Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro Review
Benchmarks
We tested the Sapphire ATI 9700Pro video card on a platform of the following configuration:
(Hi-End system):
- Processor Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz;
- Motherboard - Intel 850EMV (i850E, 512 Mb RDRAM PC800, AGP 4x);
- Sound card Creative Sound Blaster Audigy;
- HDD Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 7200 rpm
We tested the performance of AsusV9280S with the following suites and applications:
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein - Checkpoint demo (OpenGL, Quake 3 core);
- Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo (Direct3D stress test benchmark);
- DooM III E3 Demo - extremely resource-hungry overkill benchmark with shaders, bump-mapping, OpenGL and lots of other stuff to be topical by the end of 2003;
- Codecreatures demo - complex DirectX 8 benchmark;
- 3DMark 2001SE - synthetic Direct3D benchmark.
3DMark 2001SE
On the one hand, this benchmark is the most impartial since the accelerator is tested throughout the whole range of 3D applications, and the results are made up of data received from an aggregate of various sub-benchmarks. Unfortunately, you can't test the cutting-edge features of the new accelerators with this benchmark, but this is not yet topical since other accelerators don't support them either yet, and to date there are still no games made especially for DirectX9 and ATi Radeon 9700 features. Those cool new benchmarks won't appear earlier than new state-of-the-art accelerators matching these functionalities hit the market. We are expecting the release of Unreal 2 and 3DMark 2003 especially for testing the performance of both state-of-the-art chips and Microsoft's new API DirectX 9. Only these benchmarks will be able to test the performance difference between the NV30 and R300. As for now, what we can do is to compare the R300 versus the past-generation video cards:
As is seen from this benchmark, the difference between the current NVidia's top-end chip and the card in question becomes visible only at higher resolutions, and the R300 leadership is by no means outstanding. That the ATI's product is taking the lead over nVidia's at performance is already a good showing. At the low resolutions, no difference is seen at all, and the Ti4600 is leaving the contender behind. It is absolutely evident the low resolutions are strongly affected by the processor resources. Keep in mind that in our tests we used the next to last Pentium4 model. It's very likely that on systems of lower clock speeds the difference at test results will be within the error.
The key distinction is not in the FPS, but in the functionality. As for now, the software is still unable to make much of the maximum benefit exhibited by Radeon. But Unreal 2 and DooM 3 as well as some other games are already coming and will be able to make use if not all but most of the R300 potentials.
Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
A very hard and resource-hungry benchmark producing a torture of a load both on the processor and the video subsystem.
That's where R300 is showing all its muscles. Be the processor a bit weaker, the results for high and low resolutions would have differed in the minimum. Only at the maximum resolutions the load was enough to free the result from processor dependence and take all the contenders to town. In the two low resolutions, ALL the cards showed strong processor dependence, which means a processor much faster than Pentium4 2.8 GHz would be needed to increase performance, but the higher the resolutions the more vivid the difference is.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
This benchmark can be freely regarded as a processor dependence test. This benchmark is most frequently used for testing weak video cards since its requirements to the graphics accelerator can't be regarded as high enough, because the Quake3 engine is quite an easy task for modern accelerators.
The trend is absolutely predictable, and the result was the same for all the resolutions. Only at the upper resolution a 10 fps departure from the main results was seen. This result gives one good opportunity - to use enhanced anisotropic filtering and antialiasing in the gameplay since the addition of these functions does not push the performance down.
Codecreatures demo
The benchmark is extremely hard to pass. Seems like the guys at Codecult were determined to make a killer benchmark able throwing any accelerator. The number of polygons in the frame sometimes exceeded 500000, which is approximately equivalent to a level shown by declared albeit un-released games or even better than that.
Judging by the results, we can see that it's not the processor, but the accelerator that is the main limiting factor in the Codecreatures benchmark. The NV30 will probably not change the situation. The trend is as before, and again the ATI 9700Pro looks like a higher stage in the accelerators evolution. A very indicative benchmark. That's how the ATI 9700 Pro's raw performance ranks versus NVidia's cards currently on sale.
DooM III E3 Demo
Sometimes you anxiously feel like peering into the future trying to see how well things will be then. Some our readers think the final DooM will be optimized after the release and will run faster than it does now. Others (among them myself) believe as soon as all the currently missing options are introduced into DooM (soft shades, complete physics regardless of location etc.) the game won't run faster than now at least.
On seeing the graph I could help exclaiming "Wow! That's cool!". What we can assert for sure is that Radeon 9700Pro will put up a good show at playing DooM3 and other D3-based games with worthy FPS. Of course, it's still hard to play at resolutions higher than 800x600, the FPS is low, but the higher resolutions are meant for further generations of chipsets - at least two generations will pass until the core is able playing at full capacity. However, the Radeon 9700 Pro performed better at 1024x768 than the GeForce 3 at 640x480.
The results for Sapphire card by the example of the demo are simply fantastic considering that ID Software hasn't optimized Radeon - DooM3 is optimized for NV25, NV30 and .... R100 - that is the regular Radeon. We can expect optimization for ATI R300 by the final version, which can't be said of NV17 and other value chips. Let's wait and play...
Findings
It's still a mystery what ATI has done this time. Either it has finally made a hit product that although released later than Ti4600 is able taking away quite a large portion of the market. Or ATi has simply outdistanced nVidia and released a card featuring all the functions of a new-generation accelerator and is able competing with the still inexistent nVidia's NV30. Let's wait for NV30 and see, it's still premature to make conclusions. But ... For now there is one evident thing - to make the most of the Radeon 9700 Pro performance, a powerful, if not the top-end, CPU is a must.
To make the card show its full capacity, at least a 2.5 GHz processor is required, otherwise the system will be ill-balanced. An autocade normally moves at the speed of the slowest chain, which is a rule, so it's useless to expect super-high FPS in Q3-driven games and good performance in state-of-the-art resource-hungry games with weak processors - the 3D accelerator alone doesn't count.
The new ATI's chip is the first sample of the state-of-the-art accelerators which make a big difference just at the functional level, not the performance level. As we have already noted, the performance of the chip is merely a next generation in the accelerators evolution albeit quite high. The functionality of R300 is currently an overkill, nevertheless in the near future more products where the functionality might be of use will be shipped in sufficient quantities.
Recommendation: it doesn't make sense rushing over to the nearest computer shop to buy a 9700 Pro to upgrade GeForce 3. Its current price is overly high, but to date there is still a lack of games or other products making use of DirectX 9, but if you are not planning to upgrade you computer in the coming six months or going to assemble a new system this accelerator is the best choice.
Pros:
- Unmatched 3D performance, especially at high resolutions;
- Hardware support for DirectX 9.
Cons:
- Poor cooling system;
- Artifacts in 2D;
- High price.
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