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
F1 Challenge '99-'02 Performance no AA/AF
We've had plenty of requests to benchmark with a racing simulation. When we were designing the new testing suite this was one of the first games that came to mind. The game is faced paced, has lots of graphics options, and could keep someone who is into F1 racing busy for weeks at a time. Combine all of that with a nice replay feature and we have a very useful benchmark. We just ran a lap at Australia and counted the framerate of the replay via FRAPS while following one of the drivers in the middle of the pack.
We are still seeing the same jittery action with the NVIDIA cards that we have noted in Parts 1 and 2, and the AA also falls a little short of what it should be doing. As we have stated previously, these are known issues, and they are being addressed.
We see no real performance gains from the 9600 XT under this game, and we know we aren't CPU bound as both the 9700 Pro and 9800 XT show performance gains over the RV3x0 cards.
F1 Challenge '99-'02 Performance 4X AA/8X AF
We can see that the 9600 cards are able to hold their speed a little better than the NVIDIA cards when AA and AF are enabled.
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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.