ATi Mobility Radeon 9700
Final Fantasy XI & Splinter Cell
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 Final Fantasy XI |
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 when different video cards are used. 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 its "High Resolution" option (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Although its name suggests the Mobility Radeon 9700 is a higher-end product than the Radeon 9600 XT, it wasn't able to catch its desktop sibling in the Final Fantasy XI benchmark, and the 9800 Pro dominated them both. The 9600 XT pulled ahead of the Mobility Radeon 9700 by about 12.1%, and as expected the 9800 Pro beat them both by approximately 40%.
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 Splinter Cell |
Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three pre-recorded demos and incorporates a previously unavailable benchmarking tool. The demos included with the patch are somewhat limited by CPU performance, however, so we opted to use the custom Oil Rig demo created by the folks at Beyond 3D to test with this game. Beyond 3D's demo removes two CPU intensive routines while increasing dependence on Pixel Shader performance. Shaders are used to render realistic looking ocean water surrounding an Oil Rig in the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect for a brief period of time. Also note that anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter Cell. Due to this fact, we do not have any AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
The Mobility Radeon 9700 couldn't quite catch the Radeon 9600 XT or 9800 Pro in the Splinter Cell benchmark either. At more than double the price of the Radeon 9600 XT, the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro expectedly ran away with this test, but the Mobility 9700 and 9600 XT were much more evenly matched. At 1024x768, and again at 1600x1200, the Mobility Radeon 9700 came within striking distance of the 9600 XT, falling behind by a little more than 10% at both resolutions.
