Radeon 9700

Posted by John-Erik | Filed under Hardware

Mine didn’t complete - my video card got taken out by a PS failure so I’m RMAing it (it’s a FireGL 8700).

I would expect the Radeon 9700 to be faster by that much … it’s able to more easily handle more complex scenes. Remember, your GF4 Ti 4200 will likely not be able to play Doom ]|[ when it comes out, it’s very borderline. The Radeon 9700 should easily be able to double the score of a GF4 if the programing takes that much advantage of the newer higher precision features of the DX9 compliant cards. Plus, DX9 compliant cards are less CPU-bound as they have their own FPUs. I would expect Wildcat VPs and Geforce FX’s and FireGL Z1/X1 and Quadro FX’s to show similar improvement over your card.

Oh, if your friend has RDRAM that will improve his performance by quite a bit as well due to both its higher bandwith and more effective way of delivering a cache line for gaming and other multimedia applications.  Plus, what’s your OS?  Driver revision?  Chipset?  Via chipsets don’t perform as well, Windows 98/ME don’t perform as well since the drivers for those OSes are no longer being actively developed.

Tom’s Hardware as published something about each 3DMark since 2000 about how it’s skewed and they’ve been proven wrong in the long run every other time.

And if you read the whole article, you’d realize it bashes nVidia. As a side note, among people who have been working with computers and drivers for a while: ATi always has the better chips, nVidia has junky hardware but better drivers.

And, as the article points out, 3DMark only tests what it says it tests, nothing more and nothing less.

I’ve had only one ATi card fail (this is why they’re used in servers). However, I have a box full of nVidia chipset cards that hang systems either on boot or OS startup if you’d like them. That said, my home servers use nVidia cards (4 Mb Riva 128 AGP), but that’s just because I got a bunch for cheap and I knew they were burned in (old used Dell XPS D pulls), plus I wanted an AGP card to free up the slot and PCI bandwith over using one of my Rage 128GL PCI cards.
plus ATi DVD acceleration, 2D, S-Video out et all just kick nVidia to the gutter.

However, even nVidia’s drivers look like junk when you compare them to 3Dlabs. Check out their OpenGL bench scores (such as SPECviewperf). They score within 90% of their maximum theoretical speed every time, even nVidia can’t even pull 40%. Of course, then again, when I have a seperate framebuffer memory from texture memory and 32 Mb of cache on a card, I guess I could keep a pipe full too, but still, 3Dlabs knows how to make a card and drivers for it. I can’t wait for the Wildcat 5, which should support OpenGL 2.0 … drool …

Permalink | February 20th, 2003

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