ATI Radeon 64MB DDR

To demonstrate how the card would perform in a somewhat lower speed processor, we ran the Quake III Arena built in demo001 in a Pentium III 550E.

Similar to what we saw in the Athlon 750 system, the Radeon really does not show any difference when switching from 16-bit to 32-bit color, meaning that essentially all Radeon owners will want to run the cards in 32-bit color mode due to the lack of a performance drop. Our graphs, which are once again sorted by 16-bit color as we have always done them, places the Radeon near the bottom of the performance scale. When examining the 32-bit color performance of the card, we find that it is slightly below that of a GeForce 256, most likely a result of immature drivers.

We again see that the 16-bit performance of the card is weak, at best. By pushing 32-bit color gameplay, ATI has essentially changed their card's performance from that of a GeForce SDR to that of a GeForce DDR. It seems that performance is still somewhat lower compared to what we saw in the Athlon 750 system, as at this resolution in the Athlon 750, the Radeon was only slightly slower than the GeForce 2 GTS when in 32-bit color. At this lower end processor system, the Radeon essentially matched the speed of the 64MB GeForce 256 DDR.

At 1024x768x16, we see that the Radeon does not perform horribly, coming in right behind the GeForce 256 DDR 64 MB, however it does not live up to its potential until it is pushed into 32-bit color mode. When at 1024x768x32, we see the same results on this Pentium III 550E system as we saw in the Athlon 750 system at 800x600x32: that the Radeon is only slightly slower than the GeForce 2 GTS. When at this resolution, the Radeon 64MB DDR was able to perform only about 3.5 FPS slower than the top performing GeForce 2 GTS based cards. Once again, this shows that the Radeon is ready to take on some tough competition, as long as it is at 32-bit color.