ATi RADEON 9500 Pro Performance Analysis

ATI RADEON 9500 Pro Performance Analysis
Seriously Powerful Mainstream Graphics

By: Dave Altavilla
November 27, 2002

Jedi Knight II squeezes every last ounce life out of the Quake 3 game engine and offers fairly impressive graphics as a result.  It's no Unreal Tournament 2003 but it's no slouch either.  However, since like Quake 3, this game is not very demanding on today's leading edge graphics cards, we've decided to run with only AA and Aniso enabled.
 

Jedi Knight II and Unreal Tournament 2003 More OpenGL Testing and The New DX8 Driven Advanced Unreal Engine

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "it's like Deja-Vu all over again".  Like a bad dream that won't go away, the Radeon 9500 Pro makes the GeForce 4 Ti family look old school.  NVIDIA needs the GeForce FX out the door and quickly.  This new lower cost R300 variant will eat market share in a big way, with numbers like this.

Now we'll look at the latest and greatest from the folks at Epic Games, Unreal Tournament 2003.  It's fierce, fun and oh-so pretty... just like what the ladies say about our man Marco!

No AA or Aniso to cloud your judgment here, just a pre-set High Quality setting that we enabled with a custom ini file we use in the lab.  This allows us to force identical quality settings on all graphics cards, regardless of GPU or VPU.  The Radeon 9500 Pro is 15 - 25% faster than the Ti 4200 and 3 - 5% faster than the GF4 Ti 4600, in this game engine, plain and simple.

More UT 2003 and The Rating