Radeon 9500 Pro Battle Sapphire vs. Gigabyte

The Gigabyte Maya II R9500 Pro
vs.
The Sapphire Radeon 9500 Atlantis Pro
Premium Performance, Mainstream Price

By - Tom Laverriere
& Marco Chiappetta
February 3, 2003

We made some minor changes to the layout of our graphs, and took a slightly different approach to the benchmarks in this shootout.  We wanted to showcase the power of the Sapphire and Gigabyte R9500's, but also wanted to compare their relative performance to a GeForce 4 Ti4600 using NVIDIA's latest drivers (41.09 as of this writing).  All of the graphs are broken down by resolution, and where possible we used the same driver settings for each of the cards.  For all of our tests, we set the drivers for optimal image quality and only altered the AA and Aniso settings.

The Hot Hardware Test Systems Intel Showcase

 
Common Hardware:

Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz (2800MHz) 533MHz FSB
Soyo P4X400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum

VIA P4X400 Chipset w/ AGP8X

512MB Corsair PC3500 Platinum DDR RAM C2

On-Board NIC

On-Board Sound

Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM HD x 2 (RAID 0)

Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM

Standard Floppy Drive

Windows XP Professional with SP1

VIA "Hyperion" 4-in-1 Drivers v4.45

Video Cards Used:

Gainward GeForce 4 Ti 4600
(v41.09 Drivers)

Gigabyte Maya II R9500 Pro

Sapphire Radeon 9500 Atlantis Pro
(v6.14.01.6255  Drivers with v6.14.10.4012 Control Panels)
 

Unreal Tournament 2003 Benchmarks Fill Rate & Features

 
The testing began with Unreal Tournament 2003, which as most of you know is powered by DirectX.  UT2003's graphics are topnotch and it takes one heck of a card to run this game at a "playable" rate.  What we mean by "playable" in UT2K3, is hitting at least 60 FPS.  The game is very playable at an FPS lower than 60, but it gives you an idea of what we consider acceptable.  To keep the playing field level, we used a custom .INI file that insures all of the cards tested were using the exact same in-game settings...

At 1024x768, with no AA or Anisotropic filtering enabled, the Ti4600 managed to outperform the R9500's in UT2003's "FlyBy" timedemo.  With the increased settings on visual quality we notice that the R9500's managed to easily outdo the Ti4600 card.  I would like to note that even though the R9500's did not hit 60 FPS in the higher settings, the game remained very playable by my standards and the graphics were simply stunning.

3DMark 2001SE and Comanche 4