ATi Radeon 9600XT Review

ATi has sent us a Radeon 9600XT video card for review. We will see how it performs in modern Direct3D and OpenGL applications and games, as well as how it performs against the older (but more expensive) Radeon 9700 Pro. It is meant for the mainstream market, which can be deduced from its price point. It’s meant to be a powerful card for 3D games that won’t break the bank. As such, it shouldn’t be treated as a high-end card, and the comparisons between the 9700 Pro are just there to show you the difference between the two chipsets and features. Here are the specs of the card:

• 128MB of double data rate SDRAM
• VGA connector for analog CRT
• S-video connector for TV / VCR 1
• DVI-I connector for digital flat panel 2
• Independent resolutions and refresh rates for any two connected displays
• 4 parallel rendering pipelines
• 2 parallel geometry engines
• 128-bit DDR memory interface
• AGP 8X support

SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
16 textures per pass
Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control
Multiple render target support
Shadow volume rendering acceleration
High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support
Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL®

SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality) options

HYPER Z™ III+
Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
Fast Z-Buffer Clear

TRUFORM™ 2.0
2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
Displacement mapping

VIDEOSHADER™
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
Noise removal filtering for captured video

• MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
• All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
• YPrPb component output
• Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
• Dual integrated display controllers
• Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
• Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant)
• Integrated TV Output support up to 1024×768 resolution
• Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow!
• PC 2002 compliant

As you can see, the specs are pretty impressive. The card has a core clock speed of 500 MHz, and a memory clock speed of 300MHz (effectively 600MHz since it’s DDR). These speeds are much higher than the 9700 Pro, but the 9700 has a 256 bit memory interface, which, in video cards, is one of the most important features, as it helps alleviate bottlenecks in the pipeline. We’ll see how this affects its performance a little later. Right now, let’s take a look at the card itself.

The card comes in the standard ATi box, which has a cool picture on the front and some features on the side and back, with the back mostly taken up by pictures of Half-Life 2. The card comes with a voucher for a copy of Half-Life 2 (or at least will with your card, mine was lacking in the Half-Life 2 department). Check it out:

What’s in the box, you may ask? Well, not a whole lot. It comes with the card, the manual, an installation CD, and a coupon for Half-Life 2 (for you, not me). Anyways, here are some pictures of the contents:

The card itself is nice looking, with the trademark red ATi PCB stylings. It has a small heatsink/fan set-up, which is nice and small and won’t block any PCI slots. It also doesn’t have a connector for external power like my Radeon 9700 does, so you don’t have to run a floppy power connector to it.

 

The card has one VGA output connector for your standard CRT display, one DVI-I for a flat-panel or CRT displa (using an adapter, not included) and one S-Video output for sending movies or games to your TV. You can also enable HDTV output with a special connector from ATi (not included).

 

Now that we’ve taken a look at it, let’s see how it handles some games, since a card is no good if it sucks at gaming.

Okay, so now we’re going to see some benchmarks comparing this card and its older brother, the 9700 Pro. I used the newest Catalyst drivers from ATi, which was version 4.2. Here are the specs of the system used to test both cards:

• AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (Thoroughbred core)
• EPoX 8K9A2+ motherboard (KT400 chipset)
• 512 MB PC-3200 DDR from Corsair (1 stick)
• Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Gamer
• 80GB Western Digital Caviar Hard Drive with 8MB cache

For the 9600 I turned on the Overdrive feature that comes with the new drivers, which will overclock the card a slight bit using input from temperature sensors on the card. I figured that this is how most gamers will be using it, so it’s fair to leave it turned on for these benchmarks.

As I said before, the 9600XT has a 500MHz core clock, with a 300MHz (600MHz DDR) memory clock. The 9700 Pro, which is made by FIC, is running at 325MHz core, 310MHz memory clock. The 9600XT has a much higher clock speed, so we’ll see how it compares.

We will be running each of the benchmarks in 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200 resolutions. We will also be testing first without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filter, and then with 4x AA and 16x AF enabled. Sorry for the ugly graphs, I am using OpenOffice.org for my office suite, and I haven’t perfected the art of making nice looking graphs yet. They are quite informative, though, so that’s a plus.

First up on our testbed is Quake 3 Arena. This test is good for testing pure speed, but it’s reaching its useful limit, so don’t be surprised if it gets phased out of testing in the near future.

All tests were run with the graphical settings maxed. You can see that at the lower resolutions the card is comparable to the 9700. However, when we enable antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, or turn up the resolution to 1600×1200 we lose a lot of frames per second compared to the older card.

I believe that the reason for this is the 128-bit memory interface compared to the 256-bit of the 9700. As the card needs to use more memory to transfer larger scenes and to sample more images for antialiasing the lower bandwidth becomes a bottleneck to the rest of the system.

Next up is Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. This game has a nice bevy of options for benchmarking, which is why we use it. I maxed out all the graphical options in the advanced settings tab for these tests. As you can see, the two cards have a pretty normal difference, except when it comes to running at 640×480 with AA and AF on. This leads me to believe that the 9600XT has a better unit for doing the AA or AF than the 9700, but the lead only holds until the memory bandwidth is saturated, and then the 9700 takes the lead again. But these scores are still very respectable, don’t get me wrong. The 9700 still costs quite a bit more, and the 9600 shows very good scores as well.

Now we run the test on a more modern game, Unreal Tournament 2003. This game makes nice use of the power of modern graphics cards, with graphics that are most excellent. We used the [H]ardOCP benchmarking program to run this test, which was run at High Quality over 7 maps, with the average scores being placed into the graph. That way we get a nice overall spread of how it should perform in UT2K3 and other games in its class. The 9600 runs great all the way up to 1600×1200 with AA/AF disabled. I’m not sure where the jump that you see at 1280×1024 with AA/AF enabled came from, but I ran the test multiple times and that’s what it gave me. Could be a driver problem or some bug in the testing software or the game itself, I don’t know.

Now we move on to the synthetic benchmarking suites provided by Futuremark. These give a good competitive score for each card, so that we can compare how the same tests run with two different cards differ. First up we have the older 3DMark2001SE, with the latest patch installed. With AA/AF disabled we get very impressive scores, over 10,000 at 1024×768, and we continue to get respectable scores all the way up the scale.

The scores are not as good when we turn on the AA/AF, but they are pretty good up to 1600×1200, where the score drops dramatically. Again I blame this drop on the memory interface not being able to handle being inundated with data.

Here we have 3DMark2003, which is the newest benchmark from Futuremark. This thing is meant to show you how your computer will play games that will be made in the near future, since as of right now I don’t think there are any games that stress your system to its limit like this benchmark. We see the same type of spread as before, with the 9600XT about 1000 points behind the 9700 almost all around. They both get killed running at the higher resolutions with AA/AF enabled, but that’s no surprise since I’m not aware of anything that will run everything in this suite perfectly at 30 frames per second with those kind of resolutions and options enabled.

So overall the 9600XT performed as it should, a little bit slower than the 9700 but still very respectably. If you buy one of these cards, you will know that you will be able to run most games that will come out for at least the next year, depending on your PC setup as well.

Conclusion

After running the Radeon 9600XT for a while in my machine I can say that this is a great card. It never crashed at all, even with the Overdrive option enabled, and gave great performance in all the games I play. Since I assume most people don’t run their games at 1600×1200 with 4x Antialiasing and 16x Anisotropic filtering turned on, I can heartily recommend this card to anyone who doesn’t want to blow $300 or more on a video card.

Online the cheapest I saw this card for was about $150, which is a great deal for this kind of power. I noticed that in the games that I play it never slowed down or hiccuped at all (except for Deus Ex: Invisible War, but that’s a problem with the game not being optimized, as it chokes my 9700 as well).

For any casual gamer considering this as opposed to the other offerings from nVidia like the 5200 would be better off to get this card, as it provides DirectX9 capabilities for new games (Half-Life 2, anyone?) and great power at a decent price. This card is also pretty quiet, especially compared to some other cards in its class.

I would recommend this card versus getting one from a third-party vendor, as I know from personal experience that ATi is really good with their customer support, and don’t give you too much hassle if the card breaks or gets damaged somehow. I give this card a 9 as well as the OCmodshop seal of approval.

Pros

• Quiet and unobtrusive
• Great performance in modern games
• Great value

Cons

• 128-bit memory bus holds it back
• No Half-Life 2 coupon for me