Splinter Cell

So now we try to kill our video cards, Splinter Cell (using the Demo) is probably the hardest current release out there for graphics cards. This will give us a look into what future games have in store for the 9600 XT, as they will be as hard, if not harder on it.

The 9600 XT makes a damn good run at High Quality play, we are scratching at 30FPS @ 1024. We will still need to tweak the card to get 60FPS out of it, but not to the degree of the 5600 Ultra. Although we are getting closer, these results lead me to believe that Half Life 2 might be run at 8x6, or highly tweaked 1024x768. Of course, at this level of card, we will not be running either with AA/AF on ?.

Max Payne 2

Max Payne 2 is a nice test of DirectX 9, using FRAPs we were able to get some frame rate samples. The results for Max Payne 2 were derived from 3 samples, the first two were in the first Hospital Scene and the 3rd was in the beginning of the 2nd Warehouse scene.

Max Payne 2 - 1024x768, Maximum Quality

Max Payne 2 - 1280x1024, Maximum Quality

As you can see, AA/AF makes almost no difference in Max Payne 2 as far as the 9600XT is concerned. The 5600 Ultra, however, gets a definite performance hit when applying AA/AF. Even with the latest “DirectX9 Fix” drivers from Nvidia, it appears that ATI still holds an advantage in this category.

Call of Duty

A new entry here at VL is the use of Call of Duty, CoD is a very nice variation of the Q3 engine, it should prove to be a nice OpenGL reference for the video cards (and we can get away from the silly FPS readings in Quake 3 / Jedi Knight and RTCW as well).

Call of Duty - 1024x768, Maximum Detail

Call of Duty - 1280x1024, Maximum Detail

As you can see by the results of VL's own timedemo on the Brecourt map, CoD is a good test producing lower frame rates thanks to it's highly tweaked Quake III Arena Engine, most notably the Texture and Lighting portion. As you can see from the graph, the 9600 XT more than outperforms the 5600 Ultra in this OpenGL environment. The 9600 XT even allows for very good playability at 2xAA/8xAF using a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 resolution. You could use 6xAA/8xAF on the 9600 XT (in 1024x768 resolution), but sub 60 fps in my book means back it up a notch. The 5600 Ultra plays CoD well at 1024x768 with No AA/AF, but fails miserably at giving you frame rates that you can actually play with at any other higher setting. Very interesting for a game that is based on an aging Quake 3 engine.

Catalyst 3.9

ATI was good enough to release the anticipated Cat 3.9's while I was finishing up this review. I quickly downloaded them and un-installed the 3.8's using . The first thing you notice is the OverDrive tab, what appears to be missing is your ability to actually control the speed at which your card runs. It appears ATI wants to control your OC dependent on the temperature of the GPU, all though there is no tab that allows you to read this temperature diode that is supposedly on board? I ran a few test with OverDrive turned off using Splinter Cell, CoD and UT2K3.

As you can see there was not much of a difference in the performance between the 3.8's and 3.9's, the OverDrive feature did add a little boost, but not what I would consider relevant and not up to what I was able to get from the Rage3D boost. I re-installed Rage3D and checked the Overclocker with OverDrive enabled. ATI had increased the GPU to 526.5 MHz, but memory was still at 300MHz, this could be the reason behind the slim increase using OverDrive comparative from the Rage3D increase.

Editor's Note: Please be aware that the Catalyst 3.9 drivers may break OpenGL for gaming purposes. We did no experience any OpenGL game issues with the 9600 Pro or XT, but all our All-in-Wonder variants required the hotfix to repair. You can learn more from our discussion in this thread.

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