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HotHardware.com Test Setup |
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Pentium 4, Canterwood and 4 killer Graphics
Cards |
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Before we jump
into the benchmarks, please take a look at our system test
setup and specs below. It is important to note that we
have only tested an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB card in the
following benchmarks. ATi's latest 256MB DDR2 based
R9800 board did not make it to our lab in time for testing
in this article. As such, we will be coming back with
a side by side benchmark comparison of the 256MB Radeon 9800
Pro card, later this week, for a proper apples to apples
comparison. With that said, let's get it on!
Pentium 4
Processors at 3GHz - 800MHz System Bus
Motherboard and RAM Config
Abit IC7-G "Canterwood" Motherboard
512MB of Kingston HyperX PC3500 CAS 2 RAM
CAS Timings were 2-2-2-5
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra 128MB
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB
Other
Hardware and Software:
Seagate Barracuda V SATA 120GB HD
Windows XP Professional w/ SP1
NVIDIA Detonator FX Drivers Version 44.03
ATi Catalyst 3.2 Drivers
Intel Release Chipset Driver v5.00.1012
Intel Applications Accelerator RAID Edition v3.0.0.229
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3DMark 2001 SE and 3DMark 2003 |
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The
Angry Onion And The FutureMark Tests |
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Interestingly
enough, 3DMark 2001 at 1024X768 res, gives a slight edge to
the Radeon 9800 Pro, until your enable AA. Then the
NV35 clearly takes the lead. This could point to a bit
of driver immaturity for the GFFX 5900 Ultra but that is to
be expected, since we're about a month away from official
release of the card.
At high res and
with 4X AA enabled, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra really begins
to distance itself from the Radeon 9800 Pro, by almost 1000
points. In terms of AA performance, the 5800 Ultra is
clearly bringing up the rear here.
3DMark 2003
gives a clean sweep to the NVIDIA cards here and the GeForce
FX 5900 Ultra takes the lead handily by over 400 marks.
If NVIDIA was unhappy with the fact that they had to
optimize drivers for a benchmark that, in their opinion, was
not representative of real-world game rendering, then they
certainly re-prioritized their efforts. What is
interesting is that the NV30 and NV35 are within a couple
hundred points of each other.
Quake 3 Arena and Serious Sam SE
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