Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1095
ATI's Radeon 9600 Pro - Another Win for ATI
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 16, 2003 11:40 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The graphics card vendors are the worst about announcing products before they are publicly available and even before we're able to bring you performance numbers from the parts. Case in point would be the March 6th release of ATI's Radeon 9600 Pro, it has taken this long for us to receive a shipping sample to bring you performance data based on.
We won't be focusing on the architecture or technology behind the Radeon 9600 Pro in this article, as we've already covered that in our original story, but we will revisit one important topic before diving into benchmarks - what to compare the Radeon 9600 Pro to.
The Radeon 9600 Pro is the perfect example of bigger numbers not necessarily meaning higher performance; as we noted in our overview of the RV350's technology, the Radeon 9600 Pro is actually more like a regular Radeon 9500 than a Radeon 9500 Pro. Have a look at the following table to help you understand why:
| - |
Manufacturing
Process
|
Architecture
|
Rendering
Pipelines
|
Texture
Units per Pipe
|
Core
Clock
|
Memory
Bus
|
Memory
Clock
|
Memory
Bandwidth
|
| ATI Radeon 9600 Pro |
0.13-micron
|
DX9
|
4
|
1
|
400MHz
|
128-bit
|
300MHz
|
9.6GB/s
|
| ATI Radeon 9500 Pro |
0.15-micron
|
DX9
|
8
|
1
|
275MHz
|
128-bit
|
270MHz
|
8.64GB/s
|
| ATI Radeon 9500 |
0.15-micron
|
DX9
|
4
|
1
|
275MHz
|
128-bit
|
270MHz
|
8.64GB/s
|
| NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra |
0.13-micron
|
DX9
|
4
|
1
|
350MHz
|
128-bit
|
350MHz
|
11.2GB/s
|
| NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 |
0.15-micron
|
DX8
|
4
|
2
|
300MHz
|
128-bit
|
325MHz
|
10.4GB/s
|
| NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 |
0.15-micron
|
DX8
|
4
|
2
|
250MHZ
|
128-bit
|
222MHz
|
7.1GB/s
|
As you can see, the Radeon 9500 Pro was quite a fluke in that it was basically a slightly detuned Radeon 9700 Pro whereas the Radeon 9600 Pro is much more castrated, which is what you would expect from a $150 - $199 mainstream card.
ATI's Radeon 9600 Pro - Thanks to a 0.13-micron manufacturing process it requires
very little cooling
Compared to the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, the Radeon 9600 Pro has a higher core clock but lesser memory bandwidth, meaning we should be in for a fairly close performance comparison between the two. As we mentioned in our original article however, expecting the Radeon 9600 Pro's core improvements and higher clock speed to overcome the lack of rendering pipelines and outperform the Radeon 9500 Pro may very well be wishful thinking - a question we're looking to finally answer today.
NVIDIA: Hard at work on new drivers
In our last article we criticized NVIDIA for truly falling behind in the driver and image quality department; we don't even remember the last time we've been able to say about the graphics giant, which was cause for alarm.
Thankfully NVIDIA has been listening to our complaints as well as the complaints of other reviewers and is hard at work at a new driver build for the entire FX line. The forthcoming Detonator driver release is planned for the near future and will most likely accompany a new GPU release from NVIDIA, but in addition to the originally planned performance improvements the driver will supposedly address the anisotropic filtering image quality issues we've brought up in the past.
Because of the close proximity to the new driver drop we've refrained from turning this article into an extensive image quality comparison, but with AA and anisotropic filtering both very important features we'd like to leave you with our opinions on the differences between ATI and NVIDIA.
With the latest driver build from ATI and NVIDIA, the two offer very similar antialiasing quality levels, with ATI arguably having a slight quality advantage.
The biggest differences exist in the two manufacturers' anisotropic filtering settings; in order to clear up confusion and push for a more apples-to-apples comparison, NVIDIA has renamed their anisotropic filtering settings to "Performance" and "Quality" modes just like ATI (instead of the unnecessarily long "Performance-Aggressive" and "Performance-Quality").
Despite the name change, the quality issues still remain; NVIDIA's "Performance" mode is clearly inferior to ATI's "Performance" mode and while NVIDIA's "Quality" mode is much closer to ATI's "Quality" mode, there is still a noticeable difference between the two.
With the image quality offered by NVIDIA's cards potentially changing significantly over the coming weeks thanks to the new drivers, we haven't focused too much on the image quality offered by each of NVIDIA's settings. For our AA/Aniso tests we looked at the performance of each setting individually, as well as benchmarked two combination settings - a high performance and a high image quality setting (2X AA + 8X Performance aniso & 4X AA + 8X Quality aniso, respectively).
With that said, let's get onto the tests.
The Test
|
Windows
XP Professional Test Bed
|
|
|
Hardware
Configuration
|
|
| CPU |
Intel
Pentium 4 3.00GHz (Hyper-Threading Enabled)
|
| Motherboard |
Intel
D875PBZ - Intel 875P Chipset
|
| RAM |
2
x 256MB DDR400 Corsair DIMMs
|
| Sound |
None
|
| Hard Drive |
120GB
Western Digital Special Edition 8MB Cache HDD
|
| Video Cards (Drivers) |
All ATI Cards used
Catalyst 3.2 drivers |
Unreal Tournament 2003
Arguably the best looking game out today, Unreal Tournament 2003 continues to be a cornerstone of our GPU benchmarking suite. We continue to use the game's built-in benchmark.exe and force the maximum detail settings for every test run. Keep in mind we're only reporting flyby numbers, as the botmatch results are more CPU/platform bound than GPU bound.
|
173.0
165.8
136.8
131.0
|
|
In comparison to the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, the Radeon 9600 Pro comes out slightly ahead at all resolutions below 1600x1200, but ends up switching places at 1600x1200; remembering that the Radeon 9600 Pro has a higher fill rate but less memory bandwidth than the 5600 Ultra explains why at lower resolutions, the 9600 Pro is faster but proceeds to fall behind the 5600 Ultra at 1600x1200. What's important to note is that from the end-user's perspective, the two cards perform virtually identically in all of these cases.
If we step back and bring the Radeon 9500 Pro into view it's clear that regardless of which of the aforementioned two is faster, neither one of them can hold a candle to the old Radeon 9500 Pro. Even GeForce4 Ti 4200 owners would be hard pressed to find a reason to upgrade to either one of these cards outside of DirectX 9 support, which has yet to be truly demanded in a game.
Splinter Cell - Average Frame Rates
A new addition to our benchmarking suite is Splinter Cell from Ubisoft. Taken from a 3rd person perspective, the game focuses much more on sneaking around and hiding in the shadows rather than high frame rates and raking up frags as quickly as possible. The Splinter Cell benchmark is a part of the game's 1.2 patch, however the publicly available patch is currently broken and doesn't copy the appropriate demo files - so unfortunately, you will not be able to run these results for yourself just yet. For reference, we used the first demo and forced the use of "class 1" rendering and left all detail settings at their maximum levels.
|
|
|
This time around, the Radeon 9600 Pro actually manages to outperform the Radeon 9500 Pro, although not by a significant margin. What's most interesting is the fact that the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra does so poorly in the test; considering that the game was optimized originally for the Xbox, which features a NV2x series graphics, it's no surprise that the GeForce4 does so well here.
Splinter Cell - Minimum Frame Rates
|
|
|
The standings don't change tremendously when we focus at how low the frame rate drops during the benchmark, the 5600 Ultra still does the worst out of this limited pack of GPUs.
Jedi Knight 2
With the recent announcement of a successor to Jedi Knight 2 in the works (also based off the Quake III engine), it makes sense for us to continue to use JK2 as a benchmark:
|
|
|
155.2Once again we see the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and the Radeon 9600 Pro offering very similar levels of performance, but the Radeon 9500 Pro puts them both to shame.
Quake III Arena
As we just mentioned, the Quake III engine is still being used and thus performance using the engine shouldn't be ignored. For this reason we continue to use Quake III Arena as a benchmark, despite its insanely high performance results:
|
|
|
NVIDIA clearly takes the lead in Quake III Arena thanks to significant driver optimizations for the game, even the GeForce4 Ti 4200 is able to outperform the Radeon 9x00 cards compared here.
Comanche 4
|
|
|
Comanche 4 has always been a benchmark that hasn't favored the new FX line of GPUs from NVIDIA for some reason, and the trend continues here with the 5600 Ultra's closest competitor being the two-year-old GeForce3 Ti 500.
Serious Sam 2 - Average Frame Rates
|
|
|
Serious Sam 2 - Minimum Frame Rates
|
|
|
Anti-Aliasing Performance
As we mentioned at the start of this article, the Radeon 9600 Pro and GeForce FX 5600 Ultra have very similar AA modes in terms of image quality, and thus comparing one vendor's 2X to the other's is valid.
|
Despite the improvements to the RV350 core that are specifically tailored to improving AA performance, the Radeon 9600 Pro cannot outperform the Radeon 9500 Pro. The GeForce FX 5600 Ultra continues to be on-par with the Radeon 9600 Pro.
|
Although the Radeon 9600 Pro and GeForce FX 5600 Ultra swap positions, the overall picture doesn't change much with 4X AA enabled.
Anisotropic Filtering Performance
Although this very well could change with updated drivers, for now here's how the image quality stacks up when anisotropic filtering is taken into account:
- ATI's Performance mode is significantly better than NVIDIA's Performance mode
- ATI's Quality mode is slightly better than NVIDIA's Quality mode
|
The GeForce FX 5600 Ultra manages to achieve a 6% performance lead here, but once you take into account that the Radeon 9600 Pro offers much higher image quality that 6% advantage becomes even more insignificant.
|
The advantage shifts towards the Radeon 9600 Pro here, but looking at the Radeon 9500 Pro's performance puts all the newcomers to shame.
AA + Anisotropic Filtering Performance
With the Radeon 9600 Pro/GeForce FX 5600 Ultra class of cards, enabling AA and anisotropic filtering isn't always an option as it is on the high-end GPUs simply because the performance hit is sometimes too great. For this reason we focused on two particular modes to benchmark, a high performance mode and a high image quality mode; the high performance mode used only 2X AA and performance anisotropic filtering, while the high quality mode used 4X AA and the quality anisotropic filtering setting.
|
|
The standings continue to be what we've been seeing all along, with the Radeon 9600 Pro and GeForce FX 5600 Ultra performing very closely to one another and the Radeon 9500 Pro doing better than them all.
Final Words
Given the specifications of the GPU, the Radeon 9600 Pro performed quite in line with what we expected. If you recall our conclusion to the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra piece we stated:
"One thing is for sure, current Radeon 9500 Pro owners should stick with their cards, and if you can find one, it's not a bad buy."
The Radeon 9500 Pro is still the best performing solution out there in this price range, however the production run was quite limited and you won't be able to find those cards to be too available in the future so grab them while you can.
Between the Radeon 9600 Pro and the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, the performance of the two offerings is relatively close; however, the few cases where the GeForce FX performed the worst out of our roundup of cards and the lesser image quality offered by the part push our recommendation towards the Radeon 9600 Pro.
The release of the Radeon 9600 Pro marks a very important step in ATI's growth as a company, this is the first time that we've been able to recommend not only a high-end ATI GPU but also a mainstream GPU over NVIDIA's offerings. It's clear that ATI as a company has truly turned around from the days of the Radeon 8500 and we can only hope that the job-well-done will continue. ATI should not rejoice just yet however, the NVIDIA camp is definitely quite frustrated and will not take kindly to this sort of competition - vengeance is definitely brewing, only time will tell if it's enough to fuel reclamation of the the crown.
If we tally up ATI's wins (Radeon 9700 Pro, Radeon 9800 Pro, and now the Radeon 9600 Pro), the scoreboard is ATI - 3, NVIDIA - 0; but the game is far from over.
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