Date:
Thursday , July 17, 2003
Google +1

M10 - Rise of the Silicon

The Radeon Mobility 9600 will shortly be turned loose on the gaming world. We decided to put the Mobility 9600 head to head with a mainstream desktop 3D accelerator to see how powerful it really is.

continued...

Novalogic's Comanche 4 Demo - Direct3D

The standard Comanche 4 benchmark utility was used to test each platform's DX8 performance. Here, tests were run at resolutions of 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 with varying levels of enhanced image quality settings.

Article Image

Looking at the results for Comanche 4, we see that the desktop Radeon 9600 holds a slight performance advantage over the mobility 9600. Although the desktop graphics card does exhibit an advantage with no FSAA or anisotropic filtering enabled, the performance delta is relatively small. However, once these features begin to be enabled and raised to higher settings, that performance delta between the two platforms begins to increase dramatically.

In the case where 4xAA and 16xAF are enabled, the desktop Radeon 9600 is offering more than twice the frame-rate of the mobile chipset, which is now dangerously close to the 10fps mark despite running lower resolutions. The reason for the sudden drop off in comparative frames is due to the smaller amount memory on our mobile solution. All in all though, our Radeon Mobility 9600 shows that it has the right stuff.

Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL

Serious Sam 2 was run utilizing the latest official patch 1.07 and Beyond3D’s Extreme Quality script. Throughout testing, benchmarking was done using OpenGL mode at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1024.

Article Image

Moving our attention towards Serious Sam 2, we see that the Mobility 9600 is again trailing the desktop platform in terms of performance. However, unlike the previous case where the mobile platform’s performance began a drastic downward spiral, the card seems to thrive on the OpenGL engine of this title. Even at a resolution of 1024x768, the game is well above the 40fps cutoff while running 4xAA and 16xAF! This is truly an impressive feat for a laptop, as it represents both an image quality and performance benchmark which was not even possible on the previous generation mobile graphics cards.