Another 'Oh..My..God'-ious article on the Radeon 9700, this time by HardOCP.
These were the battle cries being heard coming from the lips of the ATi upper echelon: A very special day; World beating launch; CTF – Crush the force; Driving the visual experience revolution; New generation that will be the foundation of computer graphics for years to come. We have all heard the marketing fluff for years now, and we have all learned to take it with a grain of salt. Hell let’s face it, if we could believe everything we heard out of the hardware companies, there would be no reason nor need for little hardware information sites like the [H].
We met up with the ATi PR team for a lunchtime meeting and were promised two hours of hands on time, which quickly turned into three hours, with the Radeon 9700 mounted in a top-end Pentium 4 2.53GHz system with 512MB of PC1066 RDRAM. Not a shabby box in the least, one that nearly anyone would be proud to own. They asked us if we wanted to see the demos and we politely turned them down and asked if we could get right to the meat of things and run some benchmarks. That was no problem with them at all. So we started running benchmarks and playing games.
View: On to the other games..
News source: HardOCP
These were the battle cries being heard coming from the lips of the ATi upper echelon: A very special day; World beating launch; CTF – Crush the force; Driving the visual experience revolution; New generation that will be the foundation of computer graphics for years to come. We have all heard the marketing fluff for years now, and we have all learned to take it with a grain of salt. Hell let’s face it, if we could believe everything we heard out of the hardware companies, there would be no reason nor need for little hardware information sites like the [H].
We met up with the ATi PR team for a lunchtime meeting and were promised two hours of hands on time, which quickly turned into three hours, with the Radeon 9700 mounted in a top-end Pentium 4 2.53GHz system with 512MB of PC1066 RDRAM. Not a shabby box in the least, one that nearly anyone would be proud to own. They asked us if we wanted to see the demos and we politely turned them down and asked if we could get right to the meat of things and run some benchmarks. That was no problem with them at all. So we started running benchmarks and playing games.
View: On to the other games.. News source: HardOCP
Certainly the high end enthusiast video card market has changed in the last few years and I saw no real reason to waste my time with “low” resolutions, say anything below 1600x1200. If you are going to spend US$400 on a video card to play today’s games, I think having to use any resolution below that is simply unacceptable. Then of course if I am going to spend 400 big ones on a VidCard, shouldn’t I get 4X Antialiasing as well? And come to think of it, if I am going to pay $400 of my hard earned greenbacks on a VidCard, shouldn’t I get ridiculously high sampling Anisotropic Filtering too? You are damn right you should, as anything else at that pricing level is simply unacceptable.
Gaming:
Quake 3 – 1600x1200x32; 4XAA; 16XAF – Running demo 001 in v1.17 the Radeon 9700 easily topped the minimum allowed deathmatch frame rate of 60fps. Compared to the Ti4600 on the same system, the Radeon 9700 easily capped its frame rates by a blistering 35% with no AF enabled on the GF4 card. Quite honestly it was a sight to behold; it was just moving too fast to really appreciate the visual quality. Yeah, we know that the last thing you need in a Q3 deathmatch is all of the eye candy turned on, but we did it anyway. We then dropped in 16 bots on the smallest level we could find with Nightmare skills and started to tear them up, or it might have been the other way around. Running and gunning with gibs flying and blood splattering left and right in all its visual glory. Rocket jumps with a mid-air 180 degree turn over your opponent with time to squeeze off a rocket shot was not an issue.....
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