Review: ATI Radeon 9600 Pro

Stock run again first for a baseline set of numbers.

Much the same as with 3DMark, so what happens when we enable our IQ enhancements.

Things close up a lot more here with both cards hitting the same levels of performance with AA and AF enabled. Being a 4x1 architecture, like Radeon 9600 Pro, FX5600 Ultra performs much the same due to having the same multitexture fillrate available. Both cards are at 400MHz core clock remember, with memory bandwidth broadly similar. How will each card cope as we keep our IQ and up the resolution?

Ouch, either FX5600 Ultra manages its memory bandwidth more efficiently than 9600 Pro or there's something else going on I can't explain. Here's the performance drop graph to show what I mean.

Both cards drop roughly half their performance with the IQ features on, but 9600 Pro drops a further 80% of its performance at 1600x1200 compared to 60% on FX5600 Ultra. 9700 Pro does the best due to brute force and a kinder architecture for this test.

On to Unreal Tournament 2003.