ATi Mobility Radeon 9700
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 Unreal Tournament 2K4 |
We also did some testing with Unreal Tournament 2004 with the notebook operating on battery power. However, this particular notebook did not have ATi's "PowerPlay" feature enabled, so these scores may not be representative of performance when using battery power with some other notebooks. Here, we again used Unreal Tournament 2004 to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200, without any anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, and lastly with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled together. |
While operating on battery power, we didn't see much of a performance difference at all. The lower resolution (1024x768) tests show some slight variations in performance, but performance in the higher resolutions tests (1600x1200) was near identical. Had PowerPlay been available on the Eurocom notebook we tested with, the results would probably have been different, however.
The M11, or Mobility Radeon 9700 as it's more commonly known, is a very capable part that helps solidify ATi's position as a dominant player in mobile graphics. While its performance wasn't quite on par with a Radeon 9600 XT, its feature set is every bit as complete - as it should be with the M11 and RV360 architectures being so similar. About the only thing we take issue with is ATi's decision to name this part a "9700". When we think of a Radeon 9700, the 8-Pipeline R300 immediately comes to mind, not the 4-Pipeline, value priced RV360. With multiple flavors of Mobility Radeon 9600 already available though, and ATi's reservations about using the "XT" label on a mobile part, we can understand why ATi chose the 9700 moniker. With this level of performance already available, it will be interesting to see where ATi is headed with their next batch of mobile GPUs, now that the transition to PCI Express is looming. And after last week's announcement of NVIDIA's MXM initiative, we know NVIDIA's mobile NV40 derivatives aren't too far off. One thing is for certain, both competitive next-gen products will certainly be more powerful than the last. That's something we should all be excited about, as gaming on the go becomes more impressive with each new iteration.
