ATi Radeon 9700Pro Full Release Review

Keeping in the DirectX 8.1 vein, we have Novalogic's fantastic looking Military Chopper Sim, Comanche 4.  It's easily one of the best looking flight sims to date and the latest demo comes with a handy benchmarking tool.

Comanche 4 Benchmarks

This test is again, one of those that is extremely CPU intensive and doesn't strain the graphics card, until you invoke AA or crank the resolution up.

Once again, we see driver optimizations holding back the R9700 ever so slightly, at 1024X768.  However, as demand on the graphics pipeline increases with Anti-Aliasing enabled, we see the Radeon 9700 Pro barely hiccup, dropping only tenths of frames.  The Ti 4600 only takes a 10% performance hit at 1024X768 with 4X AA.  However, let's scale up in resolution and see if that holds true.

You should see this sim in motion with 4X AA on a Radeon 9700 Pro.  It looks gorgeous and is more than fluid, even when you are dropping into a "Hot LZ" with artillery, tanks and other pesky stuff burning up your backside.  Talk about white knuckle flying.... 42.7 fps is plenty fast for this sim.

As expected, the Radeon 9700 Pro hangs tough but begins to show that even it has limitations, at 1600X1200.  However, taking the system up to PC1066 RAM and or a 2.53GHz speed, would also gain you back a few frames per second. 

Let's finish things up with a little under water action, with another DX8 based title, Aquamark.

Aquamark and The Rating!