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The Unreal
Tournament 2003 benchmark is much more modern than Quake
III. So much so, in fact, that obtaining a copy is
more painful than pulling teeth. Again, I enabled
4-sample anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at
1600x1200. Not surprisingly, the RADEON 9700 scored 80
percent higher than the GeForce4 Ti 4600, again with
perfectly playable frame rates in the demo.
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3D
Mark 2001 SE |
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Fastest Hardware
on a Synthetic Benchmark |
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3D Mark
2001 SE is another popular graphics metric that returns a
synthetic result based on a series of rendered tests,
including specialized DirectX 8 techniques, like pixel and
vertex shaders. I ran the default benchmarking
configuration (1024x768) with the exception of 4-sample
anti-aliasing enabled once again. The end result is
ATI?s RADEON 9700 outperforming the GeForce4 Ti 4600 by 70
percent. Once DirectX 9 is released, expect to see a
successor to 3D Mark 2001 capable of testing the RADEON
9700, NV30 and some of the features on Matrox's Parhelia.
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Comanche 4 |
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Fastest Hardware on
a DirectX 8 Benchmark |
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Comanche 4 makes a great
processor test, but at 1600x1200 with 4-sample anti-aliasing
enabled, it is also able to stress video cards. The
RADEON 9700 again shows its prowess, besting the GeForce4 Ti
4600 by more than 80 percent.
To begin
with, we were very impressed with how well the RADEON 9700
performs. The leap in performance ATI has taken, from
the RADEON 8500 to the 9700, is nothing short of amazing.
Beating the GeForce4 Ti 4600 hands down on just about any
benchmark, is simply icing on ATI?s cake.
A couple of
things should be noted about the benchmarks. First,
you?ll notice that all of the tests were run with 4-sample
anti-aliasing enabled. The RADEON 9700 does
exceptionally well with anti-aliasing, while the GeForce4
takes a substantial hit. Similarly, the 9700 takes
virtually no performance penalty with anisotropic filtering.
In comparison, the GeForce4 suffers a bit in OpenGL and
doesn?t even support anisotropic filtering yet in Direct3D.
When retail boards hit store shelves in less than a month
(according to ATI) it will be seen that the difference
between the GeForce4 and RADEON 9700 is smaller without
anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. Regardless, the
RADEON 9700 is a faster card in every situation we?ve been
able to test thus far.
NVIDIA is
quick to point out that the NV30 is on its way, with a
vengeance. We have no doubt that NV30 will be a
tremendous performer when it is released. For the time
being however, ATI has turned over an ace (not to mention
one hell of a face card with the RADEON 9000 Pro for
mainstream users). At least for the next couple of
months, it will be tough for any manufacturer to beat
that blackjack. Expect a full barrage of
benchmarks once ATI delivers retail-quality product to the
HotHardware Labs, in a few weeks.
Come get some in the HotHardware PC Hardware Forum, now!
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