur over and over). These two measurements seemed to reflect the different aspects of gameplay well.
NVIDIA takes this test hands down. The ships of homeworld have some really nice textures, and there are some beautiful particle effects that can be seen just flying around in space watching things blow up. This first test is mostly just watching one big ship fly up past the camera.
We see that the trends remain the same with AA/AF enabled. The 9800XT gained some ground on the NVIDIA cards, but not enough to make a real difference in this test. This is another test where it was not apparent that NVIDIA's AA was doing as much as needed for the scene, so we will take a closer look at this benchmark when we do our image quality comparison.
In this battle scene (with more ships, more textures, and lots of missiles and laser fire), NVIDIA's lead is even more pronounced, could also be due to the cards memory bandwidth as there are more textures that need to be moved in and out of video RAM.
Again, we are not sure about the quality of the AA and filtering in this benchmark, but we will be looking into the matter very promptly. For now though, NVIDIA wears the Homeworld 2 crown.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
- no contrast between AVAILABLE nvidia detonators and the UNRELEASED drivers used to benchmark.- it was unclear which games were using dx8 or dx9 features for these benchmarks without having previous knowledge.
- more focus placed on performance with older existing games i.e. dx8, Arent top of the line $500 gfx cards intended for use with future games? i.e. dx9
- image quality issues not adequately discussed (major issues glazed over leaving false impressions of performance in 'some' cards), they may be covered in an upcoming article however alone this particular article may be misleading.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#38 Well i made it hard for you to understand I guess because you are the only one who complained. Btw. I did not post #36. So there are more of us... :)Will sign with the whiner for now.
The whiner
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I don't mind either. I still have my 3DFX Voodoo 3 and 32bit at all is only for whiners!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
OK, you didn't mistype it, you just made it totally unclear and impossible for anyone to really understand. No big deal.However, to imply that Anandtech should have spent time doing IQ testing instead of NV38 testing is nothing sort of ridiculous. No one (except you apparently) wants to see IQ testing instead of NV38 testing.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I d like to see q3 in your benchmarking suite again.it s still the only q3engine game where a brand new graphics card can run smoothly with Fsaa and AF on highest quality settings
important is also that the timedemo is full of action an filled with a lot of players
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I have always been an Nvidia fanboy, and I don’t mind running my card in 16bit texture quality.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
So I'm the only one who picked up on the "we'll do IQ in part 2" thing?Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Not that reviews was the subject. LOL Well, perhaps I don't know grammar better than you but I did not mistype anything.Fact is that "they" can only refer to "the other sites" and not Anandtech.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Okay, on other sites is not a subject but "they" can not refer to "reviews" (the context forbids that). So hopefully you understand now that "they" can only refer to "the other sites" since I did not mention Anandtech there. :)Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#32 Okay a second time and I will take you by the hand (please respond with a joke about me being gay):This is what I wrote (the whole paragraph):
"Perhaps YOU are clueless. I don't need to wait for complete reviews on other sites. And yes, they might have had more time as they did not benchmark NV38. However that they did not get NV38 makes this review even more suspicious."
I wrote about reviews on other sites there. You see? From that moment on every "they" automatically refers to "the other sites" until I come up with a new subject? Okay? That is grammar and hard to understand but you will get there.