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
No #40, the fact that I can write and read clear English sentences is probably why I was confused by your grammatically incorrect and mistyped statements.And surrrrrre #36 wasn't you, whatever you say....And yes, you're a whiner, and no, #42 brings up good points.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#47 - So what you are saying is that people who invest in a $450-500 video card shouldnt worry about how their card will perform in future games? Are they supposed to buy a new card for each new game thats released implementing new features? That does not seem very wise to me, and I would expect that most people paying such a high price tag for a card would EXPECT their card to have some decent lifespan where it can perform well in the latest games(6months? a year?). Of course there is going to be a point where you simply need new hardware to run new games, I don't know about you but suddenly finding that your card doesnt make the cut when a new crop of games comes out wouldnt be my idea of celebrating a $450-500 purchase.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Funny how after reading this review and seeing all the very marginal gain my 150$ more could buy me, the only thing that got me interessed was the fact they used a prescott to benchmark.As long as they keep "tweaking" the curent crop of cores, those new cards are just to keep the performance crown, and by what, .3fps to 5fps?.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
"Games such as Command & Conquer Generals: Ground Zero and Simcity 4: Rush Hour are examples where ATI clearly has the lead over NVIDIA and the argument could be made that ATI holds the lead because they optimize for all games, while NVIDIA just optimizes for benchmark titles. However, looking at games like Homeworld 2 and Neverwinter Nights you could make the exact opposite argument."Except that Command & Conquer is an EA title. The company which officially works with nVidia...
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Yeah, include it. Makes at least more sense than including Sim City, etc...The whiner
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Hey I'm disappointed. This isn't a real flame war, it's more like handbags at 30 paces.What the review says is that even with a top processor most current games are CPU rather than GPU limited if you have one of the better cards and that for these games there's not much to choose on framerate between ATi and NVidia. IQ is a different matter though. It certainly suggests that while NVidia does have some advantages they are generally outgunned by ATi unless they "cheat" by lowering IQ.
No point in worrying about future games - when they come out is the time to make a decision on that. However at the moment it looks like the card you will be buying will be made by ATi, unless you are some kind of masochist.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I would like to see Battlefield 1942 benches. It's a very popular game that has many players.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
500 bucks for a slightly overclocked 9800 pro? Good work ati, please take my money!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Again perfectly rightThe whiner
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
word