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
Final Fantasy XI
The Final Fantasy series has always been popular, and will probably always be popular. I have a personal affinity towards the series, but I’m not so sure about the Massively Multiplayer Online style they are going for this time around. The benchmark is much more straightforward than the success of their future game: we set it to high-res benchmark mode (1024x768) and record the number of frames that get rendered (in the bottom right hand corner). Then we divide that by the length of time the benchmark runs to get an average frames per second.
The two most expensive ATI cards manage to nudge out the rest of the pack which are mostly tied. Again, the 9700 Pro does a good job of remaining competitive, and the 9600 Pro is still hanging on while doing a good job of clearly beating the 5600 Ultra. Unlike the Aquanox3 style of benchmark which has a set number of frames to render, this benchmark has a set time to move through a scene and render as many frames as possible while doing so. That makes image comparison a little more difficult. No matter what hardware this benchmark is run on, there seems to be a lot of motion blur and antialiasing is not an available option (and doesn't work even if its enabled at the driver level).
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
No #40, the fact that I can write and read clear English sentences is probably why I was confused by your grammatically incorrect and mistyped statements.And surrrrrre #36 wasn't you, whatever you say....And yes, you're a whiner, and no, #42 brings up good points.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#47 - So what you are saying is that people who invest in a $450-500 video card shouldnt worry about how their card will perform in future games? Are they supposed to buy a new card for each new game thats released implementing new features? That does not seem very wise to me, and I would expect that most people paying such a high price tag for a card would EXPECT their card to have some decent lifespan where it can perform well in the latest games(6months? a year?). Of course there is going to be a point where you simply need new hardware to run new games, I don't know about you but suddenly finding that your card doesnt make the cut when a new crop of games comes out wouldnt be my idea of celebrating a $450-500 purchase.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Funny how after reading this review and seeing all the very marginal gain my 150$ more could buy me, the only thing that got me interessed was the fact they used a prescott to benchmark.As long as they keep "tweaking" the curent crop of cores, those new cards are just to keep the performance crown, and by what, .3fps to 5fps?.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
"Games such as Command & Conquer Generals: Ground Zero and Simcity 4: Rush Hour are examples where ATI clearly has the lead over NVIDIA and the argument could be made that ATI holds the lead because they optimize for all games, while NVIDIA just optimizes for benchmark titles. However, looking at games like Homeworld 2 and Neverwinter Nights you could make the exact opposite argument."Except that Command & Conquer is an EA title. The company which officially works with nVidia...
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Yeah, include it. Makes at least more sense than including Sim City, etc...The whiner
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Hey I'm disappointed. This isn't a real flame war, it's more like handbags at 30 paces.What the review says is that even with a top processor most current games are CPU rather than GPU limited if you have one of the better cards and that for these games there's not much to choose on framerate between ATi and NVidia. IQ is a different matter though. It certainly suggests that while NVidia does have some advantages they are generally outgunned by ATi unless they "cheat" by lowering IQ.
No point in worrying about future games - when they come out is the time to make a decision on that. However at the moment it looks like the card you will be buying will be made by ATi, unless you are some kind of masochist.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I would like to see Battlefield 1942 benches. It's a very popular game that has many players.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
500 bucks for a slightly overclocked 9800 pro? Good work ati, please take my money!Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Again perfectly rightThe whiner
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
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