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 - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
FSAA does work in Halo you need to add two lines to the config.txt file to enable it. FSAA is working fine in Halo now.Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Where are the DX9 benchmarks?What is going on at Anandtech? Why all the Dx9 titles?
Old cards can do dx8 well I want to see how dx9 titles run. Aquamark is mostly dx8.
You for some reason are using buggy Nvidia drivers for this test why?
Something is fishy here. I smell a sellout.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Good article and nice new testing sweet. But look into adding SOE's Planetside to the mix that game eats anything less then a 5600 for lunch running at no more then 20 fps. my heavily oced 5600 (350/550) never gets over 70 or so.Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
#206everything that was able to run aa/af was run in aa/af ... how can you complain about that?
There is exactly one (sucky) dx9 game out that they didn't test: TRAOD ...
meh
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
I'd like to see Nascar Racing 2003 tested, rather than F1Challenge. Since F1C is CPU limited, it makes the results rather useless for GPU testing.As #159 notes, starting from the back of a full-field AI race will definitely show what your hardware is capable of doing. But the AI calculations may eat up a lot of CPU cycles. (FWIW, NR2003 is multithreaded and MP-aware, so this scenario might make for a good CPU/system test.)
However, one could create a _replay_ of a full-field race. The replay is then repeatable on any system. And, although I haven't tested this, I imagine the replay might be more GPU-intensive since there's less real-time AI and physics processing happening.
OTOH, both games have DX8.x graphics engines AFAIK.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Almost all the games were cpu-limited.Relatively few used AA/AF, which is even more important with a slow cpu, given that you have videocard power to burn. Another failure.
Few of the games were DX9. Is this some sort of sop for Nvidia?
All-in-all a very annoying and disappointing non-review.
rms
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Still using Flash for benchmarks.. again? Come on, cut that out.Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
i dont even play games at 1024x768 cause i have an nvidia and it does suck!Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Pete --The ATI 9600 Pro would not run Homeworld 2 at all ... Oops on leaving that out of the write up, but that's a good catch on your part.
NWN problems are known, but didn't exist until introduced by the Cats released *after* NWN was on the shelves (so says Bioware iirc).
But we will touch on this in the next article.
The 9600 Pro will be addressed when we do our budget card section of the roundup ...
J Derek Wilson
(Wading through 180 posts as I work on the next set of benchies and IQ tests)