Driverheaven.net: Radeon 9800 XT Review

Radeon 9800 XT

The Angel of Darkness is one of the few games on the market that takes advantage of DirectX 9 features such as Pixel Shader 2.0. For this benchmark we have created our own timedemo which forces the use of Pixel Shader 2.0 and uses the Paris 3 level.

	Settings	1024x768 0aa0af	1280x960 0aa0af	1600x1200 0aa0af
*Card*
5900 Ultra		40.2fps	22.7fps	14.4fps
9800 Pro		60.7 fps	42.5 fps	27.7 fps
9800 XT		65.7 fps	46.0 fps	29.9 fps

Another convincing win for the XT over the 5900 Ultra, at 1280x960 and 1600x1200 the XT is scoring twice the number of FPS over the 5900 Ultra. The 9800 Pro does give the XT a good run though coming within 2.2 fps at 1600x1200.

Aquamark3 uses DirectX9 features such as Pixel Shader 2.0 and a real world game engine to allow users to test their system under heavy graphic load. Results can then be uploaded to an online database and compared to other users systems. The default benchmark runs at 1024x768x32 with no AntiAliasing and 4x anisotropic filtering. Detail levels are set to maximum. The results of this test are displayed as frames per second, triangles per second and the main Aquamark3 TRISCORE. The TRISCORE shows the performance of your CPU and GPU and finally gives your overall score for the benchmark. As Aquamark is not prone to other processes affecting the scores it provides reliable and comparable results.

	TRISCORE	FPS
9800 Pro	37,938	37.9
5900 Ultra	31,868	31.9
9800 XT	39,119	39.1

The main aquamark bench gives a TRISCORE of 39119 for the XT, not a large increase over the 9800 Pro. When comparing to the FX the difference is huge, 7251 points.

Detailed Aquamark results showing a section by section breakdown for the XT can be downloaded here.

Next: Shadermark