ATI Radeon 9800 XT Review - PAGE 4

Test Setup

Intel P4 2.8BGhz
AVC Sunflower P4 Cooler
MSI 648Max motherboard
512MB OCZ PC2700 DDR Memory
Seagate 120GB ATA133 Barracuda ST3100
WinXP with SP1

nVidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra reference card

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (made by FIC. reference design)
ATi Radeon 9800 XT

We chose not to include any midrange cards in the lineup because the price difference is obscenely large. For the price of a 9800 XT one could obtain two or three 9600 XTs so clearly they are not in the same class.

Unfortunately most of the cards are running on different driver revisions. The 9700 Pro Benchmarks were done with the hotfix CoD drivers that were released between the Catalyst 3.9s and the Catalyst 3.10s. The 9800 Pro benchmarks were done with the 3.9 drivers with the exception of Call of Duty which used the Cat 3.10s. The GFFX 5950 was done on the 52.14 drivers with the exception of the Call of Duty benchmarks which used the 53.03 driver sets. The 9800 XT was benchmarked using the Cat 3.10s throughout all of the benchmarks. Why the big mishmash of drivers and why did we not rebench everything? For the 9800 Pro and the 9700 Pro we did not feel that the Cat 3.10s delivered a huge performance jump over the 3.9s to warrant a full rebenching of both cards. This was the same rationale with the 5950 and the use of the 52.14s throughout most of the numbers. The driver variation is due mostly to Call of Duty, a recent addition to our benchmark suite; newer drivers were available at the time so the latest available drivers were used in each instance and the numbers we got there were just appended to our dataset.