ATi All In Wonder Radeon 9600 XT
Final Fantasy XI & Gun Metal
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The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales with different video cards installed. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to "High Resolution" (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled. |
The All-In-Wonder 9600 XT's slight core and memory clock speed advantages help it to nudge past the standard Radeon 9600 XT by 121 frames in the Final Fantasy benchmark, but it couldn't quite catch the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. However, the GeForce FX finished the demo with only 66 more frames rendered than the AIW - a small difference of only 1.4%.
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We continued our testing with the pseudo-DX9 based Gun Metal benchmark developed by Yeti Studios, using NVIDIA's Cg programming language. This benchmark, like all of the others used in this review, is based on an actual game engine. Gun Metal uses Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 1.1 ops in the creation of the game world. This test is heavily GPU limited, and because Yeti's intent was to stress all modern 3D accelerators, anti-aliasing (2X) and Anisotropic filtering are enabled by default, and cannot be disabled. We ran this test at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024. |
With their last few sets of drivers, NVIDIA has really given the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra a nice performance boost, which is clearly evident in the Gun Metal benchmark. The 5700 Ultra was about 65% faster than the ATi powered cards in this test. When comparing the XTs to each other, the All-In-Wonder pulled ahead of the standard 9600 XT by a couple of frames per second at both resolutions, but the performance differences weren't drastic.
