Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 3: ATI's Radeon 9600 XT
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 15, 2003 10:26 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness Performance no AA
As we mentioned before, we were unable to test the NVIDIA cards under TROAD. The Ti 4200 would only run with PS1.1, and as such we couldn't make a fair comparison. The 5600 Ultra was unable to run at 1024x768 as we received an out of video memory error. We have run into this issue in previous reviews. Unfortunately, even if a future patch fixes this bug, we are still stuck with v49 for benchmarking.
The gains the 9600 XT made over the Pro in this game were less than we had expected to see. This tells us that core clock speed is less of a factor in performance than other DX9 games like Halo, X2, and Aquanox. This is counter intuitive to the trends we have seen in shader intensive games, but at the same time, we can't really draw any solid conclusions from this. All we know is that TRAOD performance is less affected by core clock speed than some other games.
Note also that the 9700 Pro leads the 9600 XT by somewhere near 50%.
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness Performance with AA
In benchmarking with more ATI cards, it is very clear that enabling anisotropic filtering degrades image quality in a very unacceptable way. When trilinear filtering is enabled, everything looks fine, and anisotropic filtering on NVIDIA hardware doesn't exhibit this problem. This is the worst of the image quality problems we have seen with either ATI or NVIDIA in any game we have tested.
Since memory bandwidth between the 9600 XT and the 9600 Pro hasn't changed, its not surprising that our performance delta decreased when we turned on AA and AF.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Sorry but these scores are rubbishAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Is there a particular reason why a 9500pro card isn't included in these reviews. It seems at least as worthy as the the Ti4200, or I could be just biased because I have a 9500pro. Either way, if you could include it in future reviews it'd be appreciated.PrinceGaz - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
I agree with #4, the 9800se should be included as it is in the price range. Its widely available and radically different from the 9600pro/xt and fx5600ultra as its got a full 256-bit memory bus. That should certainly help with DX8 titles but its relatively slow four-pipeline (by default) core clocked at 325MHz could be a problem with future shader-intensive DX9 games.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Man I love to see how well the 9700 Pro still holds it own after all this time. What a great card!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
i remember an article where some guy from ATI said that this card would outperform the 9700 pro. i had serious doubts about such claim and kind of laughed about it.and i guess that i was right, as it does not outperform the 9700pro.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
THANKS FOR USING ALL CAPS #8!!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
homeworld 2 ran just fine on my radeon 9500 pro...I'm running the 3.7's though...Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
/me pets my modded 9500np->9700proAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Nvidia will be back. Not that I care. As long as I can buy a decent card from someone I don't care who it comes from.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link
Any idiot who "built computers for a living" should know better than to shout. Especially in the presence of his superiors. Check the settings again moron. They often AA/AF on and off, as well as V-sync off etc. If you had time to benchmark your systems with all these variables then you had too much time on your hands. Hence the "built" not build.