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Radeon 9700 Gaming Experience

A subjective look at our Radeon 9700 gaming experience. We came, we saw, the Radeon 9700 conquered the benchmarks.

These were the battle cries being heard coming from the lips of the ATi upper echelon: A very special day; World beating launch; CTF – Crush the force; Driving the visual experience revolution; New generation that will be the foundation of computer graphics for years to come. We have all heard the marketing fluff for years now, and we have all learned to take it with a grain of salt. Hell let’s face it, if we could believe everything we heard out of the hardware companies, there would be no reason nor need for little hardware information sites like the [H].

ATi knows marketing spin is part of the business and we expect it, but Paul Ayscough, ATi Director of Corporate Marketing, and Dave Orton, ATI Chief Operating Officer, both made statements that would get you thinking that what they were about to present the world was not your normal everyday video card.

As you see by our front page Featured Articles section, we have a review of the Radeon 9000 Pro and a Radeon 9700 white paper article posted today, but I wanted to put together something that really conveyed our thoughts and feelings about the most important part of the Radeon 9700 experience. That being, “How was it when playing games?” And, of course, along with that some benchmarks. ATi has asked us to not show solid benchmark numbers at this time as there is some final tuning to do on the Radeon 9700, but they do not have an issue with us talking about them.

We met up with the ATi PR team for a lunchtime meeting and were promised two hours of hands on time, which quickly turned into three hours, with the Radeon 9700 mounted in a top-end Pentium 4 2.53GHz system with 512MB of PC1066 RDRAM. Not a shabby box in the least, one that nearly anyone would be proud to own. They asked us if we wanted to see the demos and we politely turned them down and asked if we could get right to the meat of things and run some benchmarks. That was no problem with them at all. So we started running benchmarks and playing games.

Certainly the high end enthusiast video card market has changed in the last few years and I saw no real reason to waste my time with “low” resolutions, say anything below 1600x1200. If you are going to spend US$400 on a video card to play today’s games, I think having to use any resolution below that is simply unacceptable. Then of course if I am going to spend 400 big ones on a VidCard, shouldn’t I get 4X Antialiasing as well? And come to think of it, if I am going to pay $400 of my hard earned greenbacks on a VidCard, shouldn’t I get ridiculously high sampling Anisotropic Filtering too? You are damn right you should, as anything else at that pricing level is simply unacceptable.

Gaming:

Quake 3 – 1600x1200x32; 4XAA; 16XAF – Running demo 001 in v1.17 the Radeon 9700 easily topped the minimum allowed deathmatch frame rate of 60fps. Compared to the Ti4600 on the same system, the Radeon 9700 easily capped its frame rates by a blistering 35% with no AF enabled on the GF4 card. Quite honestly it was a sight to behold; it was just moving too fast to really appreciate the visual quality. Yeah, we know that the last thing you need in a Q3 deathmatch is all of the eye candy turned on, but we did it anyway. We then dropped in 16 bots on the smallest level we could find with Nightmare skills and started to tear them up, or it might have been the other way around. Running and gunning with gibs flying and blood splattering left and right in all its visual glory. Rocket jumps with a mid-air 180 degree turn over your opponent with time to squeeze off a rocket shot was not an issue. It was simply pretty amazing. We saw no unacceptable slowdowns or hairy artifacts flashing across the screen. Smooth deathmatch goodness, just the way it has always meant to be. Running the draw_fps command we were able to keep an eye on the framerates in the upper corner of our screen, keeping us aware of what performance we were getting. With lots of action on the screen, our framerates hung in the 70 to 90fps range and at times it would spike over 200. The only times I saw an unacceptable frame rate was when I was lying dead on the ground watching the spray of my own blood settle back to the deathmatch arena floor, but even then with the Radeon 9700 handling the transparency alpha blending for nearly every pixel on the screen it still never dipped below 40fps. Quake 3 on the Radeon 9700 was simply heaven and stopping play long enough to look around showed off the Quake 3 maps’ textures and other visuals like I think the guys at id wanted them to be seen three years ago.

Jedi Knight 2 – 1600x1200x32; 4XAA; 16XAF – The “jk2ffa” demo had no issues racing past the century mark and outran the Ti4600 by a 20% margin, again with no AF enabled on the Ti4600. When I played this game through the first time on my Ti4600 at home, I finally had to bump down the resolution to 1280x1024 in order to keep a crisp and responsive frame rate that did not leave my mousing feeling mushy. Maybe I am spoiled or maybe I am just a bit less tolerant to any lag, but blasting through the first level at 1600x1200 on the Radeon 9700 did not once leave me feeling as though I needed to back down my quality expectations in order to have the experience I wanted. And let’s face it, killing Strom Troopers that look damn near identical to the ones we have seen on the big screen is pretty satisfying, but of course that is not as much fun as whacking a few Nazis.

Castle Wolfenstein - 1600x1200x32; 4XAA; 16XAF – Since we were not going to be posting hard benchmark numbers, we simply got into playing a bit. Once again, we were met with a fluid experience. It was all effortless. No figuring out what I needed to turn off in the visual settings in order to smooth out my gameplay. The method was quite simple, turn every eye candy option to its maximum and play till your fingers cramped up; although we did not have that long.

Medal of Honor Allied Assault - 1600x1200x32; 4XAA; 16XAF – We ran into some immediate problems here when going into the Basic Training facility to take a look around. We were met with two issues that were causing extremely noticeable visual artifacts. First, the textures were simply not being filtered properly, giving that “shimmer” and “crawling” look that you have most likely seen in the past. Second, you could see the boundry around the map. It simply showed the drawn edges of a big cube you were standing in. Of course that is not supposed to happen, as it kills off the immersion factor quickly. We pulled in the engineers to figure out any quick fixes to what was going on, but none were to be found immediately. ATi has certainly been working on becoming a company that has the ability to execute, and I can say that they identified the problems we found and also figured out the solutions to them in less than 24 hours. I did not get to play MOHAA, but we all surely will later on.

Benchmarks:

UT2003 - 1600x1200x32; 4XAA; 16XAF – The Radeon 9700 doused the Ti4600 by about 25%. Now get a load of this, that is with the GF4 running without AA or AF. With 4XAA turned on the Ti4600 was crushed by nearly 300%. The Radeon 9700 simply made quick work of the Ti4600 under this UT2003 demo.

3DMark2001 – Using the default benchmark at 10x7 with no AA nor AF turned on, the Radeon 9700 exceeded the Ti4600’s score by approximately 20%. Where most of the score boost came from was the Nature demo as the Radeon 9700 was posting frame rates of right at 200% of the Ti4600 numbers.

Comanche 4 Demo - 1600x1200x32; 4XAA; 16XAF – Again, approximately 25% ahead of the Ti4600 with the Ti running no AA or AF compared to the full on settings of the Radeon 9700.

Last, but certainly not least, a benchmark we don’t use as it is made by NVIDIA, tweaked by NVIDIA, and configured for NVIDIA hardware, the Chameleon demo. At 1600x1200, the Radeon 9700 doubled the Ti4600 scores.

Conclusions & Delusions:

ATi’s Radeon 9700 delivered the most enjoyable gaming experience we have ever had on a PC. It is undoubtedly the speed king as we have seen it top GeForce4 Ti4600 scores in the last few days from between 25% to 300%. ATi is claiming double the performance of the nearest competition, and they can certainly prove that on more than just a couple of benchmarks. It is ATi’s turn to wear the crown and their hard work on the R300 over the last 18 months surely shows as they are bringing a product to market that they should be fully proud of.

Is NVIDIA going to come back with their NV30 chipset? Oh, you had better believe it, and you know very well that NVIDIA has no love of being in second place. Still, NVIDIA is behind schedule with the NV30 as it has been plagued with production problems stemming from the .13 micron solution they are implementing. Be assured though that the .13 will give them a definite advantage when they finally do get a product to market, which will very likely be this year.

I know a lot of noise is being made about UT2003, but the world’s eyes are on DOOM]|[ and ATi is guaranteeing that purchasing a Radeon 9700 will not leave you flat or void of eye candy when the game finally makes it way to the gaming public. Certainly The Carmack is behind the R300 core as the best solution at the moment for anyone wanting to play DOOM]|[.

All in all, the Radeon 9700 is absolutely the best gaming card that money can buy and ATi has committed to start shipping cards in 30 days. They have earned their moment in the spotlight and deserve kudos from the gaming community. Speaking with Dave Orton, the COO of ATi, he seemed more excited about the next product after this so he could push their R300 core into the mainstream. It just keeps getting better and better and there really is no end in sight. The Radeon 9700 is the dawn of a new era in gaming, and a very welcomed one at that.

Did I mention it was really really fast too?

Check out the Radeon 9700 demos over at ATi's site, they are more than worth the look.