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
Final Fantasy XI
The Final Fantasy series has always been popular, and will probably always be popular. I have a personal affinity towards the series, but I’m not so sure about the Massively Multiplayer Online style they are going for this time around. The benchmark is much more straightforward than the success of their future game: we set it to high-res benchmark mode (1024x768) and record the number of frames that get rendered (in the bottom right hand corner). Then we divide that by the length of time the benchmark runs to get an average frames per second.
The two most expensive ATI cards manage to nudge out the rest of the pack which are mostly tied. Again, the 9700 Pro does a good job of remaining competitive, and the 9600 Pro is still hanging on while doing a good job of clearly beating the 5600 Ultra. Unlike the Aquanox3 style of benchmark which has a set number of frames to render, this benchmark has a set time to move through a scene and render as many frames as possible while doing so. That makes image comparison a little more difficult. No matter what hardware this benchmark is run on, there seems to be a lot of motion blur and antialiasing is not an available option (and doesn't work even if its enabled at the driver level).
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I think that the new reviews should include Half-life 2....when availableAlso when UT2k4 comes out toward the end of the year (or is available to anand), UT2k3 should be replaced as a benchmarking tool. It seems likely that the graphics engine will be tweaked and better looking, as well as include very large levels in UT2k4
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
This is what I want to see used for CPU articles. Your old crap tests suck (well, unreal 2003 is still used). This is MUCH more useful to someone trying to find out how the latest games will run on their new cpu. Why use quake3 in cpu articles when you can use a bunch of games like this? Do people care more about quake3 or the batch of games you're using here for tesing vid cards? The very same games apply to picking a new cpu. NOT Q3. That game is DEAD.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
You guys should really indicate what the API used for each game is -- DX8, 8.1, 9 or Open GL. That would help out a lot in determining if a company optimizes for an API, a single game, or everything... not everyone follows the game industry enough to know which games are programmed in which graphics API....Jeff7181 - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Just so ya know... overclocking will dramatically increase the performance... check this thread I created here for some overclock GeForceFX5900 results...http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=...
Davegod - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
"This is the first installment of a multipart series that will help you decide what video card is best for you, and hopefully it will do a better job than we have ever in the past.The extensive benchmarking we’ve undertaken has forced us to split this into multiple parts, so expect to see more coverage on higher resolutions, image quality, anti-aliasing, CPU scaling and budget card comparisons in the coming weeks. We’re working feverishly to bring it all to you as soon as possible and I’m sure there’s some sort of proverb about patience that I should be reciting from memory to end this sentence but I’ll leave it at that."
Worth repeating since least 3/4 of whiners seem to have not noticed it. About 1/4 remains for the driver 'issues', which isnt mentioned but still might be/hopefully is intended, although I'd assume it to take at least as much time as the entire rest of the roundup.
Ye, hopefully parts I-III will include something to give more of an indication of Dx9. With a bit of luck it'll be the HL2 bench - the delay of which maybe being the reason for little in the way of Dx9?
- DG
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
please include every game that has been made in the past 5 years, so everyone will be happy and will shut the hell up! :)Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
regarding AA on halo, disabling the alpha render targets prevents the game from turning it off.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
nvidia can compete only in dx.7 and dx.8 or opengl 1.2 games due to wrong strategy of their ceo mr.hu ho ha nv 35 architecture has failed do you really think that nvidia can force microsoft to include nvidia custom shader language [code] in dx.9Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
While I can appreciate the work it took to generate all these benchmarks...what a complete and utter waste of time! Less than 10% bumps in the clockspeed? Zzzzzzz. I'd have sent it back to ATI and told them to call when they had something interesting.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
It would be much more helpful if you included an older video card for reference. Like a geforce 4200, 4600. I am sure there are several users like myself who bought one of these cards in the past year or so and would like to see how it compares to what is new to see how benificial a new upgrade would be.