Review: Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro

It's the usual 4-graph ho-down, just for a change. Now with the same architecture as 9700 Pro in terms of pipeline layout, just with more clock and more efficiency, there's no prizes for guessing what card is going to come first in our baseline test.

If you picked 9600 Pro, shame on you. The Hercules has the render power to storm to the top in all these baseline benchmarks, 3DMark is no different. What'll be interesting is when we turn on image quality features. In our case, that's 4x quality antialiasing and 8x quality anistropic filtering. 16x aniso would give broadly the same numbers on ATI, since it's only applied to flat rendered surfaces and is therefore essentially free. So we stick with 8x. Here's the pretty bars and numbers.

Over 10,000 marks, even with performance sapping features on. Quite the pair of performers, with the Hercules taking top spot as expected, 9600 Pro at the rear.

Our savage 2MP + IQ test now, before the performance drop graph.

PD graph now.

I passed over specific comment on the 1600x1200 result to say a bit more here. In a DirectX 8 test like 3DMark, all 3 test boards and GPU's do well. It's not too shader heavy, texture load is middling and all three have the power for comfortable performance at 1024x768x4AAx8AF, just what we expected. When the pixel count is increased, the architecture of a board like 9600 Pro makes performance drop off more steeply, you'd see the same thing on FX5600 and other 4x1, 128-bit memory bus width style solutions.

So, lots of performance from our clock heavy R350. It's going to be like this the whole way through, we should be under no illusions to the contrary. Quake 3 next, an interesting test.