Review: Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro

I hate this benchmark, but consistency with earlier reviews dictates its appearance. Baseline first, don't nod off.

Gotta love being subsystem limited, here's the same with IQ on. If there's one thing Comanche 4 is good for, it's showing off what IQ does. It makes an arse ugly benchmark look a little less like arse.

Hardly any loss on the Hercules at the top, 8:1 Z-buffer compression is what I'd wager helps most here, along with the clock speed advantage. 9600 Pro brings up the rear.

More of the same, half the render pipes hurts 9600 Pro most, compared to the more pipeline happy 9700 and 9800.

The performance drop from enabling IQ on Comanche 4's way of rendering is so small on 9800 Pro and the Hercules, that it cuts off the figure on my lovingly prepared graph. That's what you get for being so fast I guess, rendering errors in Excel. Comanche 4's render case highlights nicely the advantages of 8 render pipelines, especially when IQ is enabled.

The bastard benchmarking love-child of Satan next, those pesky German coders really know how to make a card beg for mercy.