Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 3: ATI's Radeon 9600 XT
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 15, 2003 10:26 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Halo Performance
The packaged benchmark that comes with the Halo is made up of all the cut scenes between levels (which are pretty graphics intensive). We ran the benchmark at 1024x768 @ 75Hz , which provided plenty of work for all our cards. We opted to simply include average framerate for this article, but there are some really cool features of this benchmark (like percentage of time above a certain frame rate) that we may revisit later.
We used the new 1.02 patch for this review which improved the performance of all cards under the benchmark a decent amount thanks to the removal of a memory check that used to occur every frame.
The 9600 XT makes good gains over the Pro in Halo. Of course, this is not surprising as Halo makes heavy use of pixel shaders which really benefit from the clock speed boost of the XT. This is a very nice gain of over 19% and one of the top gains in our lineup. We still aren't coming near 9700 Pro speeds though.
Homeworld 2
Unfortunately, neither of our RV3x0 cards would run Homeworld 2. We would get hard locks while running the game every time on both cards. This did, however, facilitate our testing of the VPU Recovery functionality introduced with Catalyst 3.8. At some points during other games we would see the VPU recovery kick in and everything would be fine and we'd go about our business. When Homeworld 2 locks the card we get a message that says VPU recovery wasn't able to fully reset the hardware and we will be blessed with the wonders of software rendering until we reboot. This is definitely better than having no recourse but to pull the plug from the wall, and we're glad to see that we couldn't freeze the entire system as we had previously with the 9600 Pro under Catalyst 3.7.
Both ATI and NVIDIA have known issues with Homeworld 2, and we are hoping that they will both be working closely with developers to solve these problems quickly. In the meantime, we are looking into possible workarounds and hope to bring you numbers for RV3x0 cards under Homeworld 2 in future articles.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
70 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Anyone notice that the GeForce5600 Ultra beats out the 9600 Pro, and even the 9600 ProXT, in games that dont use DX (namely they use Open GL)? Like in Wolfenstein, Jedi Academy. I also seem to remeber it winning in Quake 3, in some other reviews I read. It also won in Never Winter Nights; is that an Open GL game too?Just seems to me that if Nvidia can fix whatever probelms the Geforce line of cards have with DX, they may prove to be very good cards, as open gl seems to suggest. Just a thought.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Dear Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson,As I can't see the benchmark graphs I can't extract any useful information from this review. Please don't ever use Flash in your reviews again.
Thank you.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Oh, yeah, thanks for including the Ti4200. Lessthanthree.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
It was the Radeon 9500 plain that could be modded, not the 9500 Pro, you NITRATE-OXIDIZING FIENDThe 9500 Pro was quite a buy, though, never mind modding.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
I've seen 9700 non-pro's going for around $200... Considering the performance hike from overclocking and the ability to just overclock/flash the NP to a Pro, I'd say the 9700 is a better deal than the 9600XT. :)Anonymous Posting: As I've said before, I'm unable to procure an email address that isn't blocked under AT's anti-freemail signup requirement, so I'm out of luck in replying to these entries if they lock it to unsubscribed users. :/
Lastly, I use a Ti4200 and I'm satisfied to see my Ti4200 putting out 28fps in Halo... On the other hand, I'd like to hear from the AT folks after they've played Halo for about an hour or so using 45.23 Dets with a 4200 clock of 265/545, because I've experienced game-ruining artifacting that V-sync can't correct... And no other game has the same error, so it's not the Dets or the clock speeds that's causing it (to my knowledge).
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
i think you can find the 9700pro at a few places for around $220Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Have I missed something in the pricing of these cards? "Given the very low price of the Radeon 9700 Pro we'd strongly suggest buying a 9700 Pro over a Radeon 9600 XT". A quick check on pricewatch indicates that very low price to be $249.00. Has the accepted price of a midrange card gone that high?Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Agreed to 22, this Anonymous posting system does nothing but feed the trollsAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Yawn.. the article responses have certainly gone to shit ever since this new reply and comment system was added.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
#20-sorry that you're an idiot