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 - 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.