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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
The test setup
used for this review is an AMD based system. We used
the Chaintech Zenith 7NJS motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP
2500+ Barton 333MHz FSB CPU. We had two sticks of
Kingston HyperX PC3500C2 256MB modules giving us a total of
512MB. Our memory timings were set to 5-2-2-2 and it
was running synchronously with the front side bus giving us
dual channel DDR at 333MHz. Everything else in the BIOS
was set to default. We then formatted the hard drive and Windows XP
Professional with SP1 was installed. When the
installation was complete, we installed the nForce2 v2.45 Unified
chipset drivers and then hit the Windows Update site to
download and install all of the available updates, with the
exception of the ones related to Windows Messenger.
Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest
of our components and Windows Messenger was disabled and
removed from the system. Then Auto-Updating and System
Restore were disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented and
a 768MB permanent page file was created. Lastly, we
set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance",
installed all of the benchmarking software and ran all of
the tests.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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It's
the Top of the Line! At Least For Now! |
|
Common
Hardware:
AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Barton
Processor 1.83GHz / 333MHz System Bus
Chaintech Zenith 7NJS Motherboard ( 5/15/2003 BIOS )
512MB (256MB x2) Kingston HyperX PC3500C2
Seagate Barracuda IV 7200 RPM PATA 40GB Hard Drive
Common
Software:
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0b
nForce2 Unified Driver 2.45
Video Cards
Tested:
Albatron Gigi GeForce FX 5200 Ultra (128MB)
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro (64MB)
Video Drivers
Used:
ATI
Catalyst Drivers v3.8 - WHQL Certified
NVIDIA Detonator FX Drivers v45.23
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Performance Comparisons
With
Gun
Metal |
|
DirectX 9.0 Gaming |
|
To start our
testing we ran the cards through Yeti Studio's Gun Metal
benchmark. Keep in mind that Gun Metal, by default,
enables Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering to put as
much stress on the GPU as possible. We ran
Benchmark 1 with 2X AA enabled. The results are
posted below.
Although the R9000 Pro has half as much memory as its
counterpart, it manages to pull ahead in this benchmark.
This particular test was only run at a resolution of 800x600
due to the fact that this game engine is a bit much for
either of these cards. We pretty much have unplayable
frame rates at this setting. Also worth noting is the
picture quality in these tests seems to favor the R9000 Pro
as well. While this was our personal
experience, others may find Gun Metal looks better on an NVIDIA card.
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|
Splinter Cell Anyone? |
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On
The Prowl with Direct X |
|
Next up in our
benchmarking queue is Splinter Cell. Thanks to Beyond
3D we are able to run a demo on the Oil Rig level.
Unfortunately, we were
unable to run any benchmarks with the Radeon 9000 card using the
Catalyst 3.8 drivers though (it works with the other Radeons
in the lab, however.)
There is nothing for comparison
here, but we can still make a few notes about these numbers.
The FX 5200 Ultra is struggling even at the lowest setting
of 800x600 as it only manages to push out 23 FPS, which would
be considered by most unplayable. Neither Antialiasing
nor Anisotropic Filtering were enabled for this demo, so the jaggies
were quite noticeable. In any event,
it's obvious that Splinter Cell may be a bit too much in
terms of rendering for either of the two cards. Maybe
the next tests will show these cards in a different light.
On With DirectX
and UT2K3 |