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We're sure many
of you have already seen how ATi's "Catalyst" control panels
are laid out, but we wanted to show them to the less
fortunate people out there! The days of ATi's driver
development team taking heat are over. ATi has
steadily increased the performance and quality of their
drivers, and have been releasing them far more frequently
(In fact over the course of this review, there were two
"Official" versions released). The five panels above
are of ATi's Catalyst 2.5 driver release (DX9 Compatible
Catalyst 3.0's are currently available on ATi's site).
As you can see, users are given control over virtually every
aspect of the card. Anisotropic filtering, V-Sync and
Anti-Aliasing controls, among other things, are all easy
accessible. The DirectX and OpenGL panels are
identical, which should decrease the learning curve for less
seasoned users looking to tweak their gaming experience.
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Screenshots: Impressive Eye Candy |
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Ooooh, So Pretty... |
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Whether you like
the game or not, it's hard to deny that Unreal Tournament
2003 has some of the most impressive graphics in PC gaming
today. The models and environments are very complex,
with high poly-counts, and the textures used are of very
high quality. For the screenshot's above, we set all
of the in-game options to their highest settings, and maxed
out the Anisotropic and Anti-Aliasing settings available in
ATi's driver panels. Each screenshot was taken at a
resolution of 1024x768 with 32-Bit color, 16X Anisotropic
Filtering and 6X FSAA. Notice how clean all of the
edges are, and how sharp the textures remained, even with
Anti-Aliasing enabled. Something else we should
mention is that even with these maximum settings, the game
is completely playable, hovering around 100FPS. The
R300 VPU powering both of the cards we're looking at today,
simply put, is a powerhouse.
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 out 22" Mitsubishi 2040U.
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 the Tachyon and
Maya II, but we didn't have to tell you that. 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 and 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 also set the other memory timings to
their most aggressive settings, 2-2-5-2, with a 1T Command
rate and 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. 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 the 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 v6.13.10.6218
"Catalyst 2.5" Drivers with the v6.14.10.4000 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 |
