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Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT

 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 1, 2003 3:02 AM EST
263 Comments | Add A Comment
263 Comments

ATI is also announcing the Radeon 9600 XT; a much more exciting derivative of the Radeon 9600 Pro based on a low-k dielectric 0.13-micron process. The benefits of a low-k dielectric are mainly related to shielding from crosstalk in high transistor density chips; the benefit of a low-k process is mainly the ability to scale up clock speeds, which is why you will see that ATI is able to clock the 9600 XT at 500MHz. According to ATI, the Radeon 9600 XT should be the first mainstream part to outperform the Radeon 9700 Pro in all situations – not bad for a $199 card.

The Radeon 9600 XT will hit the streets sometime in November and we’ll be sure to bring you coverage of that card as soon as we get our hands on one.

Finally we have the NV38, NVIDIA’s Fall refresh part; we won’t see NV40 and R4x0 until next Spring so both companies are bringing out higher clocked versions of their current cards in order to compete during the holidays.

Just like the Radeon 9800 XT, the NV38 is basically a higher clocked version of the NV35 (GeForce FX 5900 Ultra) with a new cooling system. Now running at 475/475 (950MHz DDR), the NV38 boasts a 5% increase in core clock and an 11% increase in memory frequency.

The card will officially be launched next month but we’re going to be able to bring you a preview of the NV38’s performance today.

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  • WooDaddy - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Good eye #93. Evan actually mentioned it earlier too.

    Anand/Derek mentioned Nvidia being better at Doom 3. Y'all sneaky son-of-a-guns must be beta testing it in the background or sumthin. I know Carmack said it ran better but I betcha y'all got your hands on a copy. Go ahead. Admit it! Quit holding out on us. We wanna see the benchmark! I got a shiny nickel with your name on it if you put it out there...

    Overall great review. I sorta agree that 1024x768 is kinda like the 640x480 of yesteryear now, but most of us can gather what 1280 will run at. For the fanboys/girls, "You should've included counterstrike and hexen 2. waah!" Honestly, I know how long it can take to set up and benchmark those tests in a _controlled_ environment. Do you guys use automated software testers?

    Question though.Even though FFXI ran slow, is it still playable? I don't want to believe that it runs that slow all the time.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    k, I'm going to ignore everyone who's bitching because they didn't read it and thus haven't already twigged that IQ comparisons will be in part 2

    Re the PCI slot thing, doesn't that apply equally to two-slot cards? If putting a PCI card next to the AGP slot on a one-slot card is bad, surely putting a PCI card in the first slot after a two-slot card isn't exactly smart either? You still lose an extra PCI slot over what you would have with a one-slot card

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    What about Max Payne 2 ? i like to see it in next benchs

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Please use Battlefield 1942 in benchmarking in the future! It's an awesome game and has some very nice and demanding mods like desert combat. Please use desert combat in benchmarking too. Try flying around, blowing up stuff and checking if framerate ever goes to unacceptable levels. Gamers rarely care about average or maximum fps, if game is running 50fps or 150 fps it doesn't matter, but if it ever runs as sluggishly as <10 fps in heat of the battle, it is very annoying.

    Just tell us with your own words, which graphics card brings playable framerates!

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    I would like to see Battlefield 1942 added into the benchmarks. Especially since it is such a popular game and they have battlefield vietnam coming out before too long. Thanks.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    Thanks for benching so many games. Since I only play a few games I look for performance in those games in particular. My games were covererd and I really appreciate that.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    I see the fanbois are out in full force. :/

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    over all a sad review, using drivers that are not out for every one to use, no IQ tests to see if the drivers are cheating at all, and then comments like "From these two graphs, it seems like NVIDIA is the clear winner, but in watching this demo run so many times, we noticed that the NVIDIA cards were running choppier than the ATI cards, and we again had some image quality questions we need to answer"

    so that pretty much does it for me. I won't take this with a grain of salt untill they rip apart the drivers, and make sure Nvidia is not up to any "optimazations" Ive lost all trust in Nvidia. I hope the Nv40 can turn this around.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    #69 just because you run games at 1280x1024, doesn't make you the majority representation of gamers. Most gamers run at 1024x768. Most computer users resolution is at 1024x768, like 55% or something like that.

  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link

    The "Prescott" string on Page 4 is white?! Just select the 3 last lines from "2.8 GHz ...". Has it been white all the time?
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