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
Halo
With Halo in stores today, we have welcomed it with open arms into our testing suite. The packaged benchmark that comes with the game is made up of all the cut scenes between levels (which are fairly graphics intensive). We ran the benchmark at 1024x768 @ 75Hz , which provided plenty of work for all our cards. We opted to simply include average framerate for this article, but there are some really interesting features of this benchmark (like percentage of time above a certain frame rate) that we may revisit later.
This benchmark clearly lets the 9800XT stretch its legs a little and pull away from the pack Of course, 51 fps is not really what you want to see for a first person shooter on the PC. We also don't get the benefit of AA (and therefore we don't get to see if the NVIDIA chips could make up some slack via their memory bandwidth), as AA is not currently supported in Halo.
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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.