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 - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Bigsot here again as I remembered what i forgot to say...The 2xAA of the ATI is even beter than nvidias best!
ATI cards are the bestest!
Nvidia card owners must be crying!
Not me! Cause I got me an ATI!!!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
how can they test aquamark3 without a image quality some sites says that nvidia quality in aquamark 3 sucks i dont know why they dont put that resultsAnonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Maybe there should be another video card manufacturer like ATI since NVidia is sinking, so the competition would be higher and new monster video cards would be developed for the good of the gamers. =) just like meAnonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
I heard that the new ATI 9600XT will blow away even the NV5900-ultra cards!ATI ROCKS! Nvidia sucks!
Bigshot over and out of here! yeah!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Fantastic Suite....finally someone (other than SimHQis using FS2004!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
These score are worthless, clearly even the FS2004 test where not set up as fs willmake adjustments according to hardware it sees that have to be manualy changed. You can also add that the NV cards are AAing the whole scene as compared to the ATI cards that do not AA the clouds, Trees and other Alpha textures.Why no AA was used is also beyond logic, what are we back in 1994? ROTFLOL!!!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
irrelevance is the quantity of ignoranceAnonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
#164, I'm not so sure about that. From what I've read about it, and seeing the screenshots, the 64-bit mode of Far Cry is probably real. The only question is if it's all it's hyped up to be, but considering the screenshots and movies I've seen, it would be interesting even if the 64-bit mode turned out to be nothing special (not that I'd expect that, though)Pete - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Derek/Anand,Evan suggested I repost this here. I didn't do so originally b/c I doubted you'd slog through 180 other comments, but on the off chance you do... ;)
I'm curious why 9600P results were left out of the Homeworld 2 benches. I also thought ATi's framerate problems with NWN were known, because the devs coded the engine around nVidia cards (though I also know ATi seems to be working to fix this).
I'd appreciate a reply if either of you could spare the time.
Thanks,
Pete
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
I would like to see some image quality comparisons like they do on HardOCP. I've heard that the new beta dets really screw up the image in favour of speed.