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
Cheatonators are NOT USING True Trilinear filtering in EVERY DX game.
WAKE UP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
who cares about Nvidia anymore.....
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Why not stating if these games are rather OpenGL, DirectX 8 or DirectX 9 Games...Looks Like Nvidia is ahead in OpenGl games (Homeworld 2 and Never Winter Nights for example). And ATI in Direct X Games...
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
WOW, look at all those DX9 benchmarks!!!!!!LOL
He is using drivers that are NOT available to the public(51.75), there are no IQ test(yet) and he has already come to a conclusion.
Bye bye Anand you are over for me!!!!
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Cheatonators 5x.xx are used in this review!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!REDICOULOUS as ANAnD
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
ANAND + NVIDIA = this review of shit.PERIODianmills - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I've lost my faith in you as an impartial reviewer.The idea to do all tests at 1024x768 was just PLAIN STUPID.
The difference between the cards is way higher at higher resolutions... The results are much different at the other sites
Reading this interview one could conclude that the 9800xt is only 20-30% faster than the 9600pro
This is crap Anandtech. Either shape up or you've lost another reader.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I would Like To see widely played Driving games like Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2,4X4 Evo 2not that driving Anadtech Put in.I Request Anadtech to atleast include Need for speed Hot Pursuit 2.
Jeff7181 - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#121...Quake 3 is used because it's CPU limited, not limited by video cards... so if a new CPU can run the game faster, that's an indiciation of it's performance... new games like HL2 and Doom3 tend to be more video card dependant than CPU dependant.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
lock on:modern air combatcall of duty
NASCAR Thunder 2004
Need for speed:HP
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I think it is becoming clear that ATI cards are superior in DX9 games, and are the way to go. Sad for us Geforce owners. Hopefully though, Nvidia will address this and come to market with their next gen cards (not this new batch...the next) having a lot better DX9 performance--for the entire DX9 spec.If I were buying a card now, it'd be an ATI....but I don't think Nvidia is going to sit still, their new cards will be competitive.