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 - Saturday, October 4, 2003 - link
The MS flightsim tests might have v-sync enabled. That would explain the strange test resultsdswatski - Saturday, October 4, 2003 - link
AND: Age of Mythology AND: Rendering with Adobe Premiere Pro with support for second monitor.Anonymous User - Saturday, October 4, 2003 - link
gfRogodin2 - Saturday, October 4, 2003 - link
That was a pathetic review because there were way too many varibles and the fact that anand stated that there were no valid premises to reach a conclusion should have been taken to heart before he decided to publish such a POS as this.rogo
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
This info is simply unofficial, as DX doesn't want to stir up the industry more than has alredy been done. As some might recall, 3dfx was given the same ultimatum back in 99', yet the news wasn't even released until 2 years later afterAnonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
So by all means, Do Not Download Detonator 50 Drivers!!! Along with this, NV has been caught cheating on benchmarks as they usually do over at Anandtech . Notice that all of the realworld benchmarks perform better on ATi, yet all synthetic benchmarks perform better by a large margin on NV hardware. "These violations are inexcusable" said a DX employee, and I'd have to agree. So without the inside drive on DX10, NV will not be able to even optimize their cards as ATi can and will probably fall into bankruptsy just as 3dfx did before them...Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
NVIDIA out of DX10? DiscussThere's an interesting link on Gearbox Software's forums that claim NVIDIA has been shunned by Microsoft's DirectX team for future versions of the API - Thanks SidiasX!
Nvidia's NV38 (along with the rest of the FX series) has been dubbed as a substandard card by team dx. This means that DX will not include NV in it's developement range for directx10. Team DX made the decision "as a favor to the graphics industry". Team DX claims that NV violated their partnership agreement by changing the DX9 code with their latest set of drivers as caught by Xbit labs recently. This violates the licensing agreement and conpromises DX's quality in order to make it seem as if ATi and NV cards alike display the same image quality (which would be really bad in this case). This can only be fixed by reinstalling dx9b.
ATI's "Development Agreement"
it's looking bad for Nvidia..
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
NVIDIA out of DX10? DiscussThere's an interesting link on Gearbox Software's forums that claim NVIDIA has been shunned by Microsoft's DirectX team for future versions of the API - Thanks SidiasX!
Nvidia's NV38 (along with the rest of the FX series) has been dubbed as a substandard card by team dx. This means that DX will not include NV in it's developement range for directx10. Team DX made the decision "as a favor to the graphics industry". Team DX claims that NV violated their partnership agreement by changing the DX9 code with their latest set of drivers as caught by Xbit labs recently. This violates the licensing agreement and conpromises DX's quality in order to make it seem as if ATi and NV cards alike display the same image quality (which would be really bad in this case). This can only be fixed by reinstalling dx9b.
ATI's "Development Agreement"
it's looking bad for Nvidia..
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
NVIDIA out of DX10? DiscussThere's an interesting link on Gearbox Software's forums that claim NVIDIA has been shunned by Microsoft's DirectX team for future versions of the API - Thanks SidiasX!
Nvidia's NV38 (along with the rest of the FX series) has been dubbed as a substandard card by team dx. This means that DX will not include NV in it's developement range for directx10. Team DX made the decision "as a favor to the graphics industry". Team DX claims that NV violated their partnership agreement by changing the DX9 code with their latest set of drivers as caught by Xbit labs recently. This violates the licensing agreement and conpromises DX's quality in order to make it seem as if ATi and NV cards alike display the same image quality (which would be really bad in this case). This can only be fixed by reinstalling dx9b.
ATI's "Development Agreement"
it's looking bad for Nvidia..
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
The CPu is not out.the NV38 is not out
the new drivers 52.14 are not out.
and these drivers have issues and probably IQ degradation.
the test should go up to 1600 x 1200 at least,
we should stress video cards not CPU's.
DX9 needs to be included in the benches.
I know what my next card will be ,
ATI will be replacing my Nvidia soon.
I want to play HL2 and TR aod.(I love the game).
I remember , years ago ,when ATI came out with a faster card and the next day Nvidia had a new driver that increased performance by 25%.
I'm still disgusted since the cheat drivers with bad IQ, and poor DX9 .