Here, we see that the 5200 Ultra is more resilient when turning on aniso and antialiasing. The gap between the 9600 SE and the 5200 is much smaller, and the performance of the 9200 and 9200 SE fall off abruptly. The SE based cards take such a large performance hit because enabling AA significantly increases memory bandwidth requirements. We will be seeing similar performance hits for the 64bit memory bus SE cards in other games as well.
If C&C Generals: Zero Hour is your game, the 9600SE should be your budget card of choice.
I question the validity of a budget video card shootout when the test platform is and AMD FX51 processor running on a Nforce3 platform and utilizing 1 gig of ram( a setup noone who is shopping for a budget video card has). I mean, how many people out there who play games will put together an Athlon FX system with 1 gig of top of the line RAM and then stick a radeon 9200 in it? Nobody.
If you're trying to help people on a budget decide which card to buy I believe you should test the cards on a "budget" or mid-range system to show how the cards perform on the type of systems which prospective purchasers of these cards are likely to own. I would at least show one or two comparative benchmarks on a system with a mid-range althon, similar to your CPU scaling tests in past reviews. In it's current form, this article is misleading at best, and is going to convince someone who has a 1 gig athlon to go out and buy a radeon 9200 and try to play C&C Generals or Halo on it which is not going to be a very fun experience at 5-12fps.
PS - I just want to say that I generally love the content of this site and consider it to be the top tech review site on the net. This article, however, really got under my skin because people who don't have alot of cash to spend are going to rely on it without noticing the fact that the cards were tested on an Athlon FX51.
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KristopherKubicki - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1933...Radeon 9700 Pro outperforming the 9800 XT :)
Nice.
Kristopher
sauron - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
I question the validity of a budget video card shootout when the test platform is and AMD FX51 processor running on a Nforce3 platform and utilizing 1 gig of ram( a setup noone who is shopping for a budget video card has). I mean, how many people out there who play games will put together an Athlon FX system with 1 gig of top of the line RAM and then stick a radeon 9200 in it? Nobody.If you're trying to help people on a budget decide which card to buy I believe you should test the cards on a "budget" or mid-range system to show how the cards perform on the type of systems which prospective purchasers of these cards are likely to own. I would at least show one or two comparative benchmarks on a system with a mid-range althon, similar to your CPU scaling tests in past reviews. In it's current form, this article is misleading at best, and is going to convince someone who has a 1 gig athlon to go out and buy a radeon 9200 and try to play C&C Generals or Halo on it which is not going to be a very fun experience at 5-12fps.
PS - I just want to say that I generally love the content of this site and consider it to be the top tech review site on the net. This article, however, really got under my skin because people who don't have alot of cash to spend are going to rely on it without noticing the fact that the cards were tested on an Athlon FX51.