Radeon 9800 256 MB

Test Setup

It's not that easy to find differences in performance compared to the 128 MB version. Only when the detail tests are run at extremely high resolutions do a few benchmarks show some differences. In order to make it somewhat easier for the 256 MB card, we tested on an AGP 4x system so that it could be clearly seen when the memory becomes insufficient and has to be swapped out.

Only applications that use very large textures show differences at extremely high resolutions with 4x FSAA and 6x FSAA. Furthermore, we tested how AGP 4x sizes up to AGP 8x when the 128 MB card starts reallocating its resources. For this purpose, we limited our ASUS A7N8X to AGP 4x via the BIOS.

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Hardware
Test SystemAMD Athlon XP 2700+ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce 2)
Memory2 x 256 MB, PC 333 (2/2/2/5)
Drivers & Software
Graphics DriverATI - v. 3.4 (6.14.10.6343)
DirectX Version on System9.0a
OSWindows XP Professional SP1
Benchmarks & Settings
UT 2003 FullRetail Version v2166
3D Mark 2003Pro Version