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.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Sorry but these scores are rubbishAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Is there a particular reason why a 9500pro card isn't included in these reviews. It seems at least as worthy as the the Ti4200, or I could be just biased because I have a 9500pro. Either way, if you could include it in future reviews it'd be appreciated.PrinceGaz - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
I agree with #4, the 9800se should be included as it is in the price range. Its widely available and radically different from the 9600pro/xt and fx5600ultra as its got a full 256-bit memory bus. That should certainly help with DX8 titles but its relatively slow four-pipeline (by default) core clocked at 325MHz could be a problem with future shader-intensive DX9 games.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Man I love to see how well the 9700 Pro still holds it own after all this time. What a great card!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
i remember an article where some guy from ATI said that this card would outperform the 9700 pro. i had serious doubts about such claim and kind of laughed about it.and i guess that i was right, as it does not outperform the 9700pro.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
THANKS FOR USING ALL CAPS #8!!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
homeworld 2 ran just fine on my radeon 9500 pro...I'm running the 3.7's though...Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
/me pets my modded 9500np->9700proAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Nvidia will be back. Not that I care. As long as I can buy a decent card from someone I don't care who it comes from.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Any idiot who "built computers for a living" should know better than to shout. Especially in the presence of his superiors. Check the settings again moron. They often AA/AF on and off, as well as V-sync off etc. If you had time to benchmark your systems with all these variables then you had too much time on your hands. Hence the "built" not build.