ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 - What's in a name?

Call of Duty

This is a new title that we added to the mix since it is one of the most popular titles at the moment. This is another game of the first-person shooter genre, where you work on missions with your army's "company" to accomplish specified goals. Call of Duty is based on the Quake 3 engine, but it is a heavily modified version so that it can incorporate DX9 features. We ran a replay of a LAN game played among several players via the console, which is not available in the demo version of the game. Since Call of Duty caps the frames per second, we had to max out the cap value at "999" so that the benchmark could replay at its highest possible frame rate.

We should note that this game doesn't really implement ps2.0 shaders. Instead, it is more like a DX8.1 title running in a DX9 API. Keep in mind that it is also an OpenGL title.

This is one of two titles in our benchmark suite that provided the Mobility Radeon 9700 with a sub 10% margin. This doesn't seem to be the normal scenario, except for a few titles in lower resolutions. When we get to the 1280x1024 resolution, the margin jumps 17% (from 9% to 26%). This scenario is much more reminiscent of our Aquamark 3 scores.

It's very important to note that the Mobility Radeon 9700 takes a performance degrade (when jumping to a higher resolution) much better than the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro. While the Mobility Radeon 9700 only suffers a roughly 4% degrade, the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro takes a 16% drop from 1024x768 to 1280x1024. This is more of the clock for clock performance that ATI is clearly benefiting from the low-k process of the R360 graphics core.

As popular as Call of Duty is, it isn't that graphically intensive compared to some of the other titles at our disposal. Both of ATI's mobile GPUs can comfortably run well above the 50fps market, and it is our experience that AA and AF can be scaled up while achieving smooth game play.