ATI Radeon 9800 XT: We take a look at ATI's flagship pixel pusher, and see where it fits in today's and tomorrow's market.
Date:
February 4, 2004
Manufacturer:
Written By:
Price:
Benchmarks
Spec Viewperf 7.0
Spec is one of the standard professional OpenGL based benchmarks for video cards. While this is a benchmark designed for professional cards, lets see how these cards that we have here work in professional applications. Lets see the results.
SPECviewperf 7.0
Parhelia
MSI FX5900 Ultra
MSI FX5900 Ultra Oc'd
ATI Radeon 9800XT
ATI Radeon 9800XT Oc'd
ATI Radeon AiW 9000
3dsmax-02
9.255
14.22
14.65
12.33
12.79
5.819
Drv-09
19.51
52.36
53.62
29.59
29.41
31.3
Dx-08
51.57
39.52
39.6
71.27
72.37
41.94
Light-06
9.801
11.26
11.32
12.55
12.51
11.25
ProE-02
4.364
15.19
15.8
11.73
11.68
10.02
Ugs-03
6.286
7.717
8.519
18.11
18.15
5.975
We can see that the Radeon 9800XT and the FX5900U swap the top spots in the test. The DX-08 and Drv-09 are the biggest variATIons, first with the ATI card by 80% in DX-08, then the FX5900U by 77% in Drv-09. Otherwise the two cards swap small victories, with neither one actually winning more than the other, the results are 3-3 for each card. Compared to the 9000Pro we see that Drv-09, DX-08, and Ugs-03 are all limited by the budget core, however in the other three benchmarks we see the 9800XT is markedly faster than the AiW 9000 Pro. How about a Direct X 9ish game demo, how is performance here?
X2: The Threat
This is one of the few space sims out there that can be used as a benchmark. It was released late last year and provides much the same type of universe as Freelancer, with you being able to explore the universe. So lets see the performance in this rolling demo first 1024*768 without AA and ansio.
Video Card
Minimum FPS
Average FPS
Maximum FPS
MSI FX5900 Ultra Oc'd:
N/A
64.117
N/A
MSI FX5900 Ultra:
N/A
61.824
N/A
Radeon 9000 Pro AiW:
N/A
25.921
N/A
ATI Radeon 9800XT:
N/A
51.36
N/A
ATI Radeon 9800XT 459/385:
N/A
53.05
N/A
Matrox Parhelia:
N/A
18.997
N/A
We see an interesting result here, the FX5900U beats the 9800XT by 20% both in overclocked mode and at stock speeds. The ATI card only gains another 3% performance wise by overclocking the GPU and memory. Otherwise the 9800XT is about twice as fast as the 9000 Pro and about 2.75X faster than the Parhelia. How does the 9800XT perform when we enable AA and ansiotropic filtering?
Video Card
Minimum FPS
Average FPS
Maximum FPS
MSI FX5900 Ultra Oc'd:
N/A
47.911
N/A
MSI FX5900 Ultra:
N/A
44.668
N/A
Radeon 9000 Pro AiW:
N/A
7.643
N/A
ATI Radeon 9800XT:
N/A
38.49
N/A
ATI Radeon 9800XT 459/385:
N/A
40.11
N/A
Matrox Parhelia:
N/A
16.504
N/A
We see similar results to what we have seen when no AA or ansio were enabled. The difference is somewhat smaller, more like 17-19% but this is still a large amount comparitively. While this is only about 6-7fps it is still fairly significant for these results. Otherwise the Parhelia makes a better showing than without these high settings enabled and bests the 9000Pro but still is about 2.5 times slower than the 9800XT.
Splinter Cell
Splinter Cell is one of the very good spy/thinking third person shooter games. The graphics are very well done and the levels make extreme use of textures and polygons. The demo we are using, Caspian Oil Refinery, is one of the most demanding parts of the game, so frame rates will not be extremely high. However how do these cards perform?
Video Card
Minimum FPS
Average FPS
Maximum FPS
MSI FX5900 Ultra Oc'd:
35
49.62
74
MSI FX5900 Ultra:
31
44.63
74
Radeon 9800XT:
33
48.74
78
Radeon 9800XT 459/395:
36
52.46
77
Matrox Parhelia:
7
13.27
22
We see that in this test the 9800XT takes the lead as far as frame rate is concerned. There is a 9% difference between the 5900U and the 9800XT at stock speeds, though the max and minimum frame rates aren't much different. Otherwise the 9800XT gives a 7.6% increase in frame rate via the overclock which is almost perfectly in line with the clock speed increase seen here. Lastly we notice that the Radeon 9800XT offers just under four times the performance of the Parhelia in this stressful test. How about at 1600*1200, as this game has problems with AA and ansiotropic filtering, how does this card fair?
Video Card
Minimum FPS
Average FPS
Maximum FPS
MSI FX5900 Ultra Oc'd:
19
32.95
61
MSI FX5900 Ultra:
18
29.54
45
Radeon 9800XT:
24
33.6
52
Radeon 9800XT 459/395:
25
36.24
57
Matrox Parhelia:
4
7.76
12
We can see that the 9800XT is pulling away from the FX5900U here. At 1024 the overclocked 5900U managed to best the standard clocked 9800XT, but not in this test, as the 9800 is slightly faster (read less than 2%). When overclocked we see the same increase that was evident at 1024 with a 7.8% increase in frame rate resulting from the overclocking of the system. Again the Parhelia provides a weak result here, with the Radeon being just under five times faster when overclocked.
