Review - ATi Radeon 9700 Pro

Review by Edward Chang, call sign: Big_E

December 30, 2002

3DGaming Benchmarks:

-3DMark2001 Second Edition

The ATI Radeon 9700 steps into the graphics world at just the right moment. While most video cards cannot handle all the latest graphic features, the Radeon 9700 can do it all. Although it seems anything but revolutionary at default benchmark settings, it truly shines with a commanding 67% lead against its GeForce4 Ti4600 nemesis. With 4xFSAA enabled, the GeForce4Ti4600 takes a whopping 50% performance hit; the superior Radeon 9700 is barely scratched with a 20% frame-rate deduction. Obviously, if the GeForce4 is deficient at rendering with FSAA on, then FSAA would hurt other video cards in this roundup even more. Therefore, certain older generation video cards were not benchmarked with FSAA enabled (not applicable), since their performance would consequently be pitiful to say the least.

-Unreal Tournament 2003

In Unreal Tournament 2003's Antalus Flyby, the Radeon 9700 reaches insane speeds, knocking out the GeForce4 Ti4600 by a 129% advantage! This goes to show, the more 3D intensive a game is, the more one can benefit from a Radeon 9700-powered gaming system. Even with FSAA off, the Radeon 9700 is twice as fast as the robust Radeon 8500.

The Radeon 9700 has an 81% advantage over the GeForce Ti4600 here.

And 92% better performance here.

-Quake 3 Arena

The GeForce4 Ti4600 makes a surprising comeback in Quake3 by outperforming the Radeon 9700 with High Quality graphic settings, however it quickly loses its brief glory when turning on 4xFSAA inflicts a punishing 75% fps deficit.

-Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Apparently, either OpenGL or the Quake3 engine is in Nvidia's favor as the GeForce4 Ti4600 is able to beat the Radeon 9700 at High Quality graphic settings. But, again, the Radeon 9700 redeems itself in 4xFSAA by pulling nearly twice the amount of weight that the GeForce4 is capable of pulling.

-DroneZMark

The Radeon 9700 tops the chart again with a 143% performance gain over the GeForce4 Ti4600 when FSAA is on.

*These video cards do not fully support the GeForce3 High Quality graphic settings.

-Comanche4 Demo

Comanche4 is more CPU dependent than most other games. The Radeon 9700 barely flinches with 4xFSAA on.

*These video cards do not support shaders.

-Nvidia ChameleonMark

ATI must have made it a vendetta to beat Nvidia on their own ground. Nvidia's ChameleonMark is a pixel shader test. ATI's last Radeon 8500 performed satisfactorily in this benchmark, but this time around, the new Radeon 9700 clobbers Nvidia with record-breaking results; the numbers speak for themselves.

*These video cards do not support pixel shaders.