Test Setup

MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000, AIW 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.49, ATI Catalyst 3.9

Direct 3D	OpenGL

Above are a couple screenshots of our video settings. While the screenshots show AA, and AF to be disabled, we will enable them when doing the AA/AF tests. All driver settings were set to high quality.

Test Software will be:

Unreal Tournament 2003
Halo
NHL Hockey 2004
Max Payne 2
Splinter Cell

The comparison video cards will be the XFX 5600 Ultra, and FIC Radeon 9600 Pro. The Radeon 9600 Pro has a 25MHz memory clock speed disadvantage, so we thought it would be interesting to check it out. We'll also be covering image quality and overclocking after the gaming benchmarks. was used to measure in-game performance where applicable.

For those of you who don't know, there are a lot of problems with high levels of AA and some Direct 3D games, which happens to be the majority of those tested today. We'll present some games where we didn't experience abnormalities, but in many cases, 6xAA was faster than 4xAA, which cannot be, but was the case during benchmarks.

Unreal Tournament 2003

We used the from [H]ard|OCP and selected the high quality batch run at all resolutions. We'll be presenting Antalus benchmark, with AA/AF on and off.

Antalus - 1024x768, Maximum Quality

Antalus - 1280x1024, Maximum Quality

At all resolutions, and various AA and AF levels, the AIW 9600 Pro outpaces the FIC 9600 Pro just barely. The extra memory speed seems to be the deciding factor here. The XFX FX 5600 Ultra doesn't do as well as the Radeon based cards, but does a good job nonetheless. Keep in mind that the FX 5600 doesn't do 6xAA or 16xAF, hence the N/A scores.

Halo

A big hit on the XBOX, no doubt there are plenty of gamers heralding this as the second messiah when the announcement was made that it was coming to the PC. Ok, maybe not, but it does have a scripted demo which cobbles in-game cutscenes together and tally up a score. These are the results we'll be presenting, as well as using FRAPS to gauge real-gaming performance.

Video settings were configured at 1024 x 768 (and 1280x1024), Refresh rate of 100 Hz, No Vsync, Specular, shadow, and decals set to yes and Texture Quality set to High. Note that AA is broken here, and although framerates do reflect AA changes, image quality does not alter one bit.

Halo @ 1024x768 and 1280x1024 w/Timedemo

Like we've seen in our UT2003 benchmarks, the AIW variant of the Radeon 9600 Pro holds a slight lead here. This is a scripted benchmark, and not a true indication of actual gameplay, so let's take a look at real-world framerates with Halo and Fraps.

Halo @ 1024x768 and 1280x1024 w/Fraps

For all Fraps benchmarks (except NHL 2004), we ran through a repeatable route through a level, and ended up with an average framerate reading which Fraps outputs to a log file. In the case of Halo, I went around the initial control room, did some key actions, and went into the energy powerup chamber.

Both ATI cards perform within 1% of each other, with the AIW's memory clock speed advantage likely accounting for the improved performance. The FX5600 Ultra makes a strong showing, but easily trails the ATI based hardware.

Halo @ 1024x768, % time

Looking back at the Halo timedemo, we also gathered some information on the percentage of time it spent at various framerates.

What we learn from this graph is the AIW 9600 Pro spends most of the time below 60 frames per second, but more specifically, 96% of the time was spent under 50fps. Overall, the majority of the time was spent between 20 to 50fps, at 1024x768, which works out right based on our average timedemo benchmark score.