Call of Duty

This is a new title that we added to the mix since it is one of the most popular titles at the moment. This is another game of the first-person shooter genre, where you work on missions with your army's "company" to accomplish specified goals. Call of Duty is based on the Quake 3 engine, but it is a heavily modified version so that it can incorporate DX9 features. We ran a replay of a LAN game played among several players via the console, which is not available in the demo version of the game. Since Call of Duty caps the frames per second, we had to max out the cap value at "999" so that the benchmark could replay at its highest possible frame rate.

We should note that this game doesn't really implement ps2.0 shaders. Instead, it is more like a DX8.1 title running in a DX9 API. Keep in mind that it is also an OpenGL title.


This is one of two titles in our benchmark suite that provided the Mobility Radeon 9700 with a sub 10% margin. This doesn't seem to be the normal scenario, except for a few titles in lower resolutions. When we get to the 1280x1024 resolution, the margin jumps 17% (from 9% to 26%). This scenario is much more reminiscent of our Aquamark 3 scores.

It's very important to note that the Mobility Radeon 9700 takes a performance degrade (when jumping to a higher resolution) much better than the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro. While the Mobility Radeon 9700 only suffers a roughly 4% degrade, the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro takes a 16% drop from 1024x768 to 1280x1024. This is more of the clock for clock performance that ATI is clearly benefiting from the low-k process of the R360 graphics core.

As popular as Call of Duty is, it isn't that graphically intensive compared to some of the other titles at our disposal. Both of ATI's mobile GPUs can comfortably run well above the 50fps market, and it is our experience that AA and AF can be scaled up while achieving smooth game play.

Aquamark 3 Halo
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  • Platter - Saturday, February 14, 2004 - link

    Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the recent official announcement from IBM regarding the 970FX has something to do with ATI's 'Big One™'?

    PowerBook G5, anyone?
  • Andrew Ku - Monday, February 9, 2004 - link

    Ok, so to answer some of the inquires posed to me - if you currently own a Mobility Radeon 9600 (one of the three) based notebook, you are more or less set to go. The Mobility Radeon 9700 in the majority of cases behaves like an OC'ed version of its predecessor. However, the M10 is still a very hardy chip seems like it is going to have a long life cycle.

    As for waiting time, it looks like the bulk of the design wins won't start to be announced until the end of Feb. So go with a M10 based notebook if you plan to buy within the next few months or if you are just looking for the "traditional notebook." It's going to take some time before mainstream sees M11 in their mobile systems. And when it does, M11 will be in DTR notebooks for the most part.
  • Serp86 - Thursday, February 5, 2004 - link

    i think that the performance difference is quite enoght to justify calling it a 9700.
  • yomer - Thursday, February 5, 2004 - link

    So Andrew, Dell is supposed to be one of the bunch in adopting the M9700. Might Dell be called BIG? I wanted to buy an IBM t41p with a mobility firegl T2(based on the 9600) with 128MB. Should I wait and buy a notebook with the new M9700? Is it worth it? How much should we wait in oder to be able to buy one of thoes notebooks here in the US?
  • TrogdorJW - Wednesday, February 4, 2004 - link

    #9, it's all marketing. There will be enough people out there that don't know hardware who will just assume the 9700M is the same as the desktop 9700. Too bad for them. The important thing is that the M11 *is* quite a bit faster than the R9600 Mobility Pro, right? Or maybe they should have called the part the Mobility Radeon 9800 SE? ;)
  • CaptainSpectacular - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link

    ok ATI, what's with the naming scheme. this is absolutely awful! This part has nothing to do with the desktop 9700. I understand the dilema as presented, but what's wrong with 9650? or some other similar variation? the name 9700 is flat out misleading, regardless of how you justify it. This is almost as bad as nvidia calling the NV17 a GeForce4 series card (ok, not nearly that bad, but same idea...)
  • Slappi - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link

    Well if it is BIG I would think the biggest notebook maker is Toshiba and they are all Nvidia now so....... that would be huge.

    Do I get a cookie?
  • Andrew Ku - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link

    #6 - Sorry, no hints. You can count all the big guys on a single hand, and so there isn't much point in the old'e guess and check.
  • yomer - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link

    Andrew please! Tell me that the big name is not IBM!!
  • Andrew Ku - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link

    #2 - From our talks with the OEMs and ODMs, we understand that the pricing between the two chips is basically pocket change for prospective notebooks owners.

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