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- Date:
- Tuesday , March 09, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ABIT 9800XT Review
ABIT’s new Radeon 9800XT versus a GeForceFX 5950Ultra with the newest drivers. We evaluate gameplay and image quality in eleven current games.
Max Payne 2
(DirectX 9)
These are the settings we used on both cards. You will note everything is set to the highest quality and Antialiasing is selected from within the game options.
We used FRAPS frame counter and MP2's Part II Chapter 3 (Condemned Building cont'd) for our framerate evaluation. We used a repeatable manual run-throughs in this level. Part II Chapter 3 has a lot of particle, explosion and fire effects in it making for an intense graphic experience, in fact probably the most intensive graphic burden in this game making it a worse-case-scenario.
ABIT 9800XT – With Max Payne 2 we were able to run it at a high resolution with high quality settings, 1280x1024 with 4XAA and 8XAF on the ABIT 9800XT. The level we used for testing is probably the most intensive level graphically speaking. So if you can achieve good performance in this map you will experience great performance throughout the game. We did run through many other maps to make sure this was the case. We found the game very playable at these settings and image quality was excellent with no noted problems.
GeForceFX 5950U – In Max Payne 2 we found 1280x1024 with 4XAA and 8XAF were the best settings for this card. Though overall the performance was less than the ABIT 9800XT. As you can see the average FPS of the ABIT 9800XT was 79FPS and the GeForceFX 5950Ultra was 68FPS in our test run. This means that in certain situations where the ABIT 9800XT dipped down into the 40’s for intense scenes the GeForceFX 5950Ultra was in the 30’s in those same scenes, right on the edge of being unplayable. So the ABIT 9800XT had a little more performance room to play with.
Image Quality:
In the first screenshot comparison above the big thing we notice is the AA quality. It appears that even though 4XAA is enabled on the GFFX 5950Ultra it is not Anti-Aliasing some edges. We did confirm AA is enabled because in other areas you could see AA doing its job. In fact in this picture you can see that AA is working on some parts of the car. If you zoom in on the areas we have indicated you will see that AA is doing exactly what it is suppose to in those areas. It just doesn’t appear to be working anywhere else. So clearly the ABIT 9800XT has much better AA quality in this game.
In the second screenshot comparison above we can again see the better AA quality that the ABIT 9800XT exhibits. There is however a slight color difference in the pipes on the ceiling between the two cards. If you will notice there is an orange looking color on the pipes that seems more defined on the GFFX 5950Ultra than it does on the ABIT 9800XT.
Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness
(DirectX 9)
These are the video settings we used. Note that Pixel Shader 2.0 is used and everything is set to 32bit color and Trilinear Filtering and that Glow and Depth of Field are disabled.
For Tomb Raider: AOD we used the v49 patch to enable demo playback capability in the game. For our testing we recorded our own private demo in the Paris1c map. It is important to note that we played this demo back at regular game speeds and used FRAPS to gather the framerate every second and that it represents gameplay 100%.
ABIT 9800XT – Tomb Raider: AOD uses DirectX 9 shaders very heavily. Because of this Tomb Raider: AOD makes a good game to test shader use. Because it relies heavily on shaders we aren’t able to run this game at as high as a resolution. With our ABIT 9800XT we found 1024x768 to be the best resolution to run at. At this resolution we could enable 4XAA and 8XAF to clear up the jaggies and give us sharp textures. With the ABIT 9800XT we were able to enable Pixel Shader 2.0 Shadows a well. We did disable Glow and Depth of Field which impact performance quite a bit and do distract from gameplay for some.
GeForceFX 5950U – We found Tomb Raider: AOD to be most playable at 1024x768 with 4XAA and 8XAF enabled, same as the ABIT 9800XT, though the ABIT 9800XT offered better image quality. Surprisingly the GeForceFX 5950Ultra was able to achieve 34FPS as the minimum while the ABIT 9800XT achieved 32FPS. The one thing we do not know is if the GeForceFX 5950Ultra is running in Floating Point 16 or Floating Point 32 for this game. All we can do is compare image quality below to see which one looks better.
In the screenshot comparison above we chose this location where shaders are used to create the water effect with reflections. We really don’t see any difference in the shader image quality. Even when we zoomed in there were not any noticeable differences. The only image quality differences in this game were that of AA since the ABIT 9800XT has better AA quality. NVIDIA has definitely cleaned up their performance and IQ within this particular game.