![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , October 24, 2002
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro
ATI is continuing to change the video card market place. Today is the launch of ATI’s 9700, 9500 Pro and 9500 VPUs. We take a first hand look at the 9500 Pro and see if it is poised to take the performance mainstream market by storm.
Unreal Tournament 2003
For our tests we're using our homegrown batch file and custom INI settings for High Quality testing. We're working on an end user version to be released at a future date that will benchmark with the exact same settings I'm using here today. The two maps we'll use are Antalus and Inferno flyby benchmark mode.
In the Antalus map the first thing that we really notice is how the results at the higher resolutions are much lower than at 1024x768. Up at the high resolutions this game becomes very fill-rate limited, while down at the lower resolutions it's very much CPU limited, even at 1024x768. What's also remarkable is that in 1024x768 and 1280x1024 the 9500 Pro is slightly faster than the Ti 4600. Inferno map is a bit more intensive, though it seems the GF4 Ti 4600 and 9500 Pro are pretty much dead on in this map. Let's see what happens when we enabled AA and AF.
The above two graphs are with 2X AA and 8X AF enabled in Antalus and Inferno. The 9500 Pro is quite slow at 1600x1200 due to the smaller 64MB of local memory. But at 1280x1024 and 1024x768, it's able to beat out the GF4 Ti 4600 by quite a large margin. In the Antalus map there's about a 25-27 FPS difference at 1024x768 and 1280x1024 compared to the 9700 Pro.