Review: Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro

After the 9600 Pro promised I wouldn't hurt it any more and the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro had calmed down a little, I fired up UT2003. Here's the baseline on our custom high detail Antalus flyby benchmark. It's a great test of IQ since you can really see the difference it makes, texture detail really sharpens up with aniso enabled.

Given it's a similar render setup to tests like Serious Sam 2 and 3DMark 2001SE, we see similar results. The PD graph will confirm that, so lets lightly skip over the IQ and high pixel count versions of our UT2003 test.

Straight on to the PD graph then, but keep in mind the results above, even if we haven't talked about them much.

9800 Pro edges out 9700 Pro for a clean sweep of performance wins for Hercules. The drop graph lets you compare nicely, just what a real world render test performs like on each architecture. It's the drop when 4xAA and 8xAF are enabled that you are interested in. Given the baseline performance of each board, a drop of around 30 to 40% is more than acceptable given the benefits. Dropping to 2xAA for a softer edge to things (in my opinion) and maintaining 8xAF is another 10% more performance to play with, if too much AA isn't your thing.

Anyway, we knew performance would be strong, but it was nice to see just how strong, especially with IQ features on and working.

On to the conclusions.