The video card market is beginning to bulge in the middle, and John Gillooly cannot help but give it a little prod.
Every time you get comfortable with the way the video card market is moving, it goes or wobbly and flies off in a new direction. Who would have though a year ago that we would be ending 2002 with an untouchable high-end card from ATI and only the promise of a killer competitor from NVIDIA. As we wait to see what NVIDIA can deliver at the high-end, there is another big battle shaping up in one of NVIDIA's most successful niches, the low-end of the high-end.
For some time now NVIDIA has been sitting pretty with the GeForce4 Ti4200 chip. This fully featured, but slightly slower than the bleeding edge, card has become a favourite of those who want power on a budget as well as those who want to overclock to Ti4600 speeds at the lowest possible price point.
ABOVE: In the NVIDIA corner is relative newcomer Albatron with its GeForce4 Ti4200 with AGP 8x card, the Ti4280.
NVIDIA has just refreshed the Ti4200, adding support for AGP 8x and focusing heavily upon the Ti4200 with AGP 8x as the saviour until GeForceFX rises from the pages of marketing documents and becomes a real entity. However, NVIDIA now has competition from ATI, who are already causing problems at the GeForce4 MX end of the market with its DirectX 8-compliant RADEON 9000. The competition comes in the form of the RADEON 9500 series, which is ATI's way of reducing wastage by using all those R300 cores that just fall short of perfection.
To do this, ATI has designed the specs of the 9500 series to accommodate the fabrication problems that would make the chips not meet RADEON 9700 PRO status.
The major change involves the use of a 128-bit memory controller rather than the often talked about 256-bit controller seen on the 9700. The second major change differentiates the RADEON 9500 from the RADEON 9500 PRO and involves halving the number of pipelines on the card. The RADEON 9500 PRO has the full eight pipelines seen in the RADEON 9700, while the vanilla RADEON 9500 has only four pipelines.
By doing this, ATI now has four slightly different variants of the R300 that it can carefully position throughout the high-end market, while at the same time maximising the number of chips it can sell from each wafer.
ABOVE: The fully pipelined big brother RADEON 9500 Pro from Sapphire. Again this card uses a RADEON 9700 PBC.
One of the major advantages of ATI's product line-up is that both the 9500 and 9700 series are fully DirectX 9-compliant, something that NVIDIA cannot yet boast. However, the architectural omissions that differentiate the 9500 and 9700 make for a more confusing picture than the simple speed ramping of NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti series.
To crown a champion in this newfound battle for the mid-range 3D champion, we gathered together examples of each of these new cards and pitted them against each other in a series of tests designed to show off their full potential. To do this we have used the latest available drivers for both sets of cards and tested using DirectX 9 Release Candidate 0 from Microsoft.
We tested using a KT400-based ABIT AT7-Max2 motherboard, which we have found to be one of the best KT400 boards in terms of AGP 8x compatibility, 512MB DDR333 and an Athlon XP 1800+.
Testing was done under Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 1. To focus upon next generation performance, and while still suffering from a lack of a DirectX 9-based 3DMark2003 benchmark, we tested using 3DMark2001SE Pro, Codecreatures Benchmark Pro and Unreal Tournament 2003 using HardOCP's benchmarking utility.
As for the cards, we have used Albatron's Ti4280 card, which is based around the GeForce4 Ti4200 with AGP 8x chip, Gigabyte's RADEON 9500 card and Sapphire's RADEON 9500 PRO.
Currently, with the 9500 series in its infancy, all companies are making RADEON 9500 cards using the complex eight-layer PCB seen on the RADEON 9700 Pro. This added complexity is complete overkill, as the eight-layer PCB is needed to accommodate the 256-bit memory bus that is absent on the RADEON 9500 cards. In fact, at the moment the error screen that comes up when you forget to plug in the power cable still says that the card is a RADEON 9700.
By the time the cards gain widespread distribution, they should be coming on different, less complex PCBs. But for now the eight-layer PCB may be overkill, but makes for some tasty overclocking numbers.
Before we began our main testing we did some comparative tests between the latest ATI Catalyst drivers for DirectX 8.1 and ATI's release candidate DirectX 9 Catalyst drivers.
Switching to DirectX 9 gave a jump of around ten frames per second in Unreal Tournament 2003, however there was no noticeable change in the Codecreatures or DirectX 8.1 focused 3DMark2001SE Pro. Because DirectX 9 is nearing the end of its glacial drift towards release we have done our testing using the DirectX 9 release candidate drivers from ATI. There are currently no DirectX 9 drivers available for the GeForce4 Ti series of cards, so we used the 40.72 WHQL Detonator drivers.
Middleweight battle royaleIn 3DMark2001SE Pro there is only 500 3DMarks separating the GeForce4 Ti4200 with AGP 8x and the RADEON 9500 PRO, and in a picture that only becomes more common, the RADEON 9500 drops behind its PRO brother by 700 3DMarks. As you can see from the other cards we tested, the RADEON 9500 and GeForce4 Ti4200 sit nicely in the gap between the GeForce4 Ti4600/RADEON 9700 PRO high-end and the GeForce4 MX/RADEON 9000 low end.
In order to investigate the more advanced DirectX 9 shading units on the ATI cards, we have also looked at the specific results from the nature test, which focuses heavily upon pixel and vertex shaders. Somewhat surprisingly, the picture is not as clear as we would have expected, with the results closely reflecting the spread seen in the overall 3DMark scores.
We will have to wait for the release of 3DMark2003 for a serious picture of how the cards compete under DirectX 9.
Our next tests were with the taxing Codecreatures Benchmark Pro. This benchmark is heavy on the shaders, but also stresses the video RAM, with a need for 128MB available to run. This leads to a visible gulf in the graphs between the 64MB cards, which fall back on AGP speed.
As an interesting side note, the RADEON 9000 card actually beats the RADEON 8500 when AGP speed becomes important, and thanks to AGP 8x this is the only test in which the RADEON 9000 comes out ahead of the RADEON 8500.
Our Unreal Tournament 2003 results are an average framerate over a range of flyby benchmarks. Again the picture is similar, with the RADEON 9500 sitting just behind the GeForce4 Ti4200 with AGP 8x. It is also in this test that the biggest gaps between the RADEON 9500 PRO and the RADEON 9500 are seen, with the PRO coming in almost 30% faster than its half-pipelined sibling. Seeing as Unreal Tournament 2003 is the most advanced real world 3D gaming benchmark out there, it shows a glimpse at the future performance gap between the 9500 and the 9500 PRO. Also consider that Doom 3 will benefit from the eig
Issue: 137 | June, 2012