ATI's Radeon 9600 Pro - Another Win for ATI

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.

Unreal Tournament 2003 1024x768 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro ATI Radeon 9600 Pro NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 173.0 165.8 136.8 131.0 129.8 106.8 100.3 | 0 | 35 | 69 | 104 | 138 | 173 | 208

Unreal Tournament 2003 1280x1024 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro ATI Radeon 9600 Pro NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 117.2 112.1 92.3 89.1 85.7 70.6 67.3 | 0 | 23 | 47 | 70 | 94 | 117 | 141

Unreal Tournament 2003 1600x1200 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9500 Pro NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra ATI Radeon 9600 Pro NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 9500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 77.7 73.0 59.3 57.8 55.9 45.6 44.8 | 0 | 16 | 31 | 47 | 62 | 78 | 93

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.