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
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness Performance no AA
As we mentioned before, we were unable to test the NVIDIA cards under TROAD. The Ti 4200 would only run with PS1.1, and as such we couldn't make a fair comparison. The 5600 Ultra was unable to run at 1024x768 as we received an out of video memory error. We have run into this issue in previous reviews. Unfortunately, even if a future patch fixes this bug, we are still stuck with v49 for benchmarking.
The gains the 9600 XT made over the Pro in this game were less than we had expected to see. This tells us that core clock speed is less of a factor in performance than other DX9 games like Halo, X2, and Aquanox. This is counter intuitive to the trends we have seen in shader intensive games, but at the same time, we can't really draw any solid conclusions from this. All we know is that TRAOD performance is less affected by core clock speed than some other games.
Note also that the 9700 Pro leads the 9600 XT by somewhere near 50%.
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness Performance with AA
In benchmarking with more ATI cards, it is very clear that enabling anisotropic filtering degrades image quality in a very unacceptable way. When trilinear filtering is enabled, everything looks fine, and anisotropic filtering on NVIDIA hardware doesn't exhibit this problem. This is the worst of the image quality problems we have seen with either ATI or NVIDIA in any game we have tested.
Since memory bandwidth between the 9600 XT and the 9600 Pro hasn't changed, its not surprising that our performance delta decreased when we turned on AA and AF.
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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