Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 1, 2003 3:02 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Homeworld 2
This game is a space based RTS with plenty of particle effects and eye candy. Framerates can jump wildly from hundreds down to the teens depending on how close you want to get to the action. We decided to run two benchmarks (both with FRAPS), one on an in game cut scene (benchmark 1), and the second on a brief skirmish (benchmark 2) that was easily repeatable (the AI responded consistently to my inaction after the cut scene, so we could easily watch the same destruction occur over and over). These two measurements seemed to reflect the different aspects of gameplay well.
NVIDIA takes this test hands down. The ships of homeworld have some really nice textures, and there are some beautiful particle effects that can be seen just flying around in space watching things blow up. This first test is mostly just watching one big ship fly up past the camera.
We see that the trends remain the same with AA/AF enabled. The 9800XT gained some ground on the NVIDIA cards, but not enough to make a real difference in this test. This is another test where it was not apparent that NVIDIA's AA was doing as much as needed for the scene, so we will take a closer look at this benchmark when we do our image quality comparison.
In this battle scene (with more ships, more textures, and lots of missiles and laser fire), NVIDIA's lead is even more pronounced, could also be due to the cards memory bandwidth as there are more textures that need to be moved in and out of video RAM.
Again, we are not sure about the quality of the AA and filtering in this benchmark, but we will be looking into the matter very promptly. For now though, NVIDIA wears the Homeworld 2 crown.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
For all the people complaining about the cheat-y Dets, remember that Part 2 will be Image Quality based.. that's when you'll get your licks in.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#120, i said almost the exact same thing back in post #6 :PAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I'd like to see both 45.23 and Det 50s for nV cards. Also, yeah, serious CPU limit here.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Ummm wtf are you using 1024x768 for?! Did you not notice the scores being so close. Especially when 9600 is close to 9800xt. Omg. What crap. Use 1290x960 or 1600x1200 AT LEAST IN ADDITION to 1024 by 768. Almost all of the graphs look cpu limited.How about we at least TRY to stress the 500$ cards next time OK???
And use the non cheating Detonators next time too will you? As in 43.30 or whatever they are. I want to see how bad the nv38 burns when you take out the cheats.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Stay off my machine you moron!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Hi, my name is Bigshot and I wanna say I love your review! I think we now know that Nvidiot will be gone soon and it will be great just to have ATI!ATI! All the way!
ATI Rocks! and if you love Nvidia like I love my ATI watch out man!
Did you see the new Heat freakin sinks on the 9800XT? Did you see the cool flame job on them?
ATI!
Keep up the great work Anad!
ATI rocks them all! I should know.
Cause I got me one!
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I guess this is all an early (or late) April Fools... Well, in Fact exactly 1/2 a year (6 months) later...Wow, 2 fools in a Year ! Great !!
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTA2NDg1OT...ALL DX9 games are OVER for NVIDIA !!!! PERIOD
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
FS2004 is a DX8 game!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
FS2004 has the abilty to save a flight that can be used as a canned demo for benchmarking, variables like ATC must be turned off.FS2004 loads settings according to your hardware and it is up to the tester to make sure that ALL settings are identical. As the numbers indicate that was not done.
I would know, I watched the FS2004 GPU race in SD last month and something is very wrong with those posted in this review, ATI 9600 beats 5900-Ultra? LOL!!!
Please get some help!