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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BerSerK0 - Friday, January 30, 2004 - link
I have a 9600XT, and real life FPS on these games are much better :)xxZoDxx - Sunday, December 28, 2003 - link
My $.02... Constantly listening to the bickering of ATI vs nvidia, it's like Ford vs Chevy, & Pepsi vs Coke. My feelings on this? nvidia has superior hardware. Now before you get your ATI underoos in a bunch, ATI has the superior Drivers/architecture. Look at most openGL benches. Don't they follow the clock, RAM, and bandwidth speeds more closely? nvidia mostly holds all these cards. If they could only get their drivers to work as well with D3D, there wouldn't be a question. Congrats on the latest 50 series but they still have a way to go to get D3D up to snuff. Personally? I have a 5900 that o/c's like mad (well beyond 5950) and I only paid 2 bills for it. ATI... get the pricing down and you could OWN nvidia. Now I wait for the flamers..........TurtleMan - Tuesday, December 23, 2003 - link
Hmm FFXi is a main factor for me , and now i have an unopen 9600 xt sitting right here, i began to wonder if i should open it up or buy a 9800 se..Rustjive - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
The FFXI benchmark is heavily CPU bound in addition to being GPU bound. Case in point: I ran it on my duallie PIII-733 with the TI4200, and I barely got over 1200 rendered (compared with the 3000+ of Anandtech's results.) Then contrast this to Aquamark 3, in which I got 13.03 FPS as opposed to the ~15FPS of Anand's. (Comparatively, the performance differences are quite drastic.) All I have to say is...blah to FFXI and the world of MMORPGs. Blah.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link
Scores are bullshit, why bench the top of the line ATI 9800 XT against the middle of the road 5600? Thats just retarded.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link
When we will see a test with ATI,s 9800 made by different manufacturers?Asus,Hercules,Gigabyte,ATI??
Thank u!
Anonymous User - Saturday, October 18, 2003 - link
How come they used diff. settings for every benchmark? Sometimes they used 1024X768 with no AA/AF enabled while other times they used 1024X768 w/ 4XAA/8XAF. Where did the 6XAA settings go? Can't stay consistant thorough out the review so people won't have to worry about the settings for each game benchamarks. Can anyone expalain this?Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link
Unfortunately this review has missed an important issue: noise levels. Simply put many of the people reading this site will have serious hearing loss by their mid 40s because these systems are too loud for the long daily exposure times people experience with them. Old programmers who were around the old line printers frequently have hearing loss from the high pitched buzzing of the printers. Ditto any other industrial noise exposures. Silent computing is a worthwhile goal! I was very disappointed to discover that the last nVidia-based graphic card I placed in my main system was so noisy. Now I need to find a quieter one that delivers similar performance. These reviews are not much help on that dimension. Sorry.Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link
Can you PLEASE get rid of the flash ! :(Whats wrong with the classic Anandtech graphs
that everybody loved ?
It doesnt even look better ..
Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link
Hey #8, maybe it's because NVIDIA sucks. Even when they do match the performance of ATI, the image quality is lower anyway.