Review: Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro

This is probably the most shader heavy, texture heavy benchmark that you can lay your hands on. 1024x768 with no IQ as a baseline doesn't really hint at the bad bad things that happen as we crank the settings up.

It's that old "render power with efficient goodness lumped on top" way of doing things. 9800 Pro's clocks help too, with a 17% increase in render power compared to the 9700 Pro.

Do we dare turn on IQ?

9600 Pro is choking to death, 9700 Pro is sweating profusely and 9800 Pro barely manages the framerate of PAL video, never mind fluidity for playing games.

9600 Pro passes away, the Code Creatures, 2MP with IQ render case is just too much. We murdered it, oops. 9700 Pro halves its performance from the previous case and doesn't do too badly. Who are we kidding, all cards are rubbish at this. Let's have a look at the PD graph.

Too many shaders, too much texture. Code Creatures is a real struggle, and not very indicative of real world performance. It's nice for illustrating the leap in performance you can expect from the changes in architecture, but precious little else. Finally, we round off the graph-fest with my favourite benchmark, Unreal Tournament 2003.