Review: Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro

With native support for rendering features like anisotropic filtering, Serious Sam 2 is a good benchmark.

Yep, you saw right, Radeon 9700 Pro beating its bigger brother. While 2.5% is statistically significant in terms of our benchmarks, don't worry about it too much, we are simply mainly subsystem limited until we give the cards something to do. None of the trio deserve to be run without at least anisotropic filtering enabled.

That's more like it, the PD graph will show us much the same pattern of drops that 3DMark did, only more in favour of the 9800 Pro. The ATI boards are well suited to this test and it highlights their strengths.

Lots of pixels, and lots of hurt for the trio. Performance is less than a 1/3rd of the baseline and less than 1/4 in the 9700 and 9600 cases. Here's the PD graph for clarification.

9600 to 9700 = render power. 9700 to 9800 = more efficiency. That's basically how each GPU handles this test, especially with IQ on. Much the same as the 3DMark PD graph, just a little less hurt for 9600 Pro as the pixels go up. Hercules wins again, it couldn't fail to really.