|
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 XT on an i875P "Canterwood"
based MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R motherboard, powered by an Intel
Pentium 4 3.0CGHz CPU (800MHz System Bus). The first
thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the
BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults". Then
we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode,
with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD,
and set the AGP aperture size set to 256MB. The hard drive
was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was
installed. When the installation was complete, we
installed the Intel chipset drivers and then hit the Windows
Update site to download and install all of the available
updates, with the exception of the items related to Windows
Messenger. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers
for the rest of our components and Windows Messenger was
then disabled and removed from the system. Auto-Updating and
System Restore were then 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. All of the benchmarking was done with
ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured for maximum visual
quality. ATi's "Quality" anti-aliasing 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 "Quality".
For the "4X AA + Aniso" tests listed in our graphs, we
enabled 4X anti-aliasing and 8X Anisotropic filtering in
both NVIDIA's and ATi's driver panels.
 |
|
HotHardware's Test Setup |
|
Intel
Powered - 3GHz System |
|
|
Hardware:
Processor -
Mainboard -
Video Cards -
Memory -
Audio -
Hard Drive -
Optical Drive -
Other -
Software:
OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Video Drivers - |
Intel Pentium 4
3.0GHz
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
i875P "Canterwood" Chipset
Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 XT
Asus Radeon 9800 XT
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
1024MB Kingston HyperX PC3500
CAS 2
Integrated SoundMax Audio
Western Digital "Raptor"
36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA
Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM
3.5" Floppy Drive
Windows XP Professional SP1
Intel INF v5.1.0.1008
DirectX 9.0b
ATI Catalyst v3.9+
NVIDIA Forceware v53.03 |
 |
|
Performance Comparisons
With AquaMark3 |
|
DX8
and DX9 Shader Ops |
|
|
Aquamark
3 |
Aquamark 3 comes to us by the way of
Massive
Development.
Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 was
scoffed at by critics, but it was one of the first games
to implement DX8 shaders, which led to the creation of
Aquamark 2 - a benchmark used by many reviewers. Since
the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game
engine, they must support old and new video cards alike.
Thus, Aquamark 3 utilizes not only DirectX 9 shaders,
but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this
benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with
no anti-aliasing, then again with 4x and 6x AA.
Throughout all of these tests, 4X Anisotropic filtering
was enabled from within Aquamark 3's control panel. |
The Aquamark 3
benchmarks belonged to the Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 XT.
At both resolutions, with every level of anti-aliasing, it
was the highest performing card. It surpassed the
GeForce FX 5950 and 5700 Ultras by large margins,
occasionally in excess of 110% (1600x1200 with 6XAA).
The Sapphire card also outpaced the Asus Radeon 9800 XT by a
small margin, thanks to its higher clocked GPU. Our
Asus Radeon 9800 XT's core came clocked at 405MHz, while
Sapphire's card had its core clocked at 412MHz.
 |
|
Benchmarks
With
Halo |
|
Halo
- No Xbox Here! |
|
|
Halo |
For many gamers out
there, the release of Halo marks the end of a long wait,
since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a
few years back. No additional patches or tweaks
are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has
included all of the necessary information in their
README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four
of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average
frame rate is recorded. We ran this benchmark
twice, once at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024.
Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with this game at
the moment, so all of the test below were run with
anti-aliasing disabled. |
Sapphire's 9800
XT handled the Halo benchmark quite well, besting the much
less expensive 5700 Ultra, but it was not quite able to
catch the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. The NVIDIA powered
5950 Ultra held onto a 10% lead at 1024x768, that dwindled
to approximately 1% once we raised the resolution to
1280x1024. Once again, the Sapphire card pulled
slightly ahead of Asus' Radeon 9800 XT because of the slight
clock speed difference.
Unreal Tournament 2003 & Splinter Cell Testing
|