ATi Radeon 9700 PRO - Pretender To The Throne

Test Setup

And so, let the battle begin! The platform of choice is a Pentium 4 2.53 GHz system from the upper performance segment,, since any user willing to spend $300 for a 3D card will more than likely also have a current system with a fast processor and a generous helping of RAM. For users with a less state-of-the-art system, we also conducted some tests on a slightly slower Pentium 4 1.6 GHz system and a PIII 800 machine to show the card would perform on their own system.

We picked NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti4600 as the reference card for performance testing. Although Matrox's Parhelia can be found in the same price segment, it doesn't offer sufficient 3D performance to qualify as a contender to the performance crown. Read more in the article Attack Out Of The Blind Spot: Matrox Parhelia-512 .

The suite of tests can be divided into several types. First, we have the typical gaming benchmarks that test performance while a game is in progress. Next come the synthetic benchmarks that rate gaming performance (3DMark2001 SE), followed by theoretical benchmarks that focus on specific areas like triangle count and fill rate. Lastly, we test image quality by looking at anisotropic filtering and FSAA.

A word on overclocking - the current version of Powerstrip already offers overclocking options for the Radeon 9700 PRO. Since the test samples are all from a pre-production batch, we decided against overclocking tests, as these would not necessarily reflect the potential of the final production boards. Consequently, we will wait until we have samples of final shipping ATi cards (or those produced by ATi's partners) before testing their overclocking potential. The final cards to be shipped will be produced in China.