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 - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#112, just because doom3 is opengl and not dx9 it doesnt change the fact that this review completely sidestepped the issue of future performance in games. #92 makes perfect points apart from the discrepancy over doom3 using dx9, which ultimately doesnt matter since the shaders of its opengl API are similar to dx9 anyway.YOU are the only person that looks stupid if you think that this review hasnt glazed over or sidestepped important issues, most benchmarks were totally CPU limited and an unreleased nvidia driver was used which might not even see the light of day.
I'm glad that you point out to everyone that IQ will be covered in later articles, its always great to see reviews posted claiming a certain level of performance without backing up scores legitimately! That would never give people false impressions now would it?
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
- why not try more distributed forms of the review process. 30hrs in a row is quite bad and it's obviosuly going to impact a bit in terms of any sensible decisions to make during the benchmarking and comment-making.username/login aint workin!
Last 3 posts were mine.
Gaurav Sharma
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
- Dunno if you're allowed to answer this, but is the prescott a hot chip compared to a P4? if its got HT2 and things, again it could be painting an innaccurate picture. Im sure most people here have a Athlon 2xxx and that's what you shoulda benchmarked with. Also you left out too many old cards - what use is a comparision when your card aint on there?!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
- Benchmark at 1280x1024 with 4x AA, it's what these cards are designed for, especially with regard to DX8 titles. With DX9 same thing but without AA. I'm sure most of us are running our CRTs/17-18" LCDs at that.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Shut your stupid pie-hole!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Why use FRAPS for Jedi Knight when the game has the ability to record and play back demos? just use timedemo1 as in all (well almost) other Q3 based gamesAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Well Like I have always said Even when the 9000 was out you knew that it would blow away the fx5800and now we see even the 9600 beating the mess out of the poor 5900-ultra!
ATI Rocks man!
I'm out of here, but I'll be back!
Bigshot
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
a lot of people dont have the time to spend hours reading hardware reviews, for those people reviews such as this one can be very misleading when such important details are glazed over or completely missing.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#143, yes, that's true; if you don't know how to read a review and only see numbers because you are a moron, then yes those people are in bad luck...Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#142: true, but people read this review and dont see where the image quality suffers; they just see the performance.