Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis

Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis - Page 3

Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis 128MB Vivo/TV-Out
With ATi's Catalyst 3.4 Drivers

By - Tom Laverriere
June 12, 2003

Serious Sam SE Testing
OpenGL With Lots Of Texture

For our next set of tests, we used Croteam's Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.  We configured the game to use OpenGL and ran some timedemos utilizing Beyond 3D's Max Quality scripts to level the playing field.  We ran the tests at 1024x768 and again at 1280x1024.  Let's take a look.

The Sapphire Radeon 9200 video card manages to outpace the GFFX5200 without antialiasing involved.  Once again, however, we see that the GFFX5200 card takes the lead when antialiasing is throw into the equation.  Something worth mentioning about this fact is we feel NVIDIA has opted for maximum performance at the sacrifice of some image quality.  In both 2D and 3D environments, we felt that the Sapphire card had a slightly better visual appeal to it than its competitor the GFFX5200.  Ultimately, visual quality is in the eye of the beholder though, so its up to you to be the judge and decide which card you like better.

Quake 3 Arena Time Demos
OpenGL and Plenty Old

The immortal Quake 3 steps up to the plate for the next round of testing. The GFFX5200 manages to outpace the Radeon 9200 even at standard settings this time around.  Although the performance gains are minimal, they are gains nonetheless.  Once again we do not have any scores from the Radeon 9200 above a resolution of 1024x768 with 4X AA enabled.  We don't want to beat this point to death, but at a 1280x1024 resolution the GFFX5200 outpaces the Radeon 9200 yet again.  On a different note,  both of these cards manage a very playable frame rate with AA disabled.  Although some may feel Quake 3 is a bit outdated, it is nice to see a "low-end" graphics card perform at such acceptable levels at this resolution.  One last game is in the works for you, Epic's Unreal Tournament 2003.  Let's put these cards through a round of UT2K3 benchmarks and then wrap up this review.

Next Up - Unreal Tournament 2003 and The Wrap-Up


Tags:  Radeon, Sapphire, App, 920, LAN, SAP, AP

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