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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BerSerK0 - Friday, January 30, 2004 - link
I have a 9600XT, and real life FPS on these games are much better :)xxZoDxx - Sunday, December 28, 2003 - link
My $.02... Constantly listening to the bickering of ATI vs nvidia, it's like Ford vs Chevy, & Pepsi vs Coke. My feelings on this? nvidia has superior hardware. Now before you get your ATI underoos in a bunch, ATI has the superior Drivers/architecture. Look at most openGL benches. Don't they follow the clock, RAM, and bandwidth speeds more closely? nvidia mostly holds all these cards. If they could only get their drivers to work as well with D3D, there wouldn't be a question. Congrats on the latest 50 series but they still have a way to go to get D3D up to snuff. Personally? I have a 5900 that o/c's like mad (well beyond 5950) and I only paid 2 bills for it. ATI... get the pricing down and you could OWN nvidia. Now I wait for the flamers..........TurtleMan - Tuesday, December 23, 2003 - link
Hmm FFXi is a main factor for me , and now i have an unopen 9600 xt sitting right here, i began to wonder if i should open it up or buy a 9800 se..Rustjive - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
The FFXI benchmark is heavily CPU bound in addition to being GPU bound. Case in point: I ran it on my duallie PIII-733 with the TI4200, and I barely got over 1200 rendered (compared with the 3000+ of Anandtech's results.) Then contrast this to Aquamark 3, in which I got 13.03 FPS as opposed to the ~15FPS of Anand's. (Comparatively, the performance differences are quite drastic.) All I have to say is...blah to FFXI and the world of MMORPGs. Blah.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link
Scores are bullshit, why bench the top of the line ATI 9800 XT against the middle of the road 5600? Thats just retarded.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link
When we will see a test with ATI,s 9800 made by different manufacturers?Asus,Hercules,Gigabyte,ATI??
Thank u!
Anonymous User - Saturday, October 18, 2003 - link
How come they used diff. settings for every benchmark? Sometimes they used 1024X768 with no AA/AF enabled while other times they used 1024X768 w/ 4XAA/8XAF. Where did the 6XAA settings go? Can't stay consistant thorough out the review so people won't have to worry about the settings for each game benchamarks. Can anyone expalain this?Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link
Unfortunately this review has missed an important issue: noise levels. Simply put many of the people reading this site will have serious hearing loss by their mid 40s because these systems are too loud for the long daily exposure times people experience with them. Old programmers who were around the old line printers frequently have hearing loss from the high pitched buzzing of the printers. Ditto any other industrial noise exposures. Silent computing is a worthwhile goal! I was very disappointed to discover that the last nVidia-based graphic card I placed in my main system was so noisy. Now I need to find a quieter one that delivers similar performance. These reviews are not much help on that dimension. Sorry.Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link
Can you PLEASE get rid of the flash ! :(Whats wrong with the classic Anandtech graphs
that everybody loved ?
It doesnt even look better ..
Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link
Hey #8, maybe it's because NVIDIA sucks. Even when they do match the performance of ATI, the image quality is lower anyway.