Radeon 9700 Pro Battle Tyan vs Gigabyte

The Gigabyte Maya II R9700 Pro
Vs.
The Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro
Two Full Featured Radeon 9700 Pros Go Head to Head...

By - Marco Chiappetta
January 5, 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 Maya II and Tachyon G9700, 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

512MB GEiL PC3500 Platinum DDR RAM

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 R9700 Pro

Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro
(v6.13.10.6218 Drivers with v6.14.10.4000 Control Panels)
 

Unreal Tournament 2003 Benchmarks Fill Rate & Features

 
We began our testing with Epic's absolutely gorgeous, DirectX powered Unreal Tournament 2003.  If you haven't already done so, I strongly suggest taking a look at the screenshots on the previous page.  UT2003's graphics are fantastic, and can bring most video cards to their knees.  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 RADEONs were about 12% faster than the GeForce 4 Ti4600 in UT2003's "FlyBy" timedemo.  As we increased the resolution and enabled AA and Aniso, however, the RADEONs pulled way ahead, more than doubling the GF4's performance in some instances.  Something interesting to note is that UT2003's framerate remained over the mystical 60 FPS mark with 4XAA enabled at 1600x1200 on both the Maya and Tachyon.  Doing this with a game as graphically intense as UT2003 is no small feat.

3DMark 2001SE and Comanche 4