ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 - What's in a name?

Knights of the Old Republic

This is another title that we have thrown into the mix, and is a RPG game that implements some very impressive DX9 features, particularly in some of the landscape scenes. This is one that we had to benchmark by fraps, since there is no built-in benchmark console. Compounding the difficulty was the fact that some of the cut scenes are rendered within the game engine and some aren't.

We did manage to find a cut scene that was done within the game engine, and our benchmark segment consisted of that plus our guy running up and battling a gang with a companion. There are small variations with this testing, such as bad guy one firing before you hit him with your blade. But once you fight, the computer takes control of the actual fight moves. So no doubt, it was difficult to find a scene to benchmark in here, and we are certainly open to suggestions if you guys know of a better method.


Without AA or AF, there wasn't much point to compare the two GPUs, since both can run the game reasonably well. In 1024x758 with 4xAA and 8xAF, the Mobility Radeon 9700 only provided a 17% margin, compared to the ~25% that we were use to in other titles. When you turn off AA and AF, the margin and fps becomes much more "normalized," which is the setting that we would recommend for actual game play.