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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the
256MB ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
on an NVIDIA nForce 2 based Asus A7N8X mainboard, powered
by an Athlon
XP 3000+. The first thing we did when configuring this
test system was enter the system BIOS and set the Memory to run
synchronously with the FSB at 166MHz, with the CAS Latency
and other memory timings were set at 5-2-2-2. The hard
drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with
SP1 was installed. When the Windows installation was
complete, we installed the nForce 2 chipset drivers and then
hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the
available updates, except for the ones related to Windows
Messenger and Media Player 9. Then we installed all of
the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and Windows Messenger was disabled and removed the system.
Then Auto-Updating and
System Restore were disabled as well, 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 at our CPU's default clock speed. All of the
tests were run with ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured
for maximum visual quality. ATi's
"Quality" Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering
methods were employed throughout our testing, while the
Performance slider available on NVIDIA's "Performance and
Quality" driver tab was set to "Application". For the
"4X AA + Aniso" tests
listed in our graphs, we enabled 4X AA and 8X Anisotropic
filtering in both NVIDIA's and ATi's driver panels.
Now, for the results...
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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It's
the Top of the Line! At Least For Now! |
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AMD Athlon XP
3000+ (333MHz FSB)
Asus A7N8X
Motherboard (nForce 2 Chipset with AGP 8X)
512MB Corsair
PC3500 Platinum DDR RAM C2
On-Board NIC
On-Board
Sound
Seagate 120GB
SATA HD
Silicon Image
SATA Controller
Lite-On 16X
DVD-ROM
Standard
Floppy Drive
Windows XP
Professional with SP1
DirectX 9.0a
NVIDIA nForce
Chipset Drivers v2.03
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
256MB
ATi
Catalyst CATCH Drivers - Version 6.14.10.6343
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
ATi Catalyst
Drivers - Version 3.2
NVIDIA
GeForce FX 5800 Ultra
Detonator
Drivers - Version 43.45
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Performance Comparisons
With 3DMark2001 SE |
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Time For Some
Synthetic DX8 Action |
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We began our
testing with Futuremark's 3DMark2001 SE (Build
330). We ran the benchmark at its default resolution of 1024x768 and
then ran the tests again at 1600x1200. 3DMark2001 uses the
DX8 class "MaxFX"
engine, from Remedy's very popular game Max Payne, to
simulate an actual in-game environment. 3DMark2001's
overall score is calculated using the results from two
groups of "High" and "Low" quality tests. The final score is
tabulated by
taking the results of these individual tests and adding them
together using the following formula:
When benchmarking 64MB versus 128MB
video cards in the past, we have seen that
3DMark2001 doesn't benefit much by having more than 64MB on
board. At default settings, without any Antialiasing
or Anisotropic filtering enabled, the same hold true here.
The 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro does outpace all of the other
cards, but the performance gains come from the higher
clocked memory, not the larger frame buffer. When we
enabled 4X AA however, the performance deltas between the
256MB Radeon and the other cards is greater. The 256MB
Radeon outpaced its 128MB counterpart by about 4% at
1024x768 and by about 6% at 1600x1200 with 4X Antialiasing
enabled. As we mentioned earlier, at higher
resolution, with AA enabled, the extra available memory
should increase performance...
More DirectX
Testing
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