Anandtech Radeon 9800XT Review (with NV38 benchmarks)

Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
edited October 2003 in Science & Tech
Anandtech: <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1890&quot; target=_blank>Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT</a>

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So today we bring you quite a few new things, some may surprise you, some may not. <b>ATI has released their Fall refresh product – the Radeon 9800XT and they are announcing their Radeon 9600XT. NVIDIA has counterattacked by letting us publish benchmarks from their forthcoming NV38 GPU</b> (the successor to the NV35 based GeForce FX 5900 Ultra). But quite possibly more important than any of those announcements is the suite of benchmarks we’re testing these cards in; how does a total of 15 popular games sound? This is the first installment of a multipart series that will help you decide what video card is best for you, and hopefully it will do a better job than we have ever in the past.
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So who are you to believe? These days it seems like the clear purchase is ATI, but on what data are we basing that? I won’t try to build up suspense senselessly, <b>the clear recommendation today is ATI</b> (how’s that for hype-less journalism), but not because of Half Life 2 or any other conspiracies we’ve seen floating around the web these days.
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Comments

  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited October 2003
    And for the Aquamark Thread
  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited October 2003
    And Surprise!
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    GeForce cards always did do well in Quake3-engined games, like Intel.
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    And I am probably right in guessing that these benchmarks are taken with the (invalid by most reviewers) new Detonator drivers?

    NS
  • kanezfankanezfan sunny south florida Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    kind of off-topic here, but am I the only one that thinks that a Q3 engine based game (JKIII) should not bring the latest and greatest vid card to its knees? I almost re-installed windows upon first playing JKIII because it played like such crap, but i'm glad to see it's not just me. it doesn't look any better than Jedi outcast either, sometimes i wonder if game devs purposely make games run like crap just to make them seem cutting edge. JKIII along with Halo, i'm like wtf??
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited October 2003
    Admittedly, the nVidia stuff is not production-ready (right?) but it looks like ATi is gonna kick nVidia's @ss again. Which is good and bad... Good because I've always preferred ATi's cards anyhow, but bad because it means less competition, which means fewer newer/faster products.
  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    kanezfan said
    kind of off-topic here, but am I the only one that thinks that a Q3 engine based game (JKIII) should not bring the latest and greatest vid card to its knees? I almost re-installed windows upon first playing JKIII because it played like such crap, but i'm glad to see it's not just me. it doesn't look any better than Jedi outcast either, sometimes i wonder if game devs purposely make games run like crap just to make them seem cutting edge. JKIII along with Halo, i'm like wtf??

    Do you also have problems getting Halo looking good? It looks terrible for me with everything on. Good fps though. Sorry for the OT but im pissed off at this.
  • kanezfankanezfan sunny south florida Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    halo looks decent, nothing mind blowing though. i mean ut2k3 looks amazing in comparison. i just don't get that, you look at ut2k3 compared to JKIII and Halo and it just blows them away in the graphics department, I mean they look like 2 or 3 year old games, so why do they play like such crap? of course I don't know your system specs mackanz, I have an athlonxp runnig at 1.85Ghz, 1 gig of pc2100, and a 9500 pro. I know this is not top of the line stuff, but a two year old engine should have no problems running on this setup, and it doesn't when i play Q3. So are game devs purposely making their stuff play like crap? I mean JKIII looks identical to JKII outcast, yet it plays 10 times worse! JKII Outcast runs smooth as butter on my system. I just don't get it, frankly it pisses me off.
  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    My specs are close to yours, i have a 9700 pro. I have everything at full in the graphics details both in driver and in the game. Looks TERRIBLE but the fps is good. Same here, UT2K3 looks awesome compared to this Halo junk.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Halo was designed for 625 line 640x480 NTSC TVs viewed from a distance greater than 6 feet.

    One could imagine what would happen once you increase the resolution to 1024x768 or higher, triple (Or more) the amount of lines, and shorten the viewing distance to less than 2 feet. All the imperfections, the gaudy 256x256 textures, too few for the model being displayed are suddenly crystal clear.

    However, JKIII is <i>not</i> a three year old engine. The Quake3 engine certainly is, but it's had so many updates and revisions applied for JKIII (Anisotropic filtering, bump-mapping, new shader methods, anti-aliasing support, new texture effects, new lighting effects, new texture compression/control methods) that the semblance to Quake3 only remains in the way the models are constructed and the BASIC way the game renders. This again is even updated considerably over JKII.
  • TemplarTemplar You first.
    edited October 2003
    Damn Microsoft. Damn them to hell.
  • hoojhooj Bournemouth, UK
    edited October 2003
    Supposedly they were using a Prescott chip for the test bed,

    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11887
  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited October 2003
    and here's a confirmation screenie

    "Prescott" pops up when you highlight the text
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