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Radeon 9800 Pro 128: Is it worth the upgrade?
Date of Review: Apr 8, 2004
The Bottom Line: I'm confident that I got a great card for the money, and I don?t think I?ll be sweating over whether I should have got the NVIDIA 5900FX or not.
"Hooray! It's here!" Finally after 10 days and $204.79, my new Radeon 9800 Pro 128 video card finally arrived. Now all I had to do was install it and explain to my wife why this card was worth two hundred bucks. The first part was easier than the second since my wife knows little to nothing about computer graphics. At least she didn't hit me with a rolling pin.
Overview
Frame Rate. That is what it's all about in the end. If your graphics card drops frames during a first person shooter game, you most likely are going to die. What's worse is, you'll die and probably not even know how you got killed. There is more to a graphics card than frame rate, but frame rate (or the amount of frames per second a card can produce) is the key factor of a good graphics card.
I ran two benchmark tests on my system before upgrading to the Radeon 9800 Pro to set a control for a little experiment to see if my money was in fact, well spent. My previous video card was a Radeon 8500 LE with 128MB DDR memory and I used this as my control for the experiment. The benchmarks I ran were 3DMark2001SE and 3DMark2003 from Futuremark. Then I checked Futuremark's web site to find another benchmark from a computer with the same specifications as mine using a NVIDIA 5900FX video card to compare with my two benchmarks. Further down in this review is what I found out.
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
What you get with it
In the package with the video card there are several cables and two CDs. The retail package may have a couple games also. I bought mine online and got the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) version which does not include any games.
I got a S-video cable which has a proprietary plug on the end that fits into the video card and an adapter to convert the proprietary S-video output to RCA video. There was also a DVI to VGA converter for the secondary monitor output on the video card. The package also contained an RCA video cable.
The CDs that came with the card were a single driver disc which included the ATI Catalyst driver version 4.1 and the ATI control panel software. The second CD was PowerDVD version 5.
Description of the card
The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro is a bit larger than older versions of the Radeon and people with small cases may find it hard to fit, especially in microATX computer cases. It is the length of the card that may be trouble for small computers. The card is approximately 8" long.
Before buying this card you should make sure you have a good power supply, at least 300W or more if you have a lot of drives. The Radeon 9800 Pro requires a power connection from the power supply. It is a molex connection just like a hard drive, so you may need a splitter for one of your power leads.
There are two monitor output plugs on the card. One is a standard VGA/SVGA connection and the other is DVI for a digital out. You do get a converter adapter so you can use two VGA/SVGA monitors with the card if needed.
Basic Statistics
Here are the basic stats of the card taken from the ATI product comparison page located at the following URL.
http://www.atitech.com/products/radeon9800/radeon9800pro/compare.html
* Frame Buffer 128MB DDR
* Memory Interface 256-bit
* Rendering Pipelines 8
* Pixel Fillrate (Gigapixels/sec) 3.04
* Engine Clock (MHz) 380
* Memory Clock (MHz) 680
* Output Connections VGA + TV + DVI
The difference between the Radeon 9800 Pro 128 and the Radeon 9800 is mainly the clock speeds. The 9800 Pro engine clock is 55MHz faster than the 9800 and the memory clock is 100MHz faster. The only difference in the 9800 Pro 128 and the 9800 Pro 256 in that the 9800 Pro 256 has double the memory on board.
Performance
I noticed right away that the card played my 3D games with more fluidity and especially in situations where the graphics abilities had been strained before were now just as smooth and fluid as could be.
One of my favorite games is Battlefield 1942 by Electronic Arts. I have had to limit the amount of AI controlled players in a co-op game to 30 or less with my old 8500 LE or the game could get glitchy when a lot of computer generated players were together with me in the same display. But with the 9800 Pro I am able to up that number to the maximum without even so much as a hiccup from this card.
Benchmarks
As I stated earlier, I wanted to show this to my wife in "numbers" she could see, so I did a little experimenting with my old card as the control. The Radeon 9800 impressed even me when the actual numbers were laid out. Here is a summary of the benchmark experiment. Both the Radeon 8500 LE and the 9800 Pro were tested on the same computer with exactly the same specs. except the video card.
Radeon 8500 LE vs. Radeon 9800 Pro
3DMark2001 SE
Radeon 8500 LE Radeon 9800 Pro
3DMarks: 9391 13708
Fill Rate (single)
768.9 Megatexels/sec. 1998.2 Megatexels/sec.
Fill Rate (multiple)
1869.5 Megatexels/sec. 2984.7 Megatexels/sec.
Point Sprite Speed
27.0 million/sec. 43.3 million/sec.
To view the complete benchmark visit the following URL. It will be posted permanently on my web site.
http://ctsa.dnsalias.com/3dmark2001se.htm
I also benched the two cards with 3DMark2003 and you can see the final results at this next URL.
http://ctsa.dnsalias.com/3dmark2003.htm
The 3DMark2003 benchmark was more astonishing than the 3DMark2001 SE benchmark. Here were the final overall ratings.
3DMark2003
Radeon 8500 LE Radeon 9800 Pro
3DMark Score: 1410 5373
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Radeon 9800 Pro vs. NVIDIA 5900FX
I don't want to put too many stats on this review so I am only going to give the summary report from my 3DMark2003 test. You can visit the web page following the numbers to get the full test results.
NIVIDIA 5900FX Radeon 9800 Pro
3DMark Score: 5597 5373
Game Tests
Wings of Fury:
160.6 fps 156.4 fps
Proxycon:
42.1 fps 37.0
Troll's Lair:
33.0 fps 32.6 fps
Mother Nature:
34.0 fps 34.3 fps
Fill Rate (single):
1429.1 Megatexels/sec. 1679.1 Megatexels/sec.
Fill Rate (multiple):
3077.5 Megatexels/sec. 2908.3 Megatexels/sec.
Vertex Shader:
17.2 fps 18.1 fps
Pixel Shader 2.0:
38.0 fps 53.0 fps
As you can see the differences are there but minimal. The NVIDIA 5900FX wins when it comes to frame rate but not by much. The vertex shading and pixel shading is won by the Radeon 9800 Pro. The differences are really not enough to worry about for gaming.
This benchmark comparison can be found at the following URL.
http://ctsa.dnsalias.com/5900FX.htm
Conclusion
I am confident that I got a really great card for the money I spent and I don't think I'll be sweating over whether I should have got the NVIDIA 5900FX or not. The card plays all my games excellently. ATI also just released the Catalyst 4.4 driver package for the Radeon cards that can be downloaded from the ATI web site.
http://www.atitech.com/
Thanks for reading,
Gr8ful :-)
