Testbed and Methods

This is the testbed we used in our tests:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+  (2.20GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• Mainboard: ASUS K8V Deluxe;
• RAM: Corsair XMS PC3200 512MB (2x256MB, 2-3-3-6);
• HDD: Seagate 7200.7, SerialATA-150, 8MB buffer;
• Audio: Creative Sound Blaster Live!;
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1 with DirectX 9.0b installed;
• Drivers:  ATI Catalyst 4.1, NVIDIA ForceWare 53.03.

One remark is necessary. Our preliminary testing with the Catalyst 4.1 driver from ATI revealed one very unexpected peculiarity: the performance with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned out much lower in many games than in case we tested with Catalyst 3.9. As soon as we installed Catalyst 4.1, the speed would go down irrespective of the testbed configuration. We are now waiting for ATI Technologies to comment on this fact.

At the same time, we should acknowledge that Catalyst 4.1 provides an overall notable performance gain except a few given cases. Since we haven’t yet got any comments from ATI on the strange performance of our RADEON 9600 XT with CATALYST 4.1 driver and enabled FSAA, we decided to offer you the performance results for both: driver version 3.9 and version 4.1.

We have also discovered one more interesting peculiarity of the GeCube RADEON 9600 XT “Extreme” working with the ATI CATALYST 3.9 and older version of the driver. The thing is that when you use any version of CATALYST driver different from 4.1, the card works unstably in a number of applications, so that they freeze or force the system to reboot. Moreover, the frequency of this unpleasant freezing effect didn’t depend on the working frequencies of the card. This phenomenon could have been considered the drawback of our particular sample, if it had revealed itself with the driver version 4.1, too. But with this version of CATALYST the card went through all the tests several times without any problems even at higher working frequencies, not to mention the nominal ones. There is some mystery about it, which we cannot explain logically yet. Maybe it is somehow connected with the performance difference we observe with CATALYST 3.9 and 4.1. Even when we installed the drivers included into the supply (CATALYST 3.6), the situation didn’t turn any clearer: the card continued to have some stability issues at work from time to time.

This is the list of the games and applications we used during our test session for benchmarking purposes:

First person 3D shooters:

• Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory;
• StarTrek Elite Force 2;
• Unreal Tournament 2003;
• Halo: Combat Evolved;
• Deus Ex 2: Invisible War;
• Tron 2.0;
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 1;
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 2.

Third person 3D shooters:

• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell;
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time;
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles;
• X2: The Threat;
• F1 Challenge 99-2002.

Real-time strategies:

• C&C Generals: Zero Hour.

Semi-synthetic benchmarks:

• Aquamark3;
• Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 2.

Synthetic benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 340.

The graphics quality settings were the highest in each application.