ATI’s Radeon 9700 (R300) – Crowning the New King

Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter

We ran Serious Sam 2 with the Extreme Quality settings enabled but we left anisotropic filtering disabled, which normally tilts the benchmark in favor of ATI since NVIDIA anisotropic filtering algorithm takes a larger performance hit. Keep this in mind as the Radeon 9700 continues to perform incredibly well:

Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter 'Little Trouble' 1024x768x32 Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.15 1.00 0.56 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1

At 1024x768 the Radeon 9700 can only outperform the Ti 4600 by 15%, but let's stress the card a bit more and see what happens...

Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter 'Little Trouble' 1280x1024x32 Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.40 1.00 0.62 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2

That's more like it, a 40% differential is what we're paying $400 for. Can we get 50%?

Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter 'Little Trouble' 1600x1200x32 Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.50 1.00 0.65 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2

...you've got it, a 50% performance lead at 1600x1200 in Serious Sam 2. Impressive but we're still recovering from how fast this thing is under UT2003.