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Fishtank's Aquanox is a great looking "Battle Sub" sim
that really paints an amazingly detailed world for the
armchair cyber-athlete. Our man Chris Angelini grabbed
this capture during a test with an Asus GeForce 4 card
not long ago, just for reference. It's a great looking
game title for sure and uses many of the latest shader
effects of today's modern GPUs and "VPUs", in the case of
the Radeon 9700 Pro
Aquatic
renderings in real time
The game engine has been updated and patched
a few times since its release about a year ago. We've
utilized the latest Aquamark build here for this test and it
really puts a heavy load on the graphics engines.
A 17% lead is shown here by the Radeon 9700
Pro but you know we have to turn up AA and really shake
things out.
And that my friends, is what we call
domination. At more than 2X the performance, the
Radeon 9700 Pro shows it has more than enough gas to handle
this benchmark with 4X AA, while the others shudder to a
crawl comparatively.
Once again, more than 2X the performance of
a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 with AA on and a commanding lead at
1280X1024 without AA, the Radeon 9700 Pro continues to
impress us with true next generation 3D Accelerator
performance.
Game, set and match... The Radeon 9700 Pro
takes no prisoners again with nearly a 39% lead at 1600X1200
without anti-aliasing.
Turn off the oven, we're done. Let's
recap what we've learned today here boys and girls.
First and foremost, I don't think anyone can
refute that ATi is firmly in the "driver's seat" with the
release of the Radeon 9700 Pro. The benchmarks,
testing and showcase that you have seen here today, clearly
show that ATi's new flagship VPU is faster, more powerful
and has better features and 3D quality than anything on the
market, period. This is a bold statement to make for
sure but after spending some quality time with this new
graphics card, we can honestly say that it is the most
impressive product we have seen in a long time, from any
Graphics OEM. NVIDIA certainly has some catching up to
do. The NV30 needs to get out the door in a hurry
because ATi is going to eat up market share, with the
various incarnations of this product, in the weeks and
months ahead.
We've shown you OpenGL and DirectX 8 testing
with high resolution and with AA and Anisotropic Filtering.
In every test where graphics horsepower and fill rate was a
factor, the Radeon 9700 Pro dominated the benchmarks and
left the GeForce 4 in the dust. Also, you've seen your
first glimpse of 6X Gamma Corrected Anti-Aliasing with the
Radeon 9700 Pro. In our humble opinion, this is easily
the best looking AA yet and it even takes the cake over
scenes rendered on the Parhelia with 16X FAA. Keep in
mind that fact that the card can run any current game engine
at high res with 6X AA engaged and still push silky smooth
frame rates. Finally, as we've shown you in various
tests, Anisotropic Filtering is a complete free-be, costing
trivial and imperceptible performance degradation at any
resolution. However, what really is going to make the
Radeon 9700 Pro shine are game titles forthcoming like Doom
III, that will drive DirectX 9 image complexity and quality
to new levels. Not only does the Radeon 9700 Pro have
the horsepower for today's game engines, it will have the
"legroom" for next generation game engines as well, making
it extremely future proof.
At this point in time, it's safe to say that
ATi has captured the performance and quality crown from
their long time rival and market leader NVIDIA. The
NV30 is rumored to be around the corner, sometime in Q4 this
year. We'll have to wait and see what it's made of, to
determine which competitor will drive the market for the
next 6 months. For now, all the lime light is on ATi.
They've earned it by delivering a product that is truly
innovative and leading edge.
We're giving the Radeon 9700 Pro a
HotHardware Heat Meter rating of.
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| - The
fastest 3D Graphics Card money can buy today.
- Fully DX9 Compliant
- Anisotropic Filtering without performance penalty
- 6X Gamma Corrected AA (gorgeous and fast)
- Frame rate, frame rate, frame rate
- Full Stream Video Smoothing
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- $399 price tag
- Supplemental power connector required in most
systems
- Slow menu redraw glitch in WinXP (future driver
fix?) |
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