ATi Radeon 9700Pro Full Release Review


ATi Radeon 9700Pro Full Release Review - Page 4

 

The ATi Radeon 9700 Pro Full Release Review
ATi Technologies Overtakes NVIDIA's Flagship GPU

By, Dave Altavilla
August 19, 2002


 

We'll finish up our "cake walk" round of Quake 3, with a little look at what Anisotropic Filtering will do to frame rate.  As you may already know, Ansio Filtering sharpens texture detail and improves over all 3D image quality.
 

Quake 3 Arena Time Demo "Four" - Anisotropic Filtering Test
Cleaning up those textures

 

You guessed it, another complete blowout.  The Radeon 9700 Pro muscles out the nearest competitor with about 30 - 120% more performance across various resolutions.  We should also note that the Parhelia in this test is only capable of running 16 tap Aniso Filtering and it still can't keep up, beaten by all cards in this test at every resolution.

Jedi Knight II Time Demo Testing
A revamped Quake 3 engine OpenGL based game with leading edge effects

Next we have Jedi Knight II benchmarks for you. The game engine is a heavily modified Quake 3 conversion and it is extremely CPU bound in terms of it's stress points on the test system.  We ran our test at the highest detail quality settings within a multiplayer map pre-recorded time demo.  In our first run of tests, we set things up to run without AA or Aniso Filtering.

It is only at 1600X1200 resolution that we see the Radeon 9700 pull ahead.  This is not only an indication that this test is CPU bound but perhaps a sign that their are still some driver optimizations that need to be implemented for ATi's new high end card.  Regardless, it is obvious that at 1024X768 and 1280X1024, the Ti 4600 and the Radeon 9700 are being held back by the processor.  This is hard to believe when you consider we're testing with a Pentium 2.4GHz CPU but it is certainly the case none the less.

So, in an effort to turn up the heat on the graphics subsystem here, we then enabled AA and 64 tap Aniso Filtering.  Click on for the results.

Jedi Knight - AA and Aniso enabled, 3DMark 2001SE


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