ATI Radeon 9800 XT

The ATi Radeon 9800 XT  256MB
ATi Turns Up The Heat In High End 3D Graphics

By - Dave Altavilla
September 30, 2003

Comanche 4 is getting to be an aging game engine for certain.  However, the 3D graphics and effects in this title are still impressive even to this day.  Let's see how the competitors stack up on the battle field.

Performances Comparisons With Novalogic's Comanche 4 The Performance Battlefield

Once again, we see what looks like an anomaly but perhaps it isn't.  The Radeons all sweep the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra at default and even with 4X AA enabled.  However, invoke 8X AF and the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra pulls back into the lead.  Again, we examined NVIDIA's image quality in this test and it looked very comparable, so we can't knock NVIDIA in this benchmark.  However, we can't help but wonder exactly what's going on with Aniso Filtering with NVIDIA cards in DX8 and DX9 titles.  We'll be looking into this further in the weeks ahead.  Other than that, the Radeon 9800 XT only shows modest gains over its predecessors, with a 5 - 10% lead overall versus the 128MB or 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro. Again, this benchmark is fairly CPU bound and part of the reason we don't see wide variances in scoring.

Benchmarks / Comparison With Wolfenstein Enemy Territory New Game, Better Effects, Old Engine

Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory has replaced our standard Quake 3 Arena testing in this article, as an OpenGL gaming benchmark.  It utilizes a radically enhanced Quake 3 engine to drive it's graphics and is a bit more CPU bound than Quake 3 is but provides for some impressive visuals.  We recorded a custom demo run of some in game action on a internet connected Wolf ET server.  We then played back the demo with simple consol commands, like those used in Quake 3.  At the end of the demo run, a frames per second score is recorded from the consol.

This was not a good showing for ATi or the Radeon 9800 XT at all, here with Wolf ET.  Interestingly enough however, in the Anisotropic Filtering tests, the Radeon 9800 XT does manage to come away with the gold at 1024X768 resolution but falls back behind at 1600X1200.  Also, the R9800 XT does save face a bit at 1600X1200 default, with no AA or AF enabled.  It seems to us that ATi's driver team has a bit of work to do with this game engine.

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