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A look at the
driver interface shows that ATI has really spruced up and
fleshed out their product with all the latest features and
settings. ATI has switched to a unified driver suite,
now known as "Catalyst". Since then, ATI users all
over have noticed much improvement in the driver
development, performance and stability. Also worth
noting is that the frequency with which ATI releases their
driver versions has also improved. For this test we
have loaded the Catalyst 3.0 XP drivers. As you can
see, the catalyst driver gives the user many options in
tweaking, everything from Anisotropic filtering, to V-Sync,
Gamma and Anti-Aliasing controls. A look at the DX and
OpenGL panels shows that they are much more logical and
friendly to the average user. All in all, we really
like these drivers, as they give users the a lot of
opportunity to adjust the card's performance and image
quality
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Screenshots: In-Game Action |
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Some Nice Looking Visuals |
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We took some in
game screen shots from the latest in the Need For Speed
series: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 . This game is
gorgeous and offers some great eye candy. For these
particular shots we put all the settings at the highest
quality possible. Each screen shot was taken at a
resolution of 1024x768 with 32-bit color, 16X Anisotropic
Filtering and 6X FSAA. When looking closely at these
shots we can see that all the edges are crisp and clean and
nothing appears jagged. I must say that I was truly
amazed at the textures and lighting even with Anti-Aliasing
enabled. I would like to add that even with these
strenuous settings, the game remained perfectly playable
with no noticeable lag or choppiness. We were simply
amazed with the quality of both rendering and frame rate
performance of the R9500 Pro cards.
A WORD ON 2D
IMAGE QUALITY & DVD PLAYBACK:
We did not do
any "formal" testing of 2D image quality, but we can say
from using both of these cards for quite some time, that
their 2D output is top notch. With our Windows desktop
set to 1600x1200 with 75Hz refresh rate, text remained crisp
from corner to corner on our 19" Samsung monitor.
Colors also remained very uniform across the entire screen.
It was tough to pick out any differences in a Side-by-side
comparisons to a GF4 Ti4600, but the RADEONs did seem to
produce slightly more vivid images. DVD playback using
both PowerDVD and WinDVD was phenomenal with both the
Sapphire and the Gigabyte. DVD playback has always
been one of ATi's strong suits.
BEFORE WE GET TO
THE BENCHMARKS:
Due to the fact
that we have seen significant variations in benchmark scores
from one site to the next, we feel it is necessary to
explain exactly how we configure our test systems before
running any benchmarks. When testing these video cards, the
first thing we did was enter the system BIOS on our P4X400
DRAGON, loaded "Optimized Defaults" and set a 256MB AGP
Aperture size. We then set the "System Performance"
option to "Fast" and configured our RAM to run at 166MHz
(DDR333). We set the other memory timings to their
most aggressive settings, 2-2-5-2, with a 1T Command rate
using 4-Bank Interleaving. The RAID 0 array,
consisting of two Western Digital 80GB "Special Addition"
drives, was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional
(SP1) was installed. After the installation was complete, we
hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the
available updates including DX9. Then we installed all of
the necessary drivers, and disabled then removed Windows
Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System
Restore were also disabled, and we setup a 768MB permanent
page file on the same partition and drive as the Windows
installation. Lastly we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to
"best performance", installed all of the benchmarking
software, defragged the hard drive and ran all of the tests
at our CPU's default clock speed. Throughout our
testing, we used ATi's v6.14.01.6255 "Catalyst 3.0" Drivers
with the v6.14.10.4012 Control Panels, and VIA's latest
v4.45 "Hyperion" 4-In-1 chipset drivers. For the sake
of comparison, we used a Gainward GF4 Ti4600 with NVIDIA's
latest "official" Detonators, v41.09. Now, it's time
for our results...
Our
Test System & Some Numbers |
