RADEON 9700 Performance Update

ATI RADEON 9700 Relative Performance Update
Performance Analysis With The GeForce4 Ti 4600 As The Yardstick

By -Chris Angelini
July 20th, 2002

Unreal Tournament 2003
Fastest Hardware on a Future Benchmark
 

The Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark is much more modern than Quake III.  So much so, in fact, that obtaining a copy is more painful than pulling teeth.  Again, I enabled 4-sample anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at 1600x1200.  Not surprisingly, the RADEON 9700 scored 80 percent higher than the GeForce4 Ti 4600, again with perfectly playable frame rates in the demo.

3D Mark 2001 SE
Fastest Hardware on a Synthetic Benchmark

3D Mark 2001 SE is another popular graphics metric that returns a synthetic result based on a series of rendered tests, including specialized DirectX 8 techniques, like pixel and vertex shaders.  I ran the default benchmarking configuration (1024x768) with the exception of 4-sample anti-aliasing enabled once again.  The end result is ATI?s RADEON 9700 outperforming the GeForce4 Ti 4600 by 70 percent.  Once DirectX 9 is released, expect to see a successor to 3D Mark 2001 capable of testing the RADEON 9700, NV30 and some of the features on Matrox's Parhelia.

Comanche 4
Fastest Hardware on a DirectX 8 Benchmark

Comanche 4 makes a great processor test, but at 1600x1200 with 4-sample anti-aliasing enabled, it is also able to stress video cards.  The RADEON 9700 again shows its prowess, besting the GeForce4 Ti 4600 by more than 80 percent.

To begin with, we were very impressed with how well the RADEON 9700 performs.  The leap in performance ATI has taken, from the RADEON 8500 to the 9700, is nothing short of amazing.  Beating the GeForce4 Ti 4600 hands down on just about any benchmark, is simply icing on ATI?s cake. 

A couple of things should be noted about the benchmarks.  First, you?ll notice that all of the tests were run with 4-sample anti-aliasing enabled.  The RADEON 9700 does exceptionally well with anti-aliasing, while the GeForce4 takes a substantial hit.  Similarly, the 9700 takes virtually no performance penalty with anisotropic filtering.  In comparison, the GeForce4 suffers a bit in OpenGL and doesn?t even support anisotropic filtering yet in Direct3D.  When retail boards hit store shelves in less than a month (according to ATI) it will be seen that the difference between the GeForce4 and RADEON 9700 is smaller without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. Regardless, the RADEON 9700 is a faster card in every situation we?ve been able to test thus far.

NVIDIA is quick to point out that the NV30 is on its way, with a vengeance.  We have no doubt that NV30 will be a tremendous performer when it is released.  For the time being however, ATI has turned over an ace (not to mention one hell of a face card with the RADEON 9000 Pro for mainstream users).  At least for the next couple of months, it will be tough for any manufacturer to beat that blackjack.  Expect a full barrage of benchmarks once ATI delivers retail-quality product to the HotHardware Labs,  in a few weeks. 

 

Come get some in the HotHardware PC Hardware Forum, now!

 


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