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
The New Test Suite
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, we are introducing a brand new test suite with this review and we are also kicking off the first installment of a multipart series covering multiple aspects of current (and somewhat next) generation gaming performance.
By no means should you take the limited (yet extensive) tests we have here as all you will see from us, but rather something to whet your appetite for what is yet to come. The focus of this review is plain and simple – comparing the basic performance of the latest offerings from ATI and NVIDIA. In the future installments we will cover image quality, CPU scaling and other aspects of performance in greater detail. We will be making notes of noticeable visual differences between ATI and NVIDIA in this article, but a comparison with supporting images will be done in Part II of the series.
As far as the new test suite is concerned, here are the benchmarks that made it in:
AquaMark 3
Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour
F1 Challenge ’99-‘02
Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2
Halo
Homeworld 2
Jedi Knight III: Jedi Academy
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004
Neverwinter Nights: The Shadows of the Undrentide
Simcity 4
Splinter Cell
Unreal Tournament 2003
X2
Warcraft III: Frozen Throne
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
We are working on expanding the suite even further, but for now this is what we have. If you’d like to see more games added please feel free to let us know either by sending an email or even better, leaving a comment through the system at the bottom of the page.
We used ATI’s publicly available Catalyst 3.7 drivers and in order to support the NV38 we used NVIDIA’s forthcoming 52.14 drivers. The 52.14 drivers apparently have issues in two games, neither of which are featured in our test suite (Half Life 2 & Gunmetal).
Our test bed was configured as follows:
2.8GHz Intel Processor Prescott
512MB DDR400
Intel 875P Motherboard
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#112, just because doom3 is opengl and not dx9 it doesnt change the fact that this review completely sidestepped the issue of future performance in games. #92 makes perfect points apart from the discrepancy over doom3 using dx9, which ultimately doesnt matter since the shaders of its opengl API are similar to dx9 anyway.YOU are the only person that looks stupid if you think that this review hasnt glazed over or sidestepped important issues, most benchmarks were totally CPU limited and an unreleased nvidia driver was used which might not even see the light of day.
I'm glad that you point out to everyone that IQ will be covered in later articles, its always great to see reviews posted claiming a certain level of performance without backing up scores legitimately! That would never give people false impressions now would it?
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
- why not try more distributed forms of the review process. 30hrs in a row is quite bad and it's obviosuly going to impact a bit in terms of any sensible decisions to make during the benchmarking and comment-making.username/login aint workin!
Last 3 posts were mine.
Gaurav Sharma
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
- Dunno if you're allowed to answer this, but is the prescott a hot chip compared to a P4? if its got HT2 and things, again it could be painting an innaccurate picture. Im sure most people here have a Athlon 2xxx and that's what you shoulda benchmarked with. Also you left out too many old cards - what use is a comparision when your card aint on there?!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
- Benchmark at 1280x1024 with 4x AA, it's what these cards are designed for, especially with regard to DX8 titles. With DX9 same thing but without AA. I'm sure most of us are running our CRTs/17-18" LCDs at that.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Shut your stupid pie-hole!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Why use FRAPS for Jedi Knight when the game has the ability to record and play back demos? just use timedemo1 as in all (well almost) other Q3 based gamesAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Well Like I have always said Even when the 9000 was out you knew that it would blow away the fx5800and now we see even the 9600 beating the mess out of the poor 5900-ultra!
ATI Rocks man!
I'm out of here, but I'll be back!
Bigshot
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
a lot of people dont have the time to spend hours reading hardware reviews, for those people reviews such as this one can be very misleading when such important details are glazed over or completely missing.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#143, yes, that's true; if you don't know how to read a review and only see numbers because you are a moron, then yes those people are in bad luck...Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#142: true, but people read this review and dont see where the image quality suffers; they just see the performance.