ATI's Radeon 9800, 9600 & 9200: Still Fighting Strong

AA+AF Performance - Q3A, Jedi Knight 2 & Comanche 4

For this next set of benchmarks we took three games that weren't GPU bound to begin with, and cranked up the resolution and AA/AF settings until we could see some differences between the ATI and NVIDIA offerings. We'll start out with a classic benchmark, Quake III Arena:

Quake 3 Arena 'four' AA/Aniso Performance 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9800 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (4X AA/8X Bal Aniso) 128.5 117.2 114.3 104.8 102.2 | 0 | 26 | 51 | 77 | 103 | 129 | 154

Even in an old game like Quake III Arena, the Radeon 9800 Pro is able to deliver a 12% increase in performance if you turn up all of the settings at 1600 x 1200. Although admittedly, if you're still playing Quake III then you definitely don't need a Radeon 9800 Pro.

Jedi Knight 2 AA/Aniso Performance 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) Radeon 9800 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (4X AA/8X Bal Aniso) 131.9 113.9 111.6 111.1 99.9 | 0 | 26 | 53 | 79 | 106 | 132 | 158

For CPU bound games like Jedi Knight 2, the performance increase offered by the Radeon 9800 Pro isn't going to be anything tremendous - as you can clearly see here by the 0 - 15% spread. What's interesting to note is that performance didn't improve at all when Quality Aniso was used, whereas we saw a 15% boost with the Performance setting.

Comanche 4 Demo AA/Aniso Performance 1024x768x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9800 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (4X AA/8X Bal Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) 54.8 52.9 50.1 49.7 40.8 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 55 | 66