Date:
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

You have heard the rumors and the speculation. Now see what the Radeon 9000, based on the RV250 Visual Processing Unit, is really all about. You might be surprised with what ATi has done.

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Quake3

We know Quake3 may not be the best benchmark to exploit DirectX 8.1 features in hardware, but it's still a good benchmark because it shows a linear increase as CPU and video card performance increases. It shouldn't be your final decision maker, but it's good for comparison. We decided to use a better demo run instead of the old Demo001 for this comparison. We're using Quake3 with Point Release 1.30 (which is the latest Point Release that works with Q3Bench) and the demo four.dm_66. We ran at the maximum settings in Q3Bench.

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Even in this game, the Radeon 9000 Pro is still lagging behind the regular 8500 and GF4 Ti 4200. The largest difference is at 1280x1024. Even with that performance, the game is still incredibly smooth and very playable at 1600x1200 for sure. So if Quake3 is your game, the Radeon 9000 Pro still performs exceptionally well in it at all resolutions.

Serious Sam 2

Serious Sam 2 is a fun OpenGL game with stunning graphics. In this game things such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering go a long way to increase image quality. We're using the absolute latest version from Croteam, which is patch version 1.07 for the full version game of Serious Sam 2. I'm using the customized B3D scripts so that the comparison is fair for all cards. The Radeon 9000 Pro and Radeon 8500 were set to 16X anisotropic in the Extreme Quality test while the GeForce4 Ti 4200 was set to its max of 8X anisotropic.

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There's a turnabout here with the Radeon 9000 Pro taking the lead with anisotropic! It’s possible the reason for the increase is due to the newer driver the Radeon 9000 Pro is using. Whether it is or not, I’m not complaining. Anisotropic performance is superior to the GF4 Ti 4200 just as it should be.

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The lead doesn’t stay with the Radeon 9000 Pro. With no anisotropic filtering on, however, it’s close at 1024x768.

Jedi Knight 2

I used settings of: Color Depth: 32 bit, Full Screen: On, Geometric Detail: High, Texture Detail: Very High, Texture Quality: 32 bit, Texture Filter: Trilinear, Detailed Shaders: On.

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In the past we've seen poor performance at higher resolutions with only 64MB of RAM. It's the same case we're seeing here with the Radeon 9000 Pro, though the game is actually still very playable even at 1600x1200.