ATI's Radeon 9500 Pro - Now Shipping & Faster

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 9500 Pro (Final) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 55.6 53.9 53.6 53.5 52.5 51.1 50.3 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 56 | 67

Once again we stuck with the drivers you can find online for the Radeon 9700 Pro to prove the same point about the influence of the new Radeon 9500 Pro drivers - they are clearly responsible for turning the performance around for the 9500.

Comanche 4 Demo - Benchmark Test 1280x1024 - Maximum Detail ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon 9700 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (Final) NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 53.6 52.9 52.0 50.6 48.8 45.8 44.2 | 0 | 11 | 21 | 32 | 43 | 54 | 64

Here the Radeon 9500 Pro is slightly faster than a Ti 4600; you can thank the new drivers for the 18% increase in performance over the original card we tested.

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