ATi All In Wonder Radeon 9600 XT
Halo & Aquamark 3
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For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait, since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a few years back. No additional patches or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has included all of the necessary information in their README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average frame rate is recorded. We patched the game using the latest v1.04 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024. Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo at the moment, so all of the test below were run with anti-aliasing disabled. |
The AIW 9600 XT's faster core and memory clock speeds don't give it much help at 1024x768 in the Halo benchmark when compared to the standard Radeon 9600 XT, but it was still the fastest card in the group, albeit by a very small margin. At 1280x1024, less than a sinlge frame per second separated the All-In-Wonder 9600 XT from the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, but it was another victory for the AIW card nonetheless...
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Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8 class shaders, which led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9 class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing and again with 4X anti-aliasing enabled. |
As expected, the All-In-Wonder 9600 XT outperformed the lower clocked Radeon 9600 XT by a few percentage points at both resolutions, but the Aquamark 3 benchmark belonged to the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra this time around. Without any anti-aliasing, the GeForce had approximate 6-9% leads over the AIW card. Although, when we enabled anti-aliasing, the AIW 9600 XT and 5700 Ultra performed at near identical levels at both resolutions.
