AnandTech: Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT

[Jibby]

Originally posted by: killedradiostar

Originally posted by: bgeh
benchies of the 2.8 Prescott please

are you referring to the fact that the word "Prescott" is written in white text at the bottom of page 4's description of the test system?

How the bleep did you catch that? Thanks for that.

Edit: Just noticed the thread over at the CPU forum too...

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: Jibby

Originally posted by: killedradiostar

Originally posted by: bgeh
benchies of the 2.8 Prescott please

are you referring to the fact that the word "Prescott" is written in white text at the bottom of page 4's description of the test system?

How the bleep did you catch that? Thanks for that.

Edit: Just noticed the thread over at the CPU forum too...

LOL...I love Easter Eggs!

 

[techwanabe]

It sounds to me like the card to get will be the ATI Radeon 9600XT due out in November with MSRP $199.

So I can wait until next spring or so when hopefully the price will have dropped some, and that will be a good time to upgrade for folks like me.

 

[GTaudiophile]

This XT review from NordicHardware has very good IQ comparisons with nVidia's latest drivers.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
This XT review from NordicHardware has very good IQ comparisons with nVidia's latest drivers.

Interesting to read how the det 51's trash image quality in half of the games.

Hopefully Anand & Co. will write a follow up to the round part 1 focusing on image quality. The det 52's are offering good frame rates in part 1, but how much is nV "optimzing" away quality to get them?

 

[Lyfer]

Thumbs up and mucho cervesas :beer: to Anand for NOT USING 3DMARK as part of the benchmark suite.



GREAT UNBIASED REVIEW! THATS WHY THIS IS THE ONLY TECHSITE I HAVE BOOKMARKED.

 

[alexruiz]

Did anyone check that Tech Report ran their test of the 9800XT in the Athlon 64 FX? It cannot be compared directly to the numbers here as they ran everything at 1600x1200.

 

[Excelsior]

Originally posted by: Alkaline5

Originally posted by: Megatomic
The 9600XT will come with an extra 100MHz GPU and only god knows how much extra memory speed. To me it's not all that hard to believe, the 9600 Pro was fairly close to the 9700 Pro in some of the tests and it even beat it in a select few. Time will tell and I can't wait to see this card hit the streets.

Actually, the memory clock has been confirmed to be the same 600MHz for both the 9600 Pro and XT. Unless something changes between now and the actual launch, you can see why I'm skeptical.

edit: linkified

Same here. Look how close the 9700Pro is to the 9800pro and 9800XT in benchmarks. For the 9600XT to be faster than the 9700Pro in all cases, it would be the true card to get.

 

[draggoon01]

Originally posted by: Evan Lieb


And yes, we have a 2.8GHz Prescott processor, I received it last week at Computex...

can you say when NDA is up?

 

[BoberFett]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
This XT review from NordicHardware has very good IQ comparisons with nVidia's latest drivers.

Interesting to read how the det 51's trash image quality in half of the games.

Hopefully Anand & Co. will write a follow up to the round part 1 focusing on image quality. The det 52's are offering good frame rates in part 1, but how much is nV "optimzing" away quality to get them?

I don't understand the "trashing" of image quality. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the Det 4x seems to have the highest quality (albeit with lowest framerate) while the Det 5x and Cat 3.7 seem to be about equal.

Aside from Tomb Raider, are there any examples of blatant quality degradation?

 

[NOX]

Originally posted by: Evan Lieb
Surprised no one has posted a thread yet, so I'll just do it.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1890

By the way, I just received an ASUS 9800XT at my doorstep today. So, just let me know if there's something you'd like too see in that review (besides what's already in Anand's review and besides the IQ testing we'll be doing later).

And yes, we have a 2.8GHz Prescott processor, I received it last week at Computex...

Just continue with the benchmarks... I'm glad to see Anand being to front runner and using all real gaming benchmarks for a change.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: ElFenix

Originally posted by: Mingon
are the 9800xt numbers non overclocked? as the cards can automatically overclock are they doing this? Not that it really matters.

det 3.8 enables the automatic overclock, they used 3.7 for the review

oops, I think you meant "Cat 3.8"

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: NOX

Originally posted by: Evan Lieb
Surprised no one has posted a thread yet, so I'll just do it.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1890

By the way, I just received an ASUS 9800XT at my doorstep today. So, just let me know if there's something you'd like too see in that review (besides what's already in Anand's review and besides the IQ testing we'll be doing later).

And yes, we have a 2.8GHz Prescott processor, I received it last week at Computex...

Just continue with the benchmarks... I'm glad to see Anand being to front runner and using all real gaming benchmarks for a change.

I too praise you guys for running no sythetics

 

[Nicjac]

This card is great if you want to switch from nvidia to ati.
I have a 5900 ultra I will sell to buy one of those. The OverDrive feature looks really promising and it will probably be the top until NV40 / R400 are released.
Of course if you have a R9700 or 9800, I dont think the upgrade is worth it =/

 

[arcenite]

I will put off getting a new video card now to see if this 9600XT is what it's cracked up to be. If it is indeed faster than the 9700 pro, for 200 bucks, I think this will be my decided HL2 card..

Bill

 

[SgtZulu]

The Radeon 9800 XT offers a marginal performance improvement over the regular Radeon 9800 Pro, definitely not worth upgrading to for current 9800 Pro owners.
As far as people looking to upgrade once for the long run, with new architectures due out in 6 months, a $500 investment today would be significantly more out of date than if you purchase a card right before a refresh. We rarely recommend that you buy the fastest performing card on the market; in fact the last time we did that was with the Radeon 9700 Pro ? the impact of which is clearly not equaled by the Radeon 9800 XT (nor were we expecting it to). Whether spending $500 is worth it today is your call, but you can definitely get very similar performance out of a used Radeon 9700 Pro or even a non-Pro Radeon 9800 at much better price points. If money is no object, then we?re sure that ATI wouldn?t mind shipping a few more XTs in your direction.

Looks like I won't be upgrading anytime soon

 

[BFG10K]

I'd have liked to see resolutions much higher than 1024 x 768.

 

[Regs]

I'm not to thrilled about the 9800 XT. 1-5 extra frames isnt going to do any good.

9600 XT .. why? lol.