So September could be considered to be CPU month, with the release of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and the Athlon 64 and if you call it that, then October would definitely be Graphics month. If you haven't guessed already, Derek (new CPU/GPU guy here at AT) and I have been spending a lot of time benchmarking graphics stuff over the past several days. We've ended up with no less than 10 new games as a part of our new graphics test suite; we're both over at the lab right now starting our final tests on the suite for a review sometime this week. Unfortunately we are very short handed on Athlon 64 parts (and our CPUs on order have yet to come in) so the first comparison with this new suite will be done on either a 2.8GHz Intel processor or a Pentium 4 3.2 Extreme Edition. We're making the call now and you'll most likely find out which CPU we used when the review hits.
For those of you looking for benchmarks on more CPUs, have no worries as we'll be doing a CPU comparison under the new test suite very soon. Our first priority is to get the video cards compared on the fastest platform possible (thus doing a pure video card comparison) and then worry about CPU scaling.
Speaking of video card stuff, we're hoping to have the Half Life 2 benchmark soon to do an updated comparison with NVIDIA's latest drivers. I'm hearing that the latest Detonators NVIDIA is working on fix the issues that Gabe outlined in his list of complaints and improves performance significantly. It seems like the 5900 Ultra is now slightly slower than the Radeon 9800 Pro with AA/Aniso disabled, and slightly faster with it enabled; I'm hoping to see for myself shortly. I haven't heard anything about how the 5600/5200 perform with the latest drivers, but I'm guessing the performance isn't as competitive.
That's all for now, I've got two tests tomorrow morning (I love making up work after being absent to cover IDF) so I'm going to be busy with that tonight as well as helping Derek with this review. Derek and I will be co-writing this review as it will be his first major GPU review, but he will be doing the majority of the analysis (I'll just be keeping a watchful eye over him).
Take care
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Anonymous - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
still no review... everyone else has one up but AT. :(Anonymous - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
*GTapAnonymous - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
ATap, do you *really* think Derek would commit himself like that? ;)GTaudiophile - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
So can we expect a review around 4:00pm EST?Derek Wilson - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
nda goes away @ 4:00pm EST afaikGTaudiophile - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
Derek, we appreciate your hard work. Can you tell us when the NDA will be lifted?-resident fantATIc
Derek Wilson - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
soooo little sleep ... wait ... i mean so much not sleeping ... ;-)Luagsch - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
don't tell Nebor (lokal ex-nvidiot) that the 5900 ultra may be able to get 9800pro scores, he just bought a 9800 pro:Plooking forward to this
UlricT - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
"nv thinks they will have improved some of the image quality problems gabe had... "Does this mean that they got HDR working on the FX? THAT would even out the playing field... I really hope they have got their problems fixed!
I would suggest running both cards @ (visually)similar IQ settings and benchmarking them. Otherwise its not very fair... but we do know the R300 runs dx9 just as good as it runs dx8.1 :)
Pete - Monday, September 29, 2003 - link
Hi Derek,Be sure to check bilinear/trilinear filtering with and without AF, as it seems the 51.75 Dets have switched entirely to bilinear. Could be another bug, but who knows with nV these days?
Looking forward to your first review!