ATi Mobility Radeon 9800 - Benchmarked
Test System & Final Fantasy XI
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: Unfortunately, we did not have two identical laptops to do a direct comparison between the Mobility Radeon 9800 and another mobile GPU, preferably a Mobility Radeon 9700. What we did to level the playing field, however, was configure a desktop system with specifications similar to the Dell XPS laptop we used for testing. On both the laptop and our desktop machine, the hard drive formatted and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of the system's components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing 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 the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests.
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| SYSTEM 1: Intel P4 3.2GHz E.E. Dell XPS Motherboard Intel i865P Chipset 512MB 2x256MB DDR RAM Mobility Radeon 9800 On-Board 10/100 Ethernet On-Board Audio Software: Windows XP Pro SP2 Dell Branded ATi Catalyst Drivers: v.8.04-040717a-016729C DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Intel P4 3.2GHz E.E. Abit IC7-MAX3 Motherboard Intel i875P Chipset 512MB 2x256MB DDR RAM Radeon 9800 Pro On-Board 10/100/1000 Ethernet On-Board Audio Software: Windows XP Pro SP2 ATi Catalyst v4.9 Drivers: v8.051-040825a-017633C DirectX 9.0c |
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 Final Fantasy XI |
The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Even with a relatively "lite-duty" benchmark like this one, the power of the Mobility Radeon 9800 is immediately evident. It wasn't quite capable of catching the desktop system powered by a Radeon 9800 Pro, but with a score of 5636 the Mobility Radeon 9800 was a mere 4.5% behind. This is interesting because the Mobility Radeon 9800's core and memory are clocked 8.5% and 13.3% lower than the Radeon 9800 Pro. At equal clock speeds, it's likely the Mobility Radeon 9800 would have pulled ahead in this test. But let's see what happens when with something a little more intensive, shall we?
