9800 xt review: ATI Radeon 9800 XT review: ATI Radeon 9800 XT

263 Comments

IndexThe NewcomersThe Radeon 9600XT & NV38The New Test SuiteAquamark 3C&C Generals: Zero HourF1 Challenge: ’99-02Final Fantasy XIHaloHomeworld 2Jedi Knight: Jedi AcademyMicrosoft Flight Simulator 2004Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of UndrentideSimcity 4Splinter CellUnreal Tournament 2003X2Warcraft III: Frozen ThroneWolfenstein: Enemy TerritoryFinal Words

The Newcomers

As we briefly mentioned, there are three new products to talk about today – the Radeon 9800 XT, the Radeon 9600 XT and then NVIDIA’s NV38.

The XT line of Radeon 9×00 cards is specifically targeted at the very high end of the gaming market. With AMD and their Athlon 64 FX, Intel and the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, it’s not too surprising to see even more companies going this direction. With an ultra-premium part like the Radeon 9800 XT the profit margins are high and more importantly, the PR opportunities are huge – claiming the title of world’s fastest desktop GPU never hurts.

The effort required to produce a part like the Radeon 9800 XT is much lower than a serious redesign. When making any kind of chip (CPU, GPU, chipset, etc…) the design team is usually given a cutoff point where they cannot make any more changes to the design, and that is the design that will go into production. However, it is very rare that manufacturers get things right on the first try. Process improvements and optimizing of critical paths within a microprocessor are both time intensive tasks that require a good deal of experience.

Once ATI’s engineers had more experience with the R350 core and more time with it they began to see where the limitations of the GPU’s clock speed existed; remember that your processor can only run as fast as its slowest speed path so it makes a great deal of sense to change the layout and optimize the use of transistors, etc… to speed up the slow paths within your GPU. This oversimplified process is what ATI and their foundry engineers have been working on and the results are encompassed in the R360 – the core of the Radeon 9800 XT.

The Radeon 9800 XT is able to run at a slightly higher core frequency of 412MHz, quite impressive for ATI’s 0.15-micron chip (yes, this is the same process that the original R300 was based on). Keep in mind that the Radeon 9800 Pro ran at 380MHz and you’ll see that this 8% increase in clock speed is beginning to reach the limits of what ATI can do at 0.15-micron.

The Radeon 9800 XT does receive a boost in memory speed as well, now boasting a 365MHz DDR memory clock (730MHz effective) – an increase of 7% over the original Radeon 9800 Pro and an increase of 4% over the 256MB 9800 Pro. ATI was much more proud of their core clock improvements as we will begin to crave faster GPU speeds once more shader intensive games come out.

The Radeon 9800 XT does have a thermal diode (mounted on-package but not on-die) that has a driver interface that will allow the card to automatically increase its core speed if the thermal conditions are suitable. The GPU will never drop below its advertised 412MHz clock speed, but it can reach speeds of up to 440MHz as far as we know. The important thing to note here is that ATI fully warrantees this overclocking support, an interesting move indeed. Obviously they only guarantee the overclock when it is performed automatically in the drivers, as they do not rate the chips for running at the overclocked speed in all conditions.

The OverDrive feature, as ATI likes to call it, will be enabled through the Catalyst 3.8 drivers and we’ll be sure to look into its functionality once the final drivers are made available.

The Radeon 9800 XT will be available in the next month or so and it will be sold in 256MB configurations at a price of $499 – most likely taking the place of the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB.

Index
The Radeon 9600XT & NV38
IndexThe NewcomersThe Radeon 9600XT & NV38The New Test SuiteAquamark 3C&C Generals: Zero HourF1 Challenge: ’99-02Final Fantasy XIHaloHomeworld 2Jedi Knight: Jedi AcademyMicrosoft Flight Simulator 2004Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of UndrentideSimcity 4Splinter CellUnreal Tournament 2003X2Warcraft III: Frozen ThroneWolfenstein: Enemy TerritoryFinal Words

PRINT THIS ARTICLE

ATi Radeon 9800XT Review | Trusted Reviews

Verdict

Key Specifications

• Review Price: £350. 00

It is finally here, the next revision of the ATi Radeon family; the new 9800XT.

The Radeon 9800XT is not ATi’s next generation product, but rather a beefed up Radeon 9800Pro card.

You’d think that there wasn’t much more ATi could do with the current R350 core, but somehow, it has managed to push it to the next level once again.

So what’s new? Well, the VPU speed has increased from 380MHz to 412MHz; although interestingly enough ATi has added a new feature it calls ATi Overdrive.

The ATi Overdrive feature automatically increases the speed of the card up to 460MHz if the ambient temperature inside your PC is low enough. The cooler your PC is, the faster the Radeon 9800XT will run. This makes a lot of sense and lowers the risk of frying your graphics card by overclocking it manually.

The memory speed has also been increased from 340MHz to 364MHz (effectively 728MHz), but again this will increase if you enable the ATi Overdrive. The Radeon 9800XT features 256MB of DDR memory, rather than DDR-II seen on some Radeon 9800 Pro cards.

The heatsink is a completely new design and doesn’t look like something you’d expect to see on an ATi card. The front of the card has been fitted with a large copper heatsink that covers most of the PCB surface and this is augmented with a 60mm low-RPM fan. The fan runs faster if the card gets to hot, similar to the formula made popular by nVidia in the past. Half of the back of the card is covered with a copper plate that draws the heat away from the memory. This is however still a single slot solution unlike some configurations seen on recent nVidia cards.

The 9800XT only got warm to the touch during our benchmarks and the noise level was more than acceptable as the card produced less sound than most CPU coolers.

This also bodes well when it comes to using the Overdrive feature. I was however not able to test this, as it wasn’t enabled in the drivers supplied by ATi for the review, but it will be made available in November.

Looking at ATi’s specifications the Radeon 9800XT let us to believe it would be very fast.

As with the Radeon 9800 Pro, the 9800XT features eight rendering pipelines and eight full precision pixel shader 2.0 floating-point units. ATi claims that the card is capable of 23.3GB/sec peak memory bandwidth and a peak vertex throughput of 412Million triangles/sec. The peak pixel fill rate is stated at 3.3 Gigapixels/sec and it can do anti-aliased samples at an amazing 19.8 Gigasamples/sec.

All these numbers will of course increase if you enable the Overdrive feature.

So what do these numbers mean? Well, not a whole lot if the card doesn’t perform well in real world applications.

At default speed using the drivers supplied by ATi there was little speed increase compared to the older 9800Pro cards, no more than 10fps at the most.

You can compare the benchmarks of the 9800XT with the ones found in the recent graphics card group test as the 9800XT was tested on the same platform. Our test system consists of an 865PE motherboard with a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 with 800MHz FSB and 512MB PC3200 memory and a 7,200rpm S-ATA hard drive. This might not be the fastest platform around, but it does compare to what many of you might have at home.

The 9800XT was faster than the 9800Pro in all the benchmarks used, apart from SPECviewperf 7.1. This could be down to poor OpenGL drivers and it is something I would expect ATi to fix by the time the final drivers are out. What is disappointing is that the 9800XT still didn’t manage to outperform the nVidia FX5900 Ultra card in several of the benchmarks. It was very close though, and it’s likely that the 9800XT will reign supreme when the Overdrive utility is released. Well, at least for a while anyway.

Take a closer look at Gun Metal and Aquamark3 and you’ll see a different scenario, as this is where the 9800XT takes the lead, not by much, but still a respectable amount. Looking at the Aquamark3 score to start with, the 9800XT scored 44262, while the 9800Pro got 43205 and the FX5900 Ultra go 40379.

All these scores are very high up and there shouldn’t be an issue playing Aquanox 2 on any of these cards. The average frame rate for the three cards is as follows, 9800XT 44.26, 9800Pro 43.2, FX5900 Ultra 40.38. Not exactly what you’d call a huge gap but it is there.

Moving on to Gun Metal, which is written in Cg which should give the nVidia cards an extra boost, the 9800XT keeps pace even with the FX5900 Ultra and sometimes overtakes it. It’s worth noting here that the drivers used with the FX5900 Ultra don’t seem capable of using anisotropic filtering in Gun Metal which is why the scores with 4xAF enabled are so high.

If you just got yourself a Radeon 9800Pro, then there is little reason for you to upgrade to a 9800XT but if you’re about to get a new PC or about to upgrade your current one and want a top of the range graphics card, then the 9800XT is definitely worth a closer look.

There is however one issue, as always with a brand new graphics card, and that is the price. ATi’s estimated SRP for the 9800XT is €499 which ends up in the region of £350. This might not be as steep as the FX5900 Ultra was when it came out, but it still leaves the 9800XT out of reach for most of us.

To add some value to the package, the 9800XT will be bundled with a voucher for a full version of Half Life 2. This is no small bonus, as you’re probably talking about the game of the year, at the very least. Unfortunately Half Life 2 was supposed to launch at the same time as the card, but Valve pushed the release back. So you’ll have to wait a while before you can show off the 9800XT in all its glory.

”’Verdict”’

The Radeon 9800XT is more of a revision than a new card. It builds on the already impressive 9800Pro chipset but you’re paying a lot more for it. It is very fast, and with the Overdrive utility will probably be the fastest card you can buy, assuming the ambient temperature in your PC is low enough. So, if you have the means and desperately need the fastest graphics card out there, this is it.

Score in detail

• Value 8

• Features 8

• Performance 9

90,000 ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB

“Graphic chips are more and more powerful,
come in frantic gallop,
transistors sit more densely,
and coolers come wet later …”

Content

1. Features of the video Card
2. Genfounds, Test Festivities, Test Festivities. tools, quality in 2D
3. Quality issues: rationale for using driver versions
4. Test results: Quake3 ARENA
5. Test results: Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
6. Test results: Return to Castle Wolfenstein (speed and quality)
7. Test results: Code Creatures DEMO
8. Test results: Unreal Tournament 2003 (speed and quality)
9. Test results: Unreal II: The Awakening (speed and quality)
10. Test results: RightMark 3D
11. Test results: TRAOD: Benchmark in paris5_4
12. Test results: TRAOD: Benchmark in paris1c
13. Test results: TRAOD: Benchmark in paris2g
14. Conclusions

On September 30, the Canadian company ATI celebrated the release of two new products: RADEON 9800XT (former R360 and RADEON 9600XT (former RV360)). the second one is Middle-End

It seemed to be just overclocked versions of previous chips and cards Engineers did a good job on improving technical processes, and new revisions of R350 and RV350 were released, which can operate at higher frequencies.However, we see that now very there is a big confrontation between NVIDIA and ATI, so marketers decided to dress new revisions in new names and give them great dates :-).

Although, as I said above, these are essentially the same RADEON 9800 PRO from ATI and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra from NVIDIA. By the way, the overclocked version of the latter is still codenamed NV38. Let’s get back to the RADEON 9800. Since this is a simple overclocking, readers may find our previous articles on what the R300 and its successor, the R350, can and can do.

Theoretical and analytical materials and reviews of video cards, which discuss the functional features of the GPU ATI RADEON 9500/9600/9700/9800

• Analytical material on the features of the Architecture Radeon 9700 and Microsoft DirectX 9. 0
• ATI Radeon 9700 PRO 128MB
• GIGABYTE MAYA II R9700PRO 128MB PRES , as well as rivalry with the new driver 40.41 from NVIDIA
• Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro 128MB review performance of the new CATALYST 2.3 driver in 3DMark2001 SE, benchmarks Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO final release
• Review of PowerColor Evil Commando2 RADEON 9700 Pro 128MB Continuing to study the performance of the new CATALYST 2.3 driver based on game tests, 3D graphics quality issues
• Extreme overclocking of Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro based on ATI RADEON 9700 Pro
• Review of ATI RA0DEON 9700 and Gigabyte MAYA II RADEON 9500
• Sapphire Atlantis RADEON 9500 128MB as well as testing of video cards in DOOM III v.0.02
• Review of ATI RADEON 9500 PRO 128MB
• Review of Gigabyte MAYA II RADEON 9500 PRO and Hercules 3D Prophet 9500 PRO more detailed study of anisotropic filtering in RADEON 9700
• Review of RADEON 7500, 8500, 9000/Pro, 9700 Pro by Sapphire Technology, anisotropy quality issues in RADEON 9013 9013 9013 9013 9013 9013 9013 9017 RADEON HIS Excalibur RADEON 9700 PRO review Testing in DirectX 9. 0 RC0
• Summary testing of ATI RADEON 9500 64MB, 9500 128MB, 9500 PRO, 9700 and 9700 PRO in DirectX 9.0: Part 1 Game tests and 3DMark2001, as well as Soft9700!
• ATI RADEON 9500 64MB, 9500 128MB, 9500 PRO, 9700 and 9700 PRO summary tests in DirectX 9.0: Part 2 Testing in DirectX 9.0 synthetic tests from RightMark 3D version in verse form
• Review of YUAN SmartVGA RADEON 9000 64MB and RADEON 9700 PRO
• Review of video cards based on ATI products by Connect3D
• Review of ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB
• Review of HIS Excalibur RADEON 9500 128MB (128bit)
• Review of ATI RADEON 9800 PRO PRO 128MB: Part 1 — gaming tests and performance
• Review of Hercules 3D Prophet 9800 PRO 128MB and Hercules 3D Prophet 7500 128MB, and debriefing in the light of 0DMark03 scandal 9
• Review of Hercules 3D Prophet 9800 PRO 128MB and Hercules 3D Prophet 7500 128MB (one page)
• Review of video cards based on ATI RADEON 9200/9600/9600PRO/9800PRO by Sapphire Technologies
• Review of video cards based on ATI RADEON 9800 PRO by Connect3D, Gigabyte and CP. Technology
• Review of Manli RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB based on ATI RADEON 9800 PRO
• Review of video cards based on ATI RADEON 9800 PRO/9600 PRO by Gigabyte, Hercules and Sapphire
• Review of Sapphire PRO 256MB Ultimate Edition based on ATI RADEON 9800 PRO — graphics quality issues in UT2003/Unreal II and other games, manipulations with anisotropy
• Overview of video cards based on ATI RADEON 9200/9600/9600 PRO/9800 PRO by Connect3D 9600 256MB based on ATI RADEON 9600

So, R360. How is it different from its predecessor? Basically the frequencies. The RADEON 9800 PRO, as you know, has a core frequency of 380 MHz, while the memory frequency depends on the version: a 128 MB card is equipped with DDR with a frequency of 340 (680) MHz, and a 256 MB card is equipped with DDR-II with a frequency of 350 (700) MHz.

RADEON 9800 XT operates at 412/365 (730) MHz and is equipped with 256 MB of DDR memory. At the same time, the card itself has been changed, enlarged 256-megabit memory chips are used, as a result of which there are not 16 of them, but 8. However, we will consider this below.

Is there any reason for such an announcement? After all, it is known that the prices for the latest models of High-End accelerators are very high. And they go down very slowly. Where, as they say, to cram something else new? The answer can only be a price recommendation of $499. One might think that the 256 MB RADEON 9800 PRO either leave the market (relatively few of them were released) or go down a step. The first is the most likely. The RADEON 9800 XT will simply replace the ridiculous release of the 256 MB R350 version, which, having more expensive DDR-II memory and a quarter of a gigabyte of memory that hardly anyone needs, stood out only at a price of $100 higher. In terms of speed, the difference is negligible with a 128 MB card.

That’s why the R360 release pursues two goals: to replace and oust the less popular and unsuccessful RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB from the market, and to confirm ATI’s leadership crown in 3D graphics in terms of performance.

What about NVIDIA? Of course, the answer will be, and it is almost ready. NV38 is on the doorstep. This is essentially just an overclocked NV35. In our review, we will try to make an approximate comparison with the NV38 by overclocking the usual GeForce FX 5900 Ultra to its frequencies. Since there is no announcement from NVIDIA yet, this test will be only trial and, I repeat, based on NV35.

Hynix memory chips (marking HY5DU573222). The access time for memory chips is 2.5 ns, which corresponds to an operating frequency of 400 (800) MHz, while the memory operates at a frequency of 365 (730) MHz. GPU operating frequency 412 MHz. Memory exchange interface 256 bit.

PRO

PRO

PRO

PRO

PRO

PRO

PRO

PRO

PRO

PRO

0008

times the cooler, we will also look at the graphic processor (like the R350, it has a mirror surface):

As I already noted above, the cooling system is very compact. , it seems to be smeared over the card, so the board does not interfere with the use of the first PCI slot. The fan is located quite high and strongly shifted to the left, so installing low-profile PCI cards in the first slot will not interfere with the normal cooling of the video card.

Let me emphasize once again that the video card can potentially support VIVO if one of ATI’s partners installs Rage Theater on it.

Installation and drivers

Test bench configurations:

• Pentium 4 3200 MHz computer:
  • Intel Pentium 4 3200 MHz processor;
  • DFI LANParty Pro875 motherboard (i875P);
  • RAM 1024 MB DDR SDRAM;
  • hard drive Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB;
  • operating system Windows XP SP1; DirectX 9. 0a
  • ViewSonic P810 (21″) and ViewSonic P817 (21″) monitors.
  • ATI drivers version 6.378.

VSync is disabled, S3TC is DISABLED in applications.

For comparative analysis, the following video cards are shown:

• ATI RADEON 9800 PRO (380/350 (700) MHz, 256 MB DDR).
• ASUS V9950 Ultra (GeForce Fx 5900 Ultra, 450/425 (850) MHz, 256 MB DDR, driver 45.23, 51.75).

Test results

Before briefly assessing the quality in 2D, I will once again give an explanation that at the moment there is NO complete method for objective assessment of this parameter for the following reasons:

1. Almost all modern 3D of accelerators, 2D quality can greatly depend on a specific instance, and it is physically impossible to track all cards;
2. 2D quality depends not only on the video card, but also on the monitor, connection cable;

   Quality Issues: Rationale for Using Driver Versions

   Before I get into performance, I want to address two issues.

   First, explain why there will be no synthetic test results. I think it’s obvious that simply overclocking the card won’t make phenomenal changes in these tests. The overall proportion will remain. And you can see what the alignment of forces is now from our recent article by Alexander Medvedev.

   Secondly, to inform you that when analyzing the performance comparison of RADEON 9800 XT with competitors, only data obtained on NVIDIA products with drivers 45.23 (official release, WHQL) will be taken into account. For comparison, the charts will also show the results on drivers 51.75. But so far it is a very raw beta version, where there are many shortcomings. I will give examples from RtCW and Unreal II.

   Radeon 9800	FX 5900 Driver 45.23	FX 5900 Driver 51.75
   Unreal II, example 1
   That’s why I can’t use such dubious driver quality to compare with the performance obtained with ATI’s WHQL drivers. That is why the analysis of the comparison is carried out taking into account the results obtained ONLY on version 45.23 from NVIDIA. The only exception is the TR:AoD test, where on 45.23 the Depth of Fields function is clearly buggy, which is not observed on 51.75. And in general, on this version, this test runs more smoothly and with minimal flaws. [Next part (2)] October 6, 2003 Andrey Vorobyov News One of the most compact versions of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is available for maximum overclocking. PowerColor Revealed RX 7900 XTX Liquid Devil February 8, 2023 Nvidia again can we say thank you for another breakthrough? Tests have shown that the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 is approximately equal to the desktop RTX 3090 7 February 2023 A cheaper RTX 40 graphics card will be released in April. GeForce RTX 4070 credited with 5888 CUDA cores February 7, 2023 News section > review of characteristics and performance tests in games The Radeon 9800 XT video card was released by ATI, release date: October 1, 2003. The video card is designed for desktop computers and is based on the Rage 9 architecture, codenamed R360. Core frequency — 412 MHz. Texturing speed — 3.3 GTexel / s. Technological process — 150 nm. The number of transistors is 117 million. Power consumption (TDP) — 60 Watt. Memory type: DDR. The maximum memory size is 256 MB. Memory bus width — 256 Bit. Memory frequency — 730 MHz. The memory bandwidth is 23.36 GB / s. Benchmarks PassMark G3D Mark Top 1 GPU This GPU PassMark G2D Mark Top 1 GPU This GPU Name Value PassMark — G3D Mark 57 PassMark — G2D Mark 160 Features Architecture Rage 9 Codename R360 Issue date October 1, 2003 Ranking 1018 Type Desktop Core frequency 412MHz Process 150nm Texturing speed 3. 3 GTexel/s Power consumption (TDP) 60 Watt Number of transistors 117 million Video connectors 1x DVI, 1x VGA, 1x S-Video Interface AGP 8x Additional power connectors 1x Molex DirectX 9.0 OpenGL 2.0 Maximum memory size 256MB Memory bandwidth 23.