ATI's Radeon 9500 Pro

Comanche 4 Performance

We rarely benchmark with flight simulators for a handful of reasons but mostly that they are usually not very demanding on GPU power and are limited by CPU performance. It is also very difficult to find repeatable benchmark capabilities within most flight simulators; timedemo-like functionality isn't something that's normally built in.

Novalogic's Comanche 4 was an exception to the latter and thus we started using it in our reviews. The graphics aren't incredibly stunning but having another genre represented in our reviews never hurts:

Comanche 4 Demo - Benchmark Test 1024x768 - Maximum Detail ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 53.9 53.6 53.5 52.5 51.1 50.3 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 32 | 43 | 54 | 65

Most flight simulators are very CPU bound and Comanche 4 is no exception; here's a situation where all of the contenders perform similarly.

Comanche 4 Demo - Benchmark Test 1280x1024 - Maximum Detail ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 53.6 52.9 50.6 48.8 45.8 44.2 | 0 | 11 | 21 | 32 | 43 | 54 | 64

As the resolution increases the pack begins to spread apart with the Radeon 9500 Pro falling just shy of the GeForce4 Ti 4200.

Comanche 4 Demo - Benchmark Test 1600x1200 - Maximum Detail ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 52.5 50.5 44.7 41.3 36.7 20.1 | 0 | 11 | 21 | 32 | 42 | 53 | 63

Performance at 1600x1200 for the Radeon 9500 drops off considerably, while the GeForce4s and Radeon 9700s stick together at the forefront of the chart.