VisionTek Xtasy 9800 Pro 128MB AGP
Back from the Dead with a Whole New Attitude

By - Jeff Bouton
July 1, 2003

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:

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.  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.  Next we installed the nForce 2 chipset drivers followed by all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components.  We then disabled Windows Messenger, Auto-Updating, and System Restore and set a 768MB permanent page file.  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.
 

HotHardware's Test Setup
Bring It On!

 
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (333MHz FSB)

Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard Rev. 1.3 (nForce 2 Chipset with AGP 8X)

512MB GEIL PC3500 Platinum DDR RAM C2

On-Board NIC

On-Board Sound

Western Digital 30GB ATA100 HD

Creative 52X CD-ROM

Standard Floppy Drive

Windows XP Professional with SP1

DirectX 9.0a

NVIDIA nForce Chipset Drivers v2.03

 

ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB DDR

ATi Catalyst Drivers - Version 3.4

 

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra 128MB DDR2

Detonator Drivers - Version  44.03

 

Gaming Performance with Unreal Tournament 2003
Let's Get Fragging!

To get a true assessment of a video card's performance, using tests that best simulate a real world environment is best.  While synthetic tests may give us an idea how a card performs, there is nothing more easily understood than simple "Frames Per Second".  To get things started, we loaded one of our favorite DirectX benchmarks, Unreal Tournament 2003.  The tests were run at 1024x768 and 1600x1200 resolutions.

At the default driver settings the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and the VisonTek Xtasy 9800 Pro 128MB turned out very similar results.  As we increased the visual quality through the drivers, we saw the 9800 Pro take a smaller performance hit than the FX 5800, but both cards did perform quite well.

Interestingly, when we increased the resolution, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra took a solid 18FPS lead over the 9800 Pro with no Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering enabled.  However, once AA and Aniso were enabled, the GeForce card had a harder time maintaining playable frame rates.  The Xtasy 9800 Pro never dropped below the 60FPS threshold, the frame rate often considered the minimum to deem a game playable.

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