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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the Abit Radeon 9800 XT on an i875P based MSI
875P Neo-FIS2R motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4
3.2CGHz CPU. 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
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. 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, System Restore and Drive Indexing were then
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
the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests. 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.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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Intel
Powered - 3.2GHz System |
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Hardware:
Processor -
Mainboard -
Video Cards -
Memory -
Audio -
Hard Drive -
Optical Drive -
Other -
Software:
Operating System -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Video Drivers - |
Intel Pentium 4
3.2GHz
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
i875P "Canterwood" Chipset
ATi Radeon 9800 XT
GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB
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 (Fully
Patched)
Intel INF v5.1.1.1002
DirectX 9.0b
ATI Catalyst v4.1
NVIDIA Forceware v53.06 |
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Performance Comparisons
With AquaMark3 |
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DX8
and DX9 Shader Ops |
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Aquamark
3 |
Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of
Massive Development.
Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't
well received, but it was one of the first games to
implement DX8 shaders, which led to the creation of
Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts.
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,
which is the default setting for this benchmark. |
The Abit Radeon 9800 XT
outperformed the competition at both resolutions in the
Aquamark 3 tests, regardless of what level of anti-aliasing
we used. In the non-AA tests, the 9800 XT was about 4%
faster than the 5950 Ultra and 9800 Pro, but as we increased
the level of AA, the Abit 9800 XT pulled away. The
only configurations where the 9800 XT dominated the GeForce
FX were in the 6X AA tests, where it nearly doubled the 5950
Ultra's performance, otherwise all three of the cards
remained competitive.
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Benchmarks
With
Halo |
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Halo
- No Xbox Here! |
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Halo |
For
many gamers, the release of Halo marked 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. |
The performance deltas in the
Halo benchmark weren't very large, but the Abit 9800 XT did
generate the highest frame rates in this test as well. At
1024x768, the 9800 XT and 5950 Ultra performed at near
identical levels, with the 9800 Pro pulling up the rear, but
at 1600x1200, the Radeon 9800 XT had a clear advantage.
With the resolution set to 1600x1200, the 5950 Ultra lagged
behind the Abit 9800 XT by about 8%, and even dropped down
below the 9800 Pro by a small percentage.
Unreal Tournament 2003 & Splinter Cell Testing
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