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
F1 Challenge ’99-‘02
We’ve had plenty of requests to benchmark with a racing simulation. When we were designing the new testing suit this was one of the first games that came to mind. The game is faced paced, has lots of graphics options, and could keep someone who is into F1 racing busy for weeks at a time. Combine all of that with a nice replay feature and we have a very useful benchmark. We just ran a lap at Australia and counted the framerate of the replay via FRAPS while following one of the drivers in the middle of the pack.
In this bench, everyone seems to being doing really well with the exception of the two lowest end cards. It seems very clear that this test is CPU bound, and we are looking forward to benching some CPUs with this game (as well as trying to push the highend cards with some higher resolution tests). There really is no clear winner, but NV38 does come out at the top of the pile.
When we flip the filter switch, the 9800 XT drops the least in frame rate, and takes a clear lead over NV38 and the 9800 Pro. Usually NVIDIA is the camp gaining the most ground after AA and AF are enabled, but it is very much worth noting that in this benchmark (and others we will point out later) AA and AF didn't really seem to work as well on the NVIDIA cards as it did on the ATI cards. There was some difference between the two, but we will have to do more research into this area before we can bring forth anything conclusive.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
How come cards likes the new XT can only get 50fps en jediknight3 ( old Q3 engine ) and reach for the 215 for UT 2k3? ( witch have way better graphic )Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I really wonder what happened to Anandtech. I once liked and trusted their reviews so much that I did not read any other ones.Now I see the first review of the NV38 and do not see it benchmarked in any way that would interest me. No Tomb Raider: AOD, no Shadermark, no AA/AF, no image quality comparisons and no Half-Life 2 (okay, this might not be Anandtechs fault).
This means no DX9.0 title that is demanding when it comes to Pixel Shader 2.0 power (no, Aquamark isn't). So please not not bench a ton of CPU/Memory limited games even without AA/AF.
"The performance crown under Doom3 is still in NVIDIA’s camp apparently". Doom3 is mainly DirecX8. Period.
"ATI is still ahead in Half Life 2. The numbers we’ve seen indicate that in most tests ATI only holds single digit percentage leads (< 5%), although in some cases ATI manages to pull ahead by double digits." What does that mean? Is this only with the NV30 optimised (degraded IQ) code path. If so, too bad for them.
Finally what I liked to know is if NVidia required Anandtech to benchmark this way...
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
How can Anand use det. 52, It's well know to cheat with lower IQ in Aquamark etc!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Are you really using:2.8GHz Intel Processor Prescott
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
It was great to see so many games represented, not the least of which is one of my favorites: Neverwinter Nights.One game that I would be thrilled to see is Star Trek Armada II. The game is a blast to play, and under situations with many ships (ESPECIALLY multiplayer) the game can slow to a crawl even on high-end systems. I would hazard to guess that this game is more CPU bound, but a graphics analysis wouldn't hurt anything.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I thought it was a little ridiculous that almost every benchmark had the stipulation that "AA didn't seem to be applied. We'll investigate later." or "Image Quality wasn't up to snuff. We'll investigate later." and yet you still included the results for the Nvidia cards.After the article from Lars Wienand from THG where he states that if the driver reduces image quality to gain Framerate they gray it out, I expect the same thing from Anandtech. Especially since the drivers you used are unreleased for public consumption and may never even reach the public.
At this point image quality is indeed king. Who wants to spend $500 on a video card that will not provide top notch image quality? I know I don't.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
the only thing i would have like to have seen though, was an indication on the performance graphs as to whether the game being used was a dx8 game, or dx9 game...i think most of those games were dx8...but i cant be certain, so it would have been nice to have known for sure...
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
i cant wait for part 2 !:)
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Would be Cool if Anandtech could start to use Shadermark 2.0 :)Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
The sleepless are rewarded once more!