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
Halo
With Halo in stores today, we have welcomed it with open arms into our testing suite. The packaged benchmark that comes with the game is made up of all the cut scenes between levels (which are fairly 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 interesting features of this benchmark (like percentage of time above a certain frame rate) that we may revisit later.
This benchmark clearly lets the 9800XT stretch its legs a little and pull away from the pack Of course, 51 fps is not really what you want to see for a first person shooter on the PC. We also don't get the benefit of AA (and therefore we don't get to see if the NVIDIA chips could make up some slack via their memory bandwidth), as AA is not currently supported in Halo.
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WooDaddy - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Good eye #93. Evan actually mentioned it earlier too.Anand/Derek mentioned Nvidia being better at Doom 3. Y'all sneaky son-of-a-guns must be beta testing it in the background or sumthin. I know Carmack said it ran better but I betcha y'all got your hands on a copy. Go ahead. Admit it! Quit holding out on us. We wanna see the benchmark! I got a shiny nickel with your name on it if you put it out there...
Overall great review. I sorta agree that 1024x768 is kinda like the 640x480 of yesteryear now, but most of us can gather what 1280 will run at. For the fanboys/girls, "You should've included counterstrike and hexen 2. waah!" Honestly, I know how long it can take to set up and benchmark those tests in a _controlled_ environment. Do you guys use automated software testers?
Question though.Even though FFXI ran slow, is it still playable? I don't want to believe that it runs that slow all the time.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
k, I'm going to ignore everyone who's bitching because they didn't read it and thus haven't already twigged that IQ comparisons will be in part 2Re the PCI slot thing, doesn't that apply equally to two-slot cards? If putting a PCI card next to the AGP slot on a one-slot card is bad, surely putting a PCI card in the first slot after a two-slot card isn't exactly smart either? You still lose an extra PCI slot over what you would have with a one-slot card
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
What about Max Payne 2 ? i like to see it in next benchsAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Please use Battlefield 1942 in benchmarking in the future! It's an awesome game and has some very nice and demanding mods like desert combat. Please use desert combat in benchmarking too. Try flying around, blowing up stuff and checking if framerate ever goes to unacceptable levels. Gamers rarely care about average or maximum fps, if game is running 50fps or 150 fps it doesn't matter, but if it ever runs as sluggishly as <10 fps in heat of the battle, it is very annoying.Just tell us with your own words, which graphics card brings playable framerates!
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I would like to see Battlefield 1942 added into the benchmarks. Especially since it is such a popular game and they have battlefield vietnam coming out before too long. Thanks.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Thanks for benching so many games. Since I only play a few games I look for performance in those games in particular. My games were covererd and I really appreciate that.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I see the fanbois are out in full force. :/Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
over all a sad review, using drivers that are not out for every one to use, no IQ tests to see if the drivers are cheating at all, and then comments like "From these two graphs, it seems like NVIDIA is the clear winner, but in watching this demo run so many times, we noticed that the NVIDIA cards were running choppier than the ATI cards, and we again had some image quality questions we need to answer"so that pretty much does it for me. I won't take this with a grain of salt untill they rip apart the drivers, and make sure Nvidia is not up to any "optimazations" Ive lost all trust in Nvidia. I hope the Nv40 can turn this around.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#69 just because you run games at 1280x1024, doesn't make you the majority representation of gamers. Most gamers run at 1024x768. Most computer users resolution is at 1024x768, like 55% or something like that.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
The "Prescott" string on Page 4 is white?! Just select the 3 last lines from "2.8 GHz ...". Has it been white all the time?