ATI's Radeon 9500 Pro - Now Shipping & Faster

Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance (continued)

The first part of the UT2003 benchmark focuses on GPU performance without taking into account physics and AI calculations that occur during normal gameplay. Thus the flyby scores on the previous page were very GPU bound; the botmatch benchmark in UT2003 is much more focused on physics/AI performance, both of which are tasks that are very CPU intensive.

The nature of the benchmark yields much lower scores and is obviously much less influenced by GPU performance. A faster CPU or chipset generally results in the most dramatic improvements here.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail - Botmatch 1024x768 - Maximum Detail ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (Final) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 70.9 68.5 66.4 66.3 65.2 63.1 59.2 | 0 | 14 | 28 | 43 | 57 | 71 | 9

We kept the Radeon 9700 Pro drivers the same and used the new drivers for the Radeon 9500 Pro to illustrate a point in this benchmark. The new drivers clearly are the cause for the massive 20% increase in performance in UT2003; Botmatch is mostly CPU and driver limited, which is why we see such a big performance gain here. With the shipping 9500 Pro drivers, the two 9700 cards perform just slightly better than the 9500 Pro.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail - Botmatch 1280x960 - Maximum Detail ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (Final) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 66.6 66.3 66.1 58.8 56.5 53.4 51.2 | 0 | 13 | 27 | 40 | 53 | 67 | 80

The trend continues, all of the ATI cards have at least a 10% advantage over the fastest GeForce4.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail - Botmatch 1600x1200 - Maximum Detail ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (Final) NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 64.2 61.0 54.1 47.7 44.5 39.3 36.0 | 0 | 13 | 26 | 39 | 51 | 64 | 77

Where fillrate and memory bandwidth limitations come into play, the Radeon 9500 Pro's new driver cannot keep it on top for much longer. What's interesting to note is that the new driver doesn't change Radeon 9700 performance much at all, but has a huge impact on the Radeon 9500 Pro.