Review: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

Serious Sam 2 this time. It really shows off IQ when the settings are enabled and hopefully its texture usage in the chosed SdC demo can show of the 256MB of memory. But don't hold your breath. It's baseline time first.

Ignore this for the time being, despite it being perfectly valid (it was reproducible). Let's turn on IQ.

That's more like it, things level off to expected performance levels. But we can't help but think the 256MB board gets its extra performance from the extra core clock and monster memory bandwidth, rather than the extra card memory. 1600x1200 now to make the cards hurt.

Take previous performance, divide by ~2 in all cases. It's still not looking good for all that new memory, we'll check out the PD graph to be absolutely sure.

Less of a drop for the R350's due to better memory bandwidth optimisation and other trickery, but nothing other than clock scaling. Since the PD's are identical, the extra memory isn't being used.

We've still got another 3 tests to use tho, we'll try another!