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
I think that the new reviews should include Half-life 2....when availableAlso when UT2k4 comes out toward the end of the year (or is available to anand), UT2k3 should be replaced as a benchmarking tool. It seems likely that the graphics engine will be tweaked and better looking, as well as include very large levels in UT2k4
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
This is what I want to see used for CPU articles. Your old crap tests suck (well, unreal 2003 is still used). This is MUCH more useful to someone trying to find out how the latest games will run on their new cpu. Why use quake3 in cpu articles when you can use a bunch of games like this? Do people care more about quake3 or the batch of games you're using here for tesing vid cards? The very same games apply to picking a new cpu. NOT Q3. That game is DEAD.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
You guys should really indicate what the API used for each game is -- DX8, 8.1, 9 or Open GL. That would help out a lot in determining if a company optimizes for an API, a single game, or everything... not everyone follows the game industry enough to know which games are programmed in which graphics API....Jeff7181 - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Just so ya know... overclocking will dramatically increase the performance... check this thread I created here for some overclock GeForceFX5900 results...http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=...
Davegod - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
"This is the first installment of a multipart series that will help you decide what video card is best for you, and hopefully it will do a better job than we have ever in the past.The extensive benchmarking we’ve undertaken has forced us to split this into multiple parts, so expect to see more coverage on higher resolutions, image quality, anti-aliasing, CPU scaling and budget card comparisons in the coming weeks. We’re working feverishly to bring it all to you as soon as possible and I’m sure there’s some sort of proverb about patience that I should be reciting from memory to end this sentence but I’ll leave it at that."
Worth repeating since least 3/4 of whiners seem to have not noticed it. About 1/4 remains for the driver 'issues', which isnt mentioned but still might be/hopefully is intended, although I'd assume it to take at least as much time as the entire rest of the roundup.
Ye, hopefully parts I-III will include something to give more of an indication of Dx9. With a bit of luck it'll be the HL2 bench - the delay of which maybe being the reason for little in the way of Dx9?
- DG
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
please include every game that has been made in the past 5 years, so everyone will be happy and will shut the hell up! :)Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
regarding AA on halo, disabling the alpha render targets prevents the game from turning it off.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
nvidia can compete only in dx.7 and dx.8 or opengl 1.2 games due to wrong strategy of their ceo mr.hu ho ha nv 35 architecture has failed do you really think that nvidia can force microsoft to include nvidia custom shader language [code] in dx.9Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
While I can appreciate the work it took to generate all these benchmarks...what a complete and utter waste of time! Less than 10% bumps in the clockspeed? Zzzzzzz. I'd have sent it back to ATI and told them to call when they had something interesting.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
It would be much more helpful if you included an older video card for reference. Like a geforce 4200, 4600. I am sure there are several users like myself who bought one of these cards in the past year or so and would like to see how it compares to what is new to see how benificial a new upgrade would be.