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
Halo
With Halo in stores today, we have welcomed it with open arms into our testing suite. The packaged benchmark that comes with the game is made up of all the cut scenes between levels (which are fairly graphics intensive). We ran the benchmark at 1024x768 @ 75Hz , which provided plenty of work for all our cards. We opted to simply include average framerate for this article, but there are some really interesting features of this benchmark (like percentage of time above a certain frame rate) that we may revisit later.
This benchmark clearly lets the 9800XT stretch its legs a little and pull away from the pack Of course, 51 fps is not really what you want to see for a first person shooter on the PC. We also don't get the benefit of AA (and therefore we don't get to see if the NVIDIA chips could make up some slack via their memory bandwidth), as AA is not currently supported in Halo.
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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.