facebook rss twitter

Review: ATI rolls out Catalyst 9.3 with official Windows 7 support: HEXUS benchmarks high-end graphics

by Tarinder Sandhu on 18 March 2009, 05:00

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), XFX (HKG:1079), BFG Technologies

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qarg6

Add to My Vault: x

System setup and notes

Cutting right to the numbers' chase.

Graphics cards XFX Radeon HD 4870 X2 2,048MB BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB
Current pricing, including VAT  £344.40
£449.15
Shader model 4.1 4.0
Stream processors 1,600 480
GPU clock speed (MHz) 750 576
Shader clock speed (MHz) 750 1,242
Memory clock speed (MHz) 3,600 1,998
Memory bus width (bits) 512 896
CPU Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (3.20GHz, 8MB L3 cache, quad-core, LGA1,366)
Motherboard Foxconn Bloodrage X58
Motherboard BIOS P04
Mainboard software Intel Inf 9.1.0.1012
Memory 6GB Corsair DOMINATOR PC12,800
Memory timings and speed 9-9-9-24 1T @ DDR3-1,333
PSU Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1,000W
Monitor Dell 30in 3007WFP - 2,560x1,600px
Disk drive(s) Seagate 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (3Gb/s mode)
Graphics driver Catalyst 9.3 beta (Windows Vista)
Catalyst 9.3 beta (Windows 7)
ForceWare 182.06 (Windows Vista)
ForceWare 181.71 beta (Windows 7)
Operating system Windows Vista Business SP1, 64-bit
Windows 7 Ultimate beta, 32-bit

Software

3D Benchmarks Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare v1.7, HEXUS custom-recorded benchmark: DX9 - very high quality
Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts v2.103: DX10 - very high quality
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.5, HEXUS custom-recorded benchmark. OpenGL - very high quality
Far Cry 2 v1.01 - very high quality
Race Driver: GRID v1.2, HEXUS custom-recorded benchmark - ultra quality

Notes

What we're attempting to quantify is the relative performance of NVIDIA and ATI's best-performing cards - both based on internal multi-GPU setups; a worst-case scenario - and see how they stack up against current Vista results. One faux-pas on our part is the use of 32-bit Ultimate rather than 64-bit Windows 7; unavoidable time pressures made this so.

Both cards ran well under Windows 7, with the NVIDIA card only rebooting once whilst testing in Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, and the ATI card running through the benchmarks just as solidly as under Vista.

Let's see how things pan out under Windows 7.