ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 and NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5650: Taking on DX9

Conclusion

With what turned out to be not one, not two, but almost a six-month wait, we finally got the head-to-head we were looking for. And with the scores in mind, we are extremely pleased with the way Mobility Radeon 9600 turned out. It seems definitely ready for the next generation games and benchmarks. In our various benchmark runs, we were even able to roughly gauge the heat emission between the Mobility Radeon 9600 and the GeForce FX Go5650. While we can’t release full results, we can state that in our Half-Life 2 benchmark runs, the Mobility Radeon 9600 was able to noticeably generate less heat. We are still waiting for all battery consumption benchmarks to finish, and we will report back as soon as that is completed.

Results aside, it was a bit frustrating to see NVIDIA and ATI take so long to get the chips to market. After all, we reported back in March on these two solutions, and it took us quite some time (albeit almost 6 months) before we started to see real tangible retail systems. Granted, they were in other overseas markets, but the main technology market is still North America.

ATI isn’t completely without fault, as their product announcement comes after their tradition of the Mobility Radeon 9000, which was touted as the first mobile graphics chip to be announced and shipped within a week. Hopefully, we will see the next generation of mobile graphics processors (M11 and NV36M) with an announcement much closer to their full market release. (Of the two, we have only been able to see M11, which is definitely something to keep your eyes peeled for as we near official announcement.) Ideally, each company’s marketing should hold off until the date nears, and not jump the gun to respond to the other.

With the GeForce4 4200 Go ultimately replaced by the Go56xx, NVIDIA is starting to head in the right direction. Power consumption and heat emissions for the GeForce FX Go based notebooks have succeeded in many things for which the GeForce4 4200 Go did not. However, NVIDIA has fair way to go to take their mobility graphics processors up to the same speed as Mobility Radeon 9600 in many of the next-generation games on the horizon.

The developer of Half-Life 2, Valve, is the first developer to voice their displeasure for the NV3x architecture with such intensity, because it has forced them to write additional codepaths particularly for NVIDIA hardware; thus, costing them time, money, and extra resources. This was something not needed to run on ATI hardware, which is why they entered into an agreement with ATI. The order of the agreement was based on already existing hardware benchmark scores to a marketing agreement, not the other way around as some have speculated.

Now, the only way for NVIDIA hardware to run reasonably well in full DX9 games such as Half-Life 2, AquaMark 3, among others, is to lower several image quality related settings: no fog, 32-bit dropped to 16-bit, low dynamic range, etc. The current selection of older DX8 games may suit the GeForce FX based systems (desktop and notebook) just fine, but we are on the heels of a software change to DX9, which is why we are in the process of revising our graphics benchmark suite. The result of GeForce FX benchmarking in DX8 is that consumers are getting use to the higher fps rates in UT2003 and Jedi Knight 2. If Valve didn’t program a special codepath for NVIDIA hardware, customers would be calling up their technical support, and ultimately sending back the software title (RMA issues), which would result in Valve's loss of money. This ends up leaving both the programmer and the NVIDIA consumer dissatisfied because neither side gets to see the full DX9 experience appreciated. Don’t forget that programmers are also artists, and on a separate level, it is frustrating for them to see their hard work go to waste, as those high level settings get turned off. We can’t even begin to hypothesize or speculate the performance results for Go5200, which is a full DX9 part, had we sought to include it in this review.

Update 9/17: We are finished with the battery consumption runs, and we can report back that there is no noticible difference between the two mobile graphic parts, in this respect. We ran both under the highest battery conservation settings (PowerPlay and PowerMizer) and the standard MobileMark settings. Due to NDA reasons, we cannot release the numbers, but the margin between the two result were negligible.