![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- 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.
Splinter Cell - Direct3D
UbiSoft's Splinter Cell was used as the final benchmark for this comparison. Here, initial testing used the timedemo for the 1_1_2Tbilisi map which is built into the latest 1.2 patch. For further insight into each card's performance, Beyond3D's Oil Refinery Demo was also used. Keep in mind that Tbilisi better represents "real-world" gameplay when it comes to Splinter Cell while the Oil Ref Demo is strictly a shader test.
Surprisingly enough, the 64MB mobile graphics card manages to pull away slightly in this relatively new title. Overall, the two platforms appear to be very evenly matched as the performance delta between each system is less than 5fps in every scenario. Enabling 8x AF does not have any significant repercussions upon overall performance, regardless of the resolution.
Glancing at the results for the Oil Refinery benchmark, we see a great deal of separation between the two cards. Although the Mobility 9600 gives chase to the Radeon 9600 when running a resolution of 800x600, we see an entirely different scenario once the resolution is increased. Here, the mobile platform’s average frame-rate is less than half that of the desktop chipset. Considering how taxing this demo is upon pixel shaders, one would assume that the desktop 9600 had superior shader speed to the Mobility 9600. In addition, the desktop card’s additional 64MB of memory will certainly give the card a bit more headroom and a significant advantage over the mobile platform in taxing situations.