Review: ATI Radeon 9600 Pro

This demo is pretty ugly in my opinion, but it highlights well the effect that IQ options can have on a game. Enabling anistropic texture filtering on all cards brings out plenty of extra detail in this test, making it more watchable and ultimately more playable (for this reviewer at least). Here's our usual baseline.

We're not so card limited here so it's nice to see 9600 Pro showing the NVIDIA card how its done. Again, this time with IQ features.

9700 Pro flexes its muscles while the other two cards flounder a little. 8 rendering pipelines helps here in its case. Let's bump up the resolution and torture the cards a little.

Again at the higher resolution, NVIDIA's entrant seems to do better than 9600 Pro. Here's the performance drop graph for a visual look at what's happening.

Put simply, the NVIDIA card seems more efficient at higher resolution when made to really max out its available memory bandwidth. We've seen this on earlier tests and we see it here again. Either the 1600x1200 case is unoptimised by ATI, or NVIDIA are optimising more, who knows. Some IQ analysis would be nice, but we'll save that for another article.

On to a benchmarkers favourite