X-bit labs

GeCube RADEON 9600 XT “Extreme” Graphics Card Review (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 02/15/2004 | 05:00 PM ]

Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 1

The next generation of computer games will have ravenous appetites, this is hardly doubtful. They will require an efficient graphics processor architecture and high graphics chip and memory frequencies to run acceptably fast. In this case, the Highly Anticipated DirectX 9 Game is more sensitive to the VPU frequency, and GeCube RADEON 9600 XT “Extreme” is just a little ahead of the ordinary RADEON 9600 XT. (For more details on the performance of contemporary graphics accelerators in this highly anticipated next generation game see our article called A Next-Generation DirectX 9.0 Game Graphics Performance Preview)

The scene displayed in the second demo shows the advantages of the fast memory used in GeCube graphics card. The four-pipelined architecture of RADEON 9600 hits upon its ceiling in 1024x768 – even the full overclocking of GeCube RADEON 9600 “Extreme” gives no reward here.

There is very small difference between the two versions of RADEON 9600 XT VPU in the third demo of the upcoming DirectX 9 game, but overclocking brings considerable performance gains. The scene consists of underground passages filled with water, and the amount of textures is relatively small. That’s why the speed of processing geometrical data and executing pixel shaders matters more here, while the bandwidth of the memory subsystem isn’t crucial in this demo.