Review: ATI Radeon 9600 Pro

I like this benchmark due to its ease of use and the fact that it really shows up the effect IQ settings have on a game. Texture detail is markedly enhanced with aniso enabled in SS2.

Here's the base.

Not much in it, but a win for 9600 Pro. 400MHz clocked 4x1 architectures with similar memory bandwidth, who'd have thought performance would be similar. Let's enable some IQ.

Hmm, what's going on here? 9600 Pro performance drops by about half, as we've seen throughout proceedings. 5600 Ultra doesn't however. Rebenchmarking didn't change the figures, so either SS2 is setting something differently in the GeForce case, or I'm setting it up wrong (and it wouldn't be the first time!).

Does the increate in resolution bear the same results pattern, let's find out.

Eek, strange results again. The performance drop graph will show you what I mean.

A reproducible pair of 50% drops for 9600 Pro, which corresponds to what we've seen so far pretty much. But some wild variation on 5600 Ultra. I'll give the win to 9600 Pro here, its results seem more consistent and that's always something to consider.

Last up, a real card killer.