Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife

9700 Pro vs. X800 Pro

Now that we’ve seen what the X800 Pro has been through in its lifespan, what about the 9700 Pro? One of the biggest requests for inclusion in this series is a direct comparison between the two cards, which we have set up here. Along with the request to use newer games on the 9700 Pro, we have gone ahead and run the 9700 Pro through the same paces on some of the more promising games that we’ve run the X800 Pro through, and recorded the results as a performance factor for each card over its performance on the previous driver revision. For the sake of time and minimizing any impact that a CPU-limited scenario would have, all tests were run with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. We have also included a performance summary, showing the performance factor between the first 4.05 drivers, and the latest 6.01 drivers on these games.

Looking at the numbers, what we see is not what we would have initially expected. Certainly, starting with Far Cry, a 2.05 performance factor is not a typo. The performance of the game actually more than doubled over the scope of these drivers. While, as we’ve mentioned before, it’s not unusual to see a large performance boost due to a single driver, ATI did it twice, significantly reducing the performance difference between the 9700 Pro and X800 Pro. In fact, with the exception of 3dMark 2005 - the only benchmark here specifically capable of testing the differences between the shader abilities of the R3xx and R4xx designs - it’s a similar story for all of the games used in this cross-comparison. In spite of the X800 Pro being the newer, faster card with more potential, it’s the 9700 Pro that saw the biggest performance improvements.

Of course, at around half the framerate of an X800 Pro, the 9700 Pro is measuring some of its performance changes in fractions of a frame per second, so a 17% improvement in Battlefield 2 performance may not change playability at all, but nonetheless, this is a stark reminder of the power of drivers that comes in to play well after the launch of a product. Although this may be a rare scenario due to the architectural similarities between the 9700 Pro and the X800 Pro, it’s good to see that the 9700 series was not forgotten about at ATI when it was replaced by the X800. Hopefully, this isn’t a trend that will be forgotten with the X800 series either, now that the X1000 series is ATI’s high-end product line.