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
Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour
The recently released expansion to the very popular Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game Command & Conquer Generals seems to do a good job of living up to the standards set by its prestigious ancestry. RTS games usually get overlooked in GPU roundups and comparisons as they aren’t considered graphically intense. However, smoothness is very important to gameplay; goodness knows I’ve blamed plenty of lost armies on ill timed drops in framerate. For this benchmark, we created a multiplayer game consisting of 6 hard armies on one team with us, and one easy army. We then used the replay feature in conjunction with FRAPS to measure performance. This was done with and without 4xAA/8xAF.
In this first test we can see that all the ATI cards are huddled together at the top while the nvidia cards lag behind. Clearly this game favors the ATI architecture. One of NVIDIAs strong points, memory bandwidth, doesn't get a chance to shine in this game as its mostly small textures and low poly objects with some pretty cool particle effects. That kind of setup just doesn't tilt in NVIDIAs favor.
Even with AA and AF enabled neither camp is severely hampered; and the only card that really drops off significantly is the 9600 Pro. The fact that the FX 5900 and NV38 are neck and neck suggests that the reason for NVIDIAs performance in this benchmark has something to do with an aspect of the architecture that isn't directly (or significantly?) affected by GPU core clock or memory bus bandwidth/speed; more than likely we're talking about driver issues here.
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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.